I traveled recently to Nanjing, China to participate in a multi-national, multi-stakeholder working group, hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center, Japanese Institute of Developing Economics (IDE-JETRO), and Nanjing University, on “Building New Clean Water Networks in China: Challenges and Opportunities for Protecting Lake Tai,” the third largest freshwater body in the country.
En route I couldn’t help but gawk from the window of my train plying from Shanghai to Nanjing at the explosive growth of Jiangsu’s infrastructure, factories and supporting facilities, even through the thick film of lingering smog. There seemed to be a continuous string of factories, overpasses, underpasses, bridges and factory towns, with 10 and 12 story buildings grouped so tightly they were almost impossible to count. Experiencing first-hand the scope, pace and commitment to growth is truly an eye opening and mind-boggling experience.
Located on the far outskirts of Shanghai – China’s booming financial hub – Lake Tai is a shallow but expansive freshwater lake straddling the country’s rich eastern Jiangsu and neighboring Zhejiang provinces. It’s not quite as heavy a manufacturing hotbed as the southern Pearl River Delta, but the Lake Tai water basin is an expanding and crucial industrial area. The region is home to thousands of industry facilities and tens of millions of Chinese.
As impressive as China’s explosive economic growth is to witness, the environmental degradation that such a relatively quick incline has generally is equally as staggering and moving.
Chinese NGOS (Greenpeace China, Pacific Environment, Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) , Green Anhui, Jiangsu Friends of Nature, Shanghai Green Oasis, Green Camel Bell), provincial officials and local businesses at the working group delivered insightful and passionate presentations on the de-velopment plaguing Lake Tai – which has gone from a prized cultural and recreational body to one of the country’s most polluted in just the past couple of decades.
As Ma Jun, IPE’s founder and director and one of the country’s leading environmental advocates, underscored, weak government enforcement on point source pollution and a lack of an incentive for industry to adequately treat wastewater has put such stress on the system, that the resultant blue green algae bloom has largely wiped out fishing and recreation from the sacred lake.
In one presentation “Lessons from Abroad from Lake Tai,” Andy Buchsbaum of the National Wildlife Federation pointed out that a key motivating and incentivizing factor for public-private action for the Great Lakes region in the US was a study on the future economic gain of a clean water system, offering regional business and governments an economic advantage for the future. A shift in thinking of the challenge of restoration as an opportunity rather than just as a cost helped energize stalled thinking, empowering and aligning key stakeholders from the multi-state Great Lakes region to collective action.
With Lake Tai, much is to be done, and with the pace of growth and the government’s commitment to maintain current levels, time is critical. Efforts like the multi-stakeholder Lake Tai clean water working group and the soon-to-be launched Asia Water Project fill needed gaps and provide a foundation for information sharing and broader stakeholder coordination.
It is crucial, however, for all key actors not only to be at the table, but to be incentivized and committed to action. As Wen Bo of the Pacific Environment aptly observed, it seems the NGOs, both local and foreign, are ready and willing, but there needs to be much deeper commitment from provincial and national government and business.
Certainly for all actors on or near Lake Tai, they have a stake in working towards the future of a clean, and a thriving water basin. The question is less the how and why, but when.
If collective action can turn around Lake Tai, the blue print could be transposed and emulated across the country to address its severe and numerous water quality and scarcity challenges.
Tags: china, japanese institute of developing economics, lake tai, ma jun, nanjing, pollution, water pollution, Water Quality, water scarcity, woodrow wilson center
