Beijing to make better use of water resources
Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei pledged yesterday that the central government would make better use of water resources and promised the 'most stringent management and regulations ever' to address water shortages and pollution.
Mr Chen's statement, released on the Ministry of Water Resources website yesterday, is regarded by some mainland water experts as a major shift in tone. The ministry used to stress aggressive exploitation of water resources to serve the needs of the mainland's break-neck economic growth.
Some experts believed the ministry had changed tack to fall in line with President Hu Jintao's speech on Friday in which he stressed the nation must not sacrifice its environment for economic gains, despite the current financial crisis.
'We cannot lose the momentum to develop more efficient, cleaner and new energy sources, particularly during the global financial crisis,' Mr Hu was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
Mr Hu's speech was made during a visit to a clean-energy exhibition in Beijing by all nine members of the Politburo on Friday, a gesture showing the leadership attaches great importance to environmental concerns as suspicion rises that China might drop its green goals to stimulate the economy.
Mr Chen's statement was also a response to mounting domestic criticism, the experts said. The ministry came under attack by representatives and delegates of the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference this month, many of whom said the severe drought that hit the mainland earlier this year was down more to human error than natural catastrophe, and that the ministry should be held responsible for bad water management and conservation.
Critics have said the ministry has allocated too much funding to large-scale, aggressive water exploitation projects while leaving scant resources for sustainable development such as more efficient irrigation infrastructure for farmers and drinking safety facilities for ordinary citizens.
The mainland has spent 18 years and more than 200 billion yuan (HK$227 billion) building the world's biggest hydropower plant - the Three Gorges Dam - which generates 80 billion kWh of electric power a year but has raised serious environmental issues.
Another record-breaking construction is the south-to-north water diversion project, set to cost mainland taxpayers 500 billion yuan, comprising three pipelines diverting water from the Yangtze River to the often drought-stricken north, where the demand for water is far beyond natural supply.
Mr Chen hinted in his statement that projects of similar scale and ambition would no longer be included in the central government's infrastructure construction agenda.
'The priority of our planning for future development will change from exploitation to conservation,' he said.
'We will repair and protect the ecological system of major rivers and lakes by controlling the exploitation level and strengthening the environmental feasibility before carrying out further hydropower plant constructions.
'Our goal is that by 2020 there will be enough water for economic development and every Chinese citizen from the cities to the countryside will have clean water to drink.'
Jiang Wenlai, a water expert from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said he welcomed the ministry's change of attitude to water management but said the global economic chaos would render the minister's pledge hard to realise.
Professor Jiang said that to stimulate the economy the central government had moved forward projects that were scheduled to be launched in the next few years, and that some of them would demand a large supply of water.
'Co-ordinating economic development with water resources conservation is difficult,' he said.
