Chinese pay cost of saving wetlands

By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

China is paying a heavy environmental and social price for its spectacular economic growth.

Floods threaten millions in China

Water is running short, with some areas experiencing a fall of several metres in groundwater levels.

The government has now banned the draining of wetlands and the logging of forested watersheds.

And up to a million people may be moved from their homes as the wetland restoration programme gathers pace.

The delicate balancing act Beijing is having to perform is described in Wetting The Appetite, a film made by Television Trust for the Environment (TVE) and shown on BBC World.

The TVE crew travelled the length of the Yangtze river to investigate China's predicament.

Ducks offer new hope

At the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, in Sichuan province, lies Ruoergai, the world's largest high-altitude wetland.

It consists of 600,000 hectares of peat bogs, marshes and meadows, and is home to 50,000 people, mostly Tibetans.

Ruoergai stores Himalayan meltwater and releases it slowly to the streams that feed the Yangtze and the Yellow river, both of them vital to the lives of 500 million Chinese.

Hunger the priority

Groundwater levels here have dropped sharply, and patches of sand are replacing the retreating bog.

It is the result of a deliberate policy, according to Rob Paterson, of the United Nations Development Programme.

Uplands are drying out

He tells TVE: "Official government policy in China, probably for very good reason at the time, in the '60s, was to drain marshes all over the country with the idea of increasing the area available either for crop production or for grazing.

"I think it was probably justified - there were many hungry people here in China, going back 40 years."

Now, though, Ruoergai cannot cope with exceptional snowmelt: there is not enough marshland to store it, and catastrophic flooding downstream is the inevitable consequence. In dry spells, it has less water to release.

The government is trying to restore Ruoergai, by filling in old drainage ditches and also by settling the nomads, in an attempt to reduce grazing pressure.

Damage persists

But Rob Paterson says the answer lies in leaving the nomads alone and enforcing a strict ban on the most sensitive parts of Ruoergai.

Far downstream, the choices confronting China's policymakers are even more stark. Dongting, part of the Yangtze river system, was once China's largest lake.

Some river species are doing well

In less than half a century, 40% has disappeared, partly through reclamation to resettle 10 million people, and partly because upstream logging has silted up the Yangtze. Logging is now banned, though the shallow river still floods.

Tang Xinli has fished Dongting all his life, but can no longer find enough fish to catch.

He's been helped to establish a cage fishery and to rear ducks to provide an alternative livelihood. Tang is one of the lucky ones, unlike Hu Fusheng, a rice farmer.

Social engineering

He has been allowed to keep only a small rice paddy, which he is determined to keep. But 360,000 people have been moved from the land where the Hu family lives, originally reclaimed from the lake.

As the government reverses the reclamation and allows Dongting to fill up again, more than one million people face removal.

The problem of a coastal nature reserve at Dafeng mirrors those upriver. A wetland species, Pere David's deer, reintroduced there, is now breeding so successfully it is destroying the flora and faces culling.

In China's water crisis, neither humans nor wildlife can expect to continue unchanged.