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NY Times, Dec. 29 2016
As China’s Largest Freshwater Lake Shrinks, Solution Faces Criticism
By MIKE IVES
HONG KONG — Long celebrated as China’s largest freshwater lake, Poyang
reaches more than three times the expanse of Los Angeles in the summer
wet season. It is home to the rare Yangtze finless porpoise, and its mud
flats are the primary winter feeding grounds for thousands of birds that
fly south each autumn to escape Siberia’s chill, including the
critically endangered Siberian crane.
Now it is Poyang itself that is at risk.
In recent years, the average expanse of the lake, in the southeastern
province of Jiangxi, has been shrinking, and winter water levels have
declined sharply.
The local government has a proposed solution, but it faces a chorus of
opposition from scientists and environmental groups in China and beyond
who argue that it could have disastrous effects on the lake’s fragile
ecosystem and drive the Siberian crane and other migratory birds further
toward extinction.
Water levels in the lake have always fluctuated radically between the
summer rains and winter dryness, but there is now concern that the
levels are off balance. Culprits include the Three Gorges Dam, which
stores water upstream on the Yangtze for winter electricity generation,
lowering a nearby river channel and sucking water from the lake.
Dredging to collect sand for construction projects has also lowered the
lake’s bed and caused more runoff. This year, drought turned much of the
lake into grassy plains.
The local government has proposed building a sluice gate to keep more
water inside the lake in the winter, but critics say the gate would
essentially be a dam, and it could cause bigger problems.
“I think you’re proposing a solution without understanding the causes of
the problem,” said David Shankman, a professor emeritus of geography at
the University of Alabama who has studied the lake’s hydrology.
“The whole idea of the dam is that there would be some economic benefit,
but there may be potential long-term ecological problems,” he added.
The primary feature of the $1.9 billion Poyang Lake Water Conservancy
Project would be a 10,000-foot sluice gate across a natural channel that
connects the lake’s northern edge to the Yangtze, according to a
November report by the Jiangxi provincial government.
Among other benefits, the report said, the sluice gate would help to
stabilize the drinking water supply and promote shipping on the lake.
The report described the project as an ideal way to create “first-class
water quality, first-class air, first-class ecology and a first-class
environmental standard for residents.”
The National Development and Reform Commission, the government agency
that helps oversee economic planning, has been reviewing the proposal
since 2009, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection began its
environmental impact assessment in November. The proposal could still be
derailed if senior officials turn against it.
Scientists said in interviews that the project could irreparably alter
the lake’s seasonal flood pulse, which causes water to rise and fall by
up to 30 feet between the wet and dry seasons and has carried sediment
into Poyang from as far away as the Tibetan plateau.
The project would also allow water to rush in from the Yangtze during
the winter dry season, the scientists said, drowning vegetation that
grows in Poyang’s mud flats and provides a crucial food source for
hundreds of species of migratory birds.
“Whatever’s built is going to be able to drown that entire system during
the winter,” said James Burnham, a doctoral candidate at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched how changes in China’s wetlands
affect endangered water birds.
The Siberian crane, whose estimated 4,000 remaining individuals winter
almost exclusively at Poyang because it is the closest lake to Siberia
that does not freeze, is among Jiangxi’s best-known birds. But more than
a dozen other threatened or endangered bird species depend on Poyang as
a wintering site and would be threatened by the project, Mr. Burnham said.
Several prominent environmental groups have also criticized the project.
WWF, which has been working to protect the endangered Yangtze finless
porpoises that live in Poyang, has said that the project would
“irreversibly and unpredictably” affect water quality and species diversity.
Zhang Yunbo, who heads Let Birds Fly, an environmental group based in
Beijing, said that he was not categorically opposed to reasonable
engineering solutions at Poyang, but that the complexity of the
hydrological problems there made him wary of a large-scale engineering
solution.
“Just because the water level is going down doesn’t mean we have to
engineer the water levels,” Mr. Zhang said.
Some experts say that an alternative would be to stop the sand mining
that appears to be lowering the lake bed and causing more water to
escape from the water channels that appear in Poyang’s mud flats during
the winter. Much of the sand is used for construction in Shanghai, about
400 miles east, and other Chinese cities along the lower Yangtze River
basin.
Officials at the Jiangxi Provincial Water Bureau declined a request for
an interview and referred inquiries to the government’s report on the
project.
Separately, local officials released some details in November from its
environmental impact assessment of the project. But critics, including
Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, said that the
details did not allow for a full assessment by outsiders of the
project’s likely ecological consequences.
A 2014 study in the journal Scientific Reports found that reservoirs
covering a total area equivalent to the size of Vermont had been
constructed across China over the previous six decades, and that most of
China’s large freshwater lakes — not including Poyang and Dongting,
another freshwater lake in the Yangtze River basin — were regulated for
irrigation, flood protection and other uses.
Lu Xixi, one of the study’s authors and a geography professor at the
National University of Singapore, said the Chinese government’s approach
to hydrological challenges was often driven by an “engineering
mentality.” As a result, he said, the consequences of engineering
projects — such as erosion — were often addressed with further
engineering, even when less-intensive solutions might be more effective
or less harmful to the watershed.
“We think the mentality must be changed,” Mr. Lu said in an interview.
Mr. Burnham said that stabilizing Poyang’s flood pulse would make its
seasonal variations more predictable, potentially allowing for economic
activities in places near the lake that were once at risk of flooding
during the summer.
But he said it was unlikely that the migratory birds that feed at the
lake during the winter dry season would see any benefits from the
proposed sluice gate.
One of Mr. Burnham’s latest studies shows that when Poyang’s water
levels were high during an unusually wet winter in 2011, Siberian cranes
fled to nearby grasslands but did not absorb as many calories there as
they normally do from vegetation in the lake’s mud flats. The study also
says that grassland feeding could potentially slow the birds’
reproduction over the long term.
“There aren’t many other places for these birds to go: Poyang is the
last, best place around,” Mr. Burnham said. “And if that’s no longer
available, or if it gets altered to the point where it can’t be used
anymore, you’re going to see a collapse of these species in the wild.”
Follow Mike Ives on Twitter @mikeives.
Emily Feng contributed research from Beijing.
--
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