Professor James O. Leckie
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Stanford University

China’s Growing Water Crisis

Over the last 30 years China has made remarkable progress in both economic and industrial development. The rate of industrialization is unprecedented in modern experience. An inevitable consequence of the industrialization process is the increased production of waste materials. The early decision to postpone investing in expensive environmental control technologies has allowed both industrial and municipal waste materials to accumulate in the natural water resources of the nation, including both surface water and ground water resources. A comparison is made with the industrial development period of North America (1870-1970) where a similar decision was made to postpone implementing environmental controls until late in the development process. The comparison between the industrial development of China and the United States is useful to help understand why the there is such stress on China’s water resources. Land area and annual water availability are comparable between China and the United States, however, the time period of industrial development is much compressed compared to that for the United States and the population density during the development period for China is ten times the population density of the US during it’s development period. Consequently the use of water is much more intense in China. Finally, industrial use of chemicals in the modern era is much more intense and many more chemicals are used in high volume than were used during the development period of the US. This difference has resulted in many more types of contaminants being released in greater quantities during China’s development period. The recovery period experienced by the US indicates that it takes as long to clean up the water environment, typically, as it did to contaminate it.