Millions benefit from project that sent water north
Print Edition
MORE than 11 million people in Beijing have benefited from China’s south-to-north water diversion project.
Over the past two years, the middle route has pumped 1.94 billion cubic meters of water into the capital, officials said.
More than 1.3 billion went to water supply companies in the city, 280 million was stored in reservoirs, and the rest was used as groundwater and to supply rivers and lakes in downtown areas, office director Sun Guosheng said.
Currently, water is flowing into Beijing at a rate of some 3.4 million cubic meters a day as a result of the project.
“The water diversion has relieved the pressure on Beijing’s water supply,” Sun said.
Before the diversion, Beijing’s water sources, mainly from underground, were susceptible to being encrusted by calcium and magnesium salts.
The middle route of the south-to-north diversion project carries 9.5 billion cubic meters each year through canals and pipes from the Danjiangkou reservoir in central China’s Hubei Province to the provinces of Henan and Hebei as well as Beijing.
The water transfer project was conceived by Mao Zedong in 1952. The State Council approved the project in December 2002 after nearly half a century of debate.
One of the world’s biggest cities, Beijing is in dire need of water. Between 1999 and 2011, average annual precipitation was just 480 millimeters, and its water resources per capita about 100 cubic meters, a 20th of the national average and an 80th of the global average.
The diverted water, which supplies downtown areas and parts of the suburbs, increased the per capita amount to 150 cubic meters, said the Beijing Water Authority’s Hu Bo.
It has also helped rein in excessive use of groundwater. Before the water arrived, the groundwater level of Beijing’s plain dropped by around a meter per year, with groundwater of more than 6,400 square kilometers overexploited by the end of 2014.
In November, the level was more than 0.4 meters higher than a year ago, according to the water authority.
However, Hu said Beijing remains thirsty as its current per capita water resources lags far behind the global standard. “Water conservation is still an important job,” he said.
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