A province in north China that supplies Beijing with much needed water is itself facing serious shortages of the resource, state media reported ahead of World Water Day yesterday.
Li Qinglin, director of Hebei’s water conservation department, said water shortages had become a big problem for the province’s social and economic development, Xinhua news agency reported late on Saturday.
DWINDLING SUPPLIES
“Water resources in Hebei have dwindled by nearly 50 percent in recent years,” Li said.
Hebei, part of China’s parched northern region, is one of the major suppliers of water to Beijing and Tianjin, which grouped together account for at least 28 million people and are running out of the resource.
China’s rapid economic expansion has helped deplete its water supplies and has long been one of the country’s major concerns.
WATER ECONOMY
Probe International, a leading development policy group, has warned that the city of Beijing faces economic collapse and will need to resettle part of its population in coming decades as it could run out of water in five to 10 years.
Previous Xinhua reports have said that Beijing and surrounding areas, including most of Hebei, have suffered droughts every year since 1999.
Li said that Hebei was consuming approximately 21 billion cubic meters of water annually with only 17 billion cubic meters of surface water, leaving groundwater to supply the rest, Xinhua said.
He urged the government to take steps to reduce water consumption for the sake of sustainable economic and social development.
DIVERSION
China is in the process of building the multi-billion dollar North-South Water Diversion Project to bring water from the nation’s longest river, the Yangtze, to the parched north.
Xinhua has said that by 2010, when much of the north-south water diversion project is to be completed, up to 1 billion cubic meters of water will be diverted to Beijing annually, mostly from the Yangtze.
World Water Day has been held every year on March 22 since 1993.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
RSS