World Water Day: China's Tibet policies threatening water security for one billion Asians

 

  

As the world marks World Water Day (1) today, Free Tibet is calling on the international community to take urgent action to address an impending water crisis on the Tibetan Plateau which could have potentially catastrophic consequences on a global scale.

 

The Tibetan Plateau is the world’s third largest store of ice outside the north and south poles. Home to some 40,000 glaciers, it has come to be known by scientists as the Earth’s “Third Pole”. These glaciers feed Asia’s major rivers (2) and are responsible for water-supply to hundreds of millions of people downstream in South and Southeast Asia.

 

But the long-term health of the Tibetan glaciers and ecosystems are hugely threatened by global warming. Chinese scientists have acknowledged that temperatures are rising twice as fast on the Plateau as anywhere else on the planet (3). And as global warming exerts ever greater pressure on Tibet’s increasingly threatened water resources, China is responding with policies that are politically motivated. In October 2008 The Guardian newspaper reported Chinese plans to build a string of dams across the Tibetan Plateau (4). The move is designed to protect water supply to China’s ever thirstier industries in eastern China and will seriously imperil the future supply of clean water to approximately one billion people living downstream throughout Asia.

 

To make way for the dams, as well as mines that are highly pollutive to water resources on the Plateau, China has also announced its intention to permanently settle, or move altogether from the grasslands, Tibet’s nomadic herders who number more than 2 million.

This politically motivated policy (5), which is aimed at diluting Tibetan culture and identity on the Plateau, flies in the face of scientific evidence, including evidence from Chinese scientists, that the nomads’ traditional land-use pastoral practices represent the best chance of maintaining the health of Tibet’s ecosystems and offsetting the worst effects of climate change. By forcing the removal of these essential stewards of the Plateau to make way for dam construction, the Chinese authorities are gravely threatening the long-term water supply to hundreds of millions downstream.

 

A major theme of this year’s World Water Day is “Clean Water for a healthy world”. With China offering political responses to an impending ecological disaster which threatens clean water supply to hundreds of millions, it is imperative that the international community urges China to enter into trans-national discussions with all stakeholders in the future health of the Plateau.

 

Free Tibet Director, Stephanie Brigden, said:

 

“China’s naked self-interest on environmental protection is plainly out of kilter with world opinion which wishes to see far more political co-operation to protect our collective interests. With China’s reputation already having taken a hit at the recent Copenhagen Climate summit, it will continue to plummet further if it persists in prioritising short-term political interests over wider collective environmental issues. The international community should be making far more persuasive arguments to China that it is in China’s own reputational interest to halt its forced removal of Tibetan nomads from the grasslands, and to enter into trans-national discussions on the future health of the Plateau.”

 

Ends

 

For further information:

 

Matt Whitticase, External Communications

t +44 (0)20 7324 4605 / +44 (0)7515 788456 and email: matt@freetibet.org

 

Stephanie Brigden, Director

t +44 (0)20 7324 4605 / +44 (0)7530 528264 and email: stephanie@freetibet.org

 

 

 

Notes to Editor:

 

(1)   More information on World Water Day is available at: http://www.worldwaterday.org/page/2536

(2)   Rivers with their sources on the Tibetan Plateau are: Ganges, Bhramaputra, Indus, Salween, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtse.

(3)   A 2007 study by the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) Meteorological Bureau found that the TAR is experiencing a 0.3°C increase in temperature every decade (Xinhua, November 20, 2007). On 18 August 2009 an article from the Press Trust of India cited an official China Daily article which quoted Qin Dahe of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as saying that the temperature in Tibet rose by an average of 0.32 degrees Celsius every 10 years between 1961 and 2008, much faster than the average across China, where temperatures rose by between 0.05 and 0.08 degrees.

(4)   The Guardian article is available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/14/china-tibet

(5)   In its 2007 Annual Human rights Report on China the US State Deparment quoted Tibet Party Secretary, Zhang Qingli: " The settlement program was described by the TAR Party Secretary Zhang Qingli as a means to counter the Dalai Lama's influence, as well as an essential party of "continuing to carry out major development of west China."