Ben Walsh & Alexander C. Kaufman - How To Get Cleaner Water For 700 Million People
Urban areas globally
spend an estimated $90 billion a year on water infrastructure, and watershed
areas are a crucial part of that investment, a new report from
The Nature Conservancy highlights.
On average, forests
make up just 40 percent of urban watersheds, with 30 percent of the area being
used for crops and 20 percent for pasture. In the developing world, the area
used for farming is even higher, which causes water problems from fertilizer
use and erosion, the report finds.
“Investing in nature
can change how land use in source watersheds affects water quality—and, over
time, possibly water quantity,” the report finds. Investing in nature in this
case means things like saving and replanting forests, restoring rivers, and
changing farming practices to limit runoff. These strategies
“could measurably improve the quality of water sources serving over 700 million
people living in the 100 largest cities,” the authors find.
The idea that nature
can provide services on par with traditional infrastructure investments has
long been touted by environmentalists. It is now gaining more widespread
recognition from unlikely places: companies with a history of pollution. Dow
Chemical, for example, is working with The Nature Conservancy to evaluate the
water use at its chemical processing plants and place a dollar amount on their
environmental impact.
China may someday
serve as a valuable case study for other countries looking to improve their
water. Seventy-three percent of China’s watersheds are significantly polluted,
the report found. A problem like that is hard to ignore, and there seems
to be a recognition that conservation can help provide China with clean water.
About 16 years ago,
China kicked off the world’s largest conservation program, which aimed to
restore the country’s forests. The effort appears to be working, according to a
study released
last month from Michigan State University. By paying farmers and
former loggers to serve as stewards of the country’s woodlands, instead of simply
banning deforestation, the country gained much more forest than it lost in the
decade after it kicked off the program.
Between 2000 and 2010,
China recovered about 1.6 percent, or 61,000 square miles, of tree cover, the
study found. That compares to the 0.38 percent, or 14,400 square miles, of
forest cut down. Replanting forests is one of the five ways identified by The
Nature Conservancy to help improve water quality.
“China’s environmental
issues are very challenging — everybody knows of the bad air quality and water
pollution,” Jianguo Liu, the director of Michigan State University’s Center for
Systems Integration and Sustainability who co-authored the study, told The
Huffington Post. Compared to the country’s widespread environmental blights,
“the forests are a major exception,” he added.
The key to the
program’s success in China lies in the subsidies built in to deter logging and
incentivize conservation. Some state-owned timber companies are paid to plant
trees, Liu said. Rather than clearing land for crops, local governments instead
pay farmers to monitor forests as watchdogs. “This stick and carrot
approach seems to really work well,” Liu said. “It’s different from many
previous policies that just said, ‘Oh, you can’t do this.’”
It may prove a
difficult model to emulate in other countries. The Communist Party in China
maintains authoritarian control over the country’s politics and economy,
allowing it to make sweeping decisions with little pushback from would-be
opposition leaders. People who live in Western-style democracies might recoil
at such unfettered power in the hands of a government, but when addressing the
slow-moving disaster that is human-caused climate change, it can be an asset. “If the Chinese
government realizes something which is important to do, they can do it very
fast,” Liu said. “To some degree, it’s unique.”
