From Pua Mench, Director of Stakeholder Engagement, Asia:

At a recent talk Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent for The Guardian and author of “When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It”, gave disturbing summary of China’s environmental performance – and expressed hope for our collective future.

Watts’ book provides a poignant and informative glimpse into China’s deteriorating environment, from Yunnan Province to Inner Mongolia, which Watts playfully describes as a guide of places not to go. Watts, who is based in Beijing and has spent the past seven years in China, is frank but fair when describing the situation in China. He gives cautious praise to the country’s 12^th Five-Year Plan, released in March 14, 2011 and says he is encouraged by the plan, which for the first time ever slightly reduces the pace of economic growth and expands the list of pollution targets. “Government is starting to recognize that there are finite limits on how far you can push the environment,” says Watts. But it remains to be seen whether or not government efforts will improve the situation.

Until a river expedition in search of the Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin – one of only five freshwater dolphin species in the world – Watts said he assumed that when mankind wholeheartedly turns his attention to problems he could fix them. The Baiji expedition represented such efforts. Well funded and with cutting edge technology and a leading team of scientists, the journey was forecast to be a success, yet not a single dolphin was found. At the trip’s end a creature that had been on earth for twenty million years was declared functionally extinct, most likely due to environmental stress caused by pollution, river traffic, dams and illegal fishing. Watts regards that story as the most important one he’ll ever write, one that powerfully illustrates the limits of human capability and irreversible and grave consequences of our actions.

In response to the apparent demise of the Baiji, Indian authorities announced plans earlier this year to make extraordinary efforts to save the country’s remaining population of the endangered Ganges river dolphin – of which authorities estimate less than 3,000 remain in the wild. 

Unfortunately, the deeper meaning behind tragedies like the demise of the Baiji is often lost, especially in China where 300 million people live without access to clean water supplies. “Water quality and quantity is by far the biggest concern in China,” says to Watts. Fifty percent of China’s water is not fit for human consumption and another third to a quarter is not fit for any use whatsoever, according to Ministry of Environmental Protection research. Air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, largely stemming from coal-fired power plants, are also a huge problem in China, which over took the United States in 2007 to become the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter. Even with slightly lowered GDP growth targets, the country’s energy demands are set to skyrocket in the coming decades.

As Watts’ colleague Isabel Hilton noted:

The west invented unsustainable living; China has taken it up with enthusiasm.

We are barely three decades in to China’s industrial and consumption revolution. There are still hundreds of millions of poor Chinese who wish to prosper and consume in a country that wastes so much energy that its average per capita carbon emissions already equal those of France. The most worrying thing about the Chinese industrial revolution is not even the appalling damage that Watts meticulously chronicles, but the capacity for more that is still in the system.

“The good news is that government gets it,” says Watts, and is sincere because they are facing severe environmental crises and cannot avoid addressing them. But the solutions that are being put forth are engineered supply side solutions, like the massive South to North Water Transfer Project, which in many ways exhibits the same hubris as the expedition to save the Baiji.

China is now the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Authorities aim for renewable sources to account for 8% of China’s energy supply by 2020. And even with the increase, two-thirds of Chinas’ energy supply will still come from coal (the remaining from nuclear and hydropower sources).

China has made huge investments in the clean tech sector (in fact, it was the country with the highest level of investment in the world in 2009) yet renewables will continue to represent just a fraction of China’s largely coal dominated energy mix.

Such investment and development strategies are ultimately band-aids to the underlying and much bigger problem identified by Watts, Western style consumption habits, which have readily been adopted by the Chinese. More consumption means greater energy and water demands, increased pollution, growing carbon dioxide emissions and fewer and fewer natural resources. “We may be approaching ecological limits to economic growth,” asserts Watts. “We [humans] resemble a swarm of locusts.” Pollution is not the biggest problem, because you can deal with pollution, what you cannot deal with is mankind’s widening appetite for “stuff” which is pushing the environment to its limits.

One of the constant arguments put forth by developing countries, particularly in relation to carbon emissions, is that they should be allowed to grow their economies without restrictions, just as developed countries did—the “develop now and clean up later” model. But this logic loses sight of the fact that we share one planet and finite resources. There may come a point in time at which the environment simply cannot support global consumption patterns. China, home to 1.3 billion people and “the world’s factory” is reaching that point. The extinction of the 20 million year old Baiji should serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when you push the environment beyond its healthy limits.

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