Farming is driving force in drying soil in Northern China

Purdue University News: An important agricultural region in China is drying out, and increased farming may be more to blame than rising temperatures and less rain, according to a study spanning 30 years of data. A research team led by Purdue University and China Agricultural University analyzed soil moisture during the growing season in Northern China and found that it has decreased by 6 percent since 1983.

The optimal soil-moisture level for farmland is typically 40 percent to 85 percent of the water holding capacity, and the region's soil is now less than 40 percent and getting drier. If this trend continues, the soil may not be able to support crops by as early as 2090, said study leader Qianlai Zhuang, Purdue's William F. and Patty J. Miller Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Agronomy.

"The soil moisture declined by 1.5 to 2.5 percent every decade of the study and, while climate change is still a factor, this water depletion appears to be largely driven by human activities," Zhuang said. "A 10 percent decline in soil moisture over the course of a century would have major implications for agriculture and the fresh water supply in this heavily populated area."

Forty percent of the nation's population resides in Northern China, according to the country's population census office. The region also accounts for 65 percent of the nation's cropland, Zhuang said.

"The drying of soil in Northern China has been well documented, but its causes and the impacts of agricultural intensification in general have been understudied," he said. "This information is critical to improvement of agricultural practices and water resource management. The demand for food and water is increasing, but current practices to meet this demand threaten the future security of water resources. Unfortunately, with the growing world population, more and more regions could face the same circumstances of agricultural intensification for food security."...

This is a map of soil moisture trends in Northern China during the growing seasons from 1983-2012. The shading shows the trend in satellite-observed surface soil moisture, and the circles represent monitoring stations within agricultural plots. A Purdue University-led research team found that farming was more of a driver in the drying of the soil than rising temperatures and declining rainfall. The change in volumetric water content is shown. (Purdue University image/Yaling Liu) 

Typhoon lashes China after more than a million people evacuated

Sue-Lin Wong in Reuters: One of the most powerful typhoons to strike eastern China in decades disrupted air, rail and sea transport on Saturday after forcing the evacuation of more than a million people from the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, state media reported.

Typhoon Chan-Hom was packing winds of 162 kph (101 mph) as it hit the city of Zhoushan, slowing from an earlier speed of 173 kph (108 mph). It could be the most powerful typhoon to hit Zhejiang in July since the Communist Party took power in 1949, the National Meteorological Center said.

In Shanghai, the commercial capital, Pudong International Airport canceled 500 flights while Hongqiao Airport canceled 250 because of the typhoon, the official People's Daily newspaper said.

The typhoon brought heavy rain to Shanghai as well as the provinces of Anhui and Fujian, besides Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the weather service said....

Chan-Hom on July 10, 2015, via Himawari-8 AHI images provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency and composited by Meow, a work of  University of Wisconsin–Madison SSEC/CIMSS, Wikimedia Commons

Catastrophic Chinese floods triggered by air pollution

Roland Pease at Science News: What atmospheric scientist Jiwen Fan saw on her television in July 2013 appalled her. The worst flooding to hit China in 50 years was happening in Sichuan province, in the same place that had been devastated by a massive earthquake just 5 years earlier. Over the course of 5 days, 73 centimeters of rain pounded the mountains, peaking at 29 centimeters in a single day. Rivers burst their banks and poured through city streets, washing away homes, factories, and bridges. Steep valley slopes collapsed in deadly landslides. About 200 people died, and a further 300,000 were displaced.

But Fan was worried about more than just the immediate effect of the floods. The Richland, Washington–based researcher—an expert on air pollution and climate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington—wondered how they had gotten so strong so fast. The Sichuan basin, surrounded by mountains that trap smoke billowing from its industrial centers, is “notorious” for its dirty air, she says. Did air pollution play a role? To find out, she and her team of Chinese, American, and Israeli researchers designed precision computer simulations to model what had happened.

Air pollution can affect precipitation in many ways. Sometimes, the aerosol particles in smoke can reduce or delay rain. Sometimes, they can make thunderstorms more intense. Their best understood interaction is in changing how water vapor condenses to form droplets in clouds. But Fan and her team have proposed a first: that pollution also changes some air circulation patterns that lead to rainclouds.

In the case of the Sichuan storms, they write in a paper published online before print in Geophysical Research Letters, soot in particular contributed to the catastrophic flooding. It prevented rainclouds from forming over the basin during the day, leading to more intense rainfall in the mountains that evening. “We were amazed at the scale of the effect the pollution had,” Fan says. “Effectively it redistributed the precipitation from the wide area of the basin into the mountains.”...

From the 2013 flooding in Sichuan, shot by 人神之间, Wikimedia Commons, under the  Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

China's struggle for water security

Business Standard via AFP: Way back in 1999, before he became China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao warned that water scarcity posed one of the greatest threats to the "survival of the nation".  Sixteen years later, that threat looms ever larger, casting a forbidding shadow over China's energy and food security and demanding urgent solutions with significant regional, and even global, consequences.

The mounting pressure on China's scarce, unequally distributed and often highly polluted water supply was highlighted in a report released at the World Water Forum this week in Daegu, South Korea.

Published by the Hong Kong-based NGO, China Water Risk (CWR), it underlined the complexity of the challenge facing China as it seeks to juggle inextricably linked and often competing concerns over water, energy supply and climate change.  "There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to China's water-energy-climate nexus," the report said.

"More importantly, China's energy choices do not only impact global climate change, but affect water availability for Asia," it said, warning of the danger of future "water wars" given China's upstream control over Asia's mightiest rivers.

The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau is essentially the world's largest water tank and the origin of some of Asia's most extensive river systems including the Indus, Brahmaputra and Mekong.  The most significant link in the nexus the report describes is the fact that 93 percent of China's power generation is water-reliant....

In Yunnan, on the Tibetan Plateau, shot by Popolon, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Experts sound warning over flu dangers in China, India

Terra Daily: Scientists sounded warnings Wednesday over H7N9 bird flu in China and the H1N1 strain of swine flu in India that have jointly claimed more than 1,700 lives. H7N9 virus presents a high risk of becoming pandemic if China fails to close loopholes in its live poultry trade, researchers reported in the journal Nature.

A different team, writing in the US journal Cell Host and Microbe, said a strain of H1N1 "swine" flu in India may have acquired mutations enabling it to spread more readily. Looking at H7N9, epidemiologists led by Yi Guan at the University of Hong Kong sought to understand why this dangerous strain emerged in China in 2013, faded away and then rebounded in 2014.

The reason lies in the live poultry sector, they found, with China's eastern province of Zhejiang a springboard for spreading the virus south- and eastward. In the 2014 outbreak, H7N9 mixed with other flu viruses, helping to create new strains, the team said.

Their evidence came from throat and faecal swabs taken from chickens at live markets in Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Jiangsu and Shandong provinces from October 2013 to July 2014. No H7N9 was found among ducks. Further proof came from analysis of flu virus samples taken from patients at hospitals in the southern city of Shenzhen, in Guangdong province across from Hong Kong...

An electron micrograph of H7N9 from the Centers for Disease Control

China plans rural land reform experiment

Terra Daily via AFP: China will carry out a groundbreaking trial programme that may allow farmers to sell land, a senior official said Wednesday, a step towards liberalising rural real estate transactions currently monopolised by the government.

The ability to sell land is expected to accelerate China's urbanisation, a key driver of its decades-long economic boom, by enabling farmers to realise value from their assets, facilitating their move to the cities.

Under current Chinese law, all land in the country is ultimately owned by the state or by rural collectives, while farmers can retain usage rights in the countryside. Only the government has the power to appropriate land, often with little or no compensation, and can then sell it to property developers at a huge profit, leading to widespread social resentment and frequently triggering unrest.

A total of 33 county-level areas including Beijing's Daxing district -- the site of the capital's new airport -- will suspend some regulations that ban the free trading of some non-farming land, according to Fu Ying, a spokeswoman for the National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislature.

The programme will allow "rural land for business purposes" -- usually real estate used for industry or commerce -- to be traded on the market, meaning farmers are no long restricted to selling it to the government, according to a report posted earlier on the NPC's website.

"This reform is to support the development of agriculture modernisation and urbanisation, and it intends to better protect farmers' rights and interests during the process of reforms," Fu told reporters at a news conference....

Farming in Yunnan Province, shot by JialiangGao www.peace-on-earth.org, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Canal could turn Lake Nicaragua into ‘dead zone’

Paula Leighton in SciDev.net: The Interoceanic Canal that will run through Lake Nicaragua could kill life in the vast lake and have other serious effects on the country’s environment and economy unless safeguards are put in place, an independent international panel of experts has warned.

Scientists from the InterAmerican Network of Academies of Science joined biodiversity, engineering and hydrology experts from the Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences (CAN) and the International Council for Science (ICSU) to warn that the project must minimise “unintended adverse consequences” that could do economic, environmental and social harm.

Because of a lack of publicly available information from the Nicaraguan government and HKND, the Chinese firm building the canal, the panel sought to identify “the main technical and scientific questions” in order to “contribute to a public and transparent debate”, Jorge Huete-Pérez, CAN vice-president, tells SciDev.Net.

The water in Lake Nicaragua, Central America’s largest lake, is currently suitable for drinking, irrigation and “other ecosystem services essential to Nicaragua’s economy”. The lake is particularly vulnerable because it is shallow, with an average depth of 12.5 metres, and is exposed to wind action that encourages sediment to be brought back into suspension

Canal construction, which began last month, will require the lake to be dredged to a depth of 30 metres for 105 kilometres. Together with ongoing maintenance and traffic, it will considerably lower water quality and may impair the lake’s usefulness, says the summary document of a workshop on scientific and technical issues associated with the canal, held in Managua, Nicaragua, on 10-11 November....

An 1870 map of an earlier attempt at a canal across Nicaragua. Created by Julius Bien and Company, it is titled Panoramic View of the Nicaragua Canal

China encourages environmental groups to sue polluters

The Guardian (UK) via AFP: China on Wednesday granted public interest groups more power to sue those that flout environmental protection laws, the country’s highest court said, as Beijing steps up efforts to curb pollution that regularly chokes major cities.

Social groups that work to fight polluters judicially will gain special status and have court fees reduced, the Supreme People’s Court said on its website. They will also be allowed to sue firms or individuals across China, regardless of where the organisation is based.

The term the court used for the groups covers both NGOs and government-backed organisations, although it was not immediately clear whether independent environmentalists will benefit from the regulations.

China has more than 700 registered and regulated environmental protection groups, the official Xinhua news agency cited a ministry official as saying. The new rules came into force on Wednesday, the court said, adding that they were issued “in response to questions on the matter”.

A side effect of the country’s meteoric economic rise of recent decades has been severe pollution in major cities, leading to increased public
dissatisfaction that has unnerved the ruling Communist Party. Recent studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of China’s soil is estimated to be polluted, and that 60% of underground water is too contaminated to drink...

Beijing smog, shot by Kevin Dooley Kevin Dooley, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Egypt authorities report 10th bird flu death in 2014

Press TV (Ireland): Egyptian health authorities have reported the country's 10th death this year from bird flu as well as the first case of infection with the virus’s H5N1 strain in Cairo. The fatality was reported on Monday. Health Ministry spokesman, Hossam Abdel Ghaffar, said it occurred last week in the southern province of Aswan.

A 42-year-old man was also diagnosed with bird flu and quarantined on December 26 in the capital, Cairo. He is the 25th case of bird flu in the country this year, but the first infection reported in Cairo. Bird flu first appeared in Egypt in 2006.

Mainly in Southeast Asia, the H5N1 strain has killed over 400 people since first appearing in 2003. A separate strain, H7N9 has also killed over 170 people since it first emerged in 2013.  Also on Monday, Chinese state media reported that a man had died from the H7N9 strain in eastern China....

Plucking poultry at the Tomb of Nakht, Western Thebes, 15th century BCE. It's a bit outdated -- but there are no copyright issues!

Chinese tests find quarter of drinking water 'substandard'

Reuters: Almost a quarter of purified drinking water tested by China's top safety watchdog was substandard, with many products found to contain excessive levels of bacteria, the official Shanghai Daily newspaper said on Monday.

The findings underline the challenge to controlling supply chains in China, after a slew of food safety scares over the past year from donkey meat products contaminated with fox to heavy metals found in infant food.

The China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) found excessive bacteria in purified water products from China's biggest drinks maker, Wahaha Group, as well as C'estbon Beverage Co Ltd and Danone SA's Robust brand, the newspaper said.

In a statement posted on the official Xinhua news agency, Wahaha said it had recalled the affected products and cut its supply relationship with the water station where it said the contamination had occurred....

Image by Angelsharum, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Tibetan mega-dam begins operation

Terra Daily via AFP: China has begun generating electricity from Tibet's biggest ever hydropower project, state-run media reported, the latest dam development on Himalayan rivers which has stoked fears in neighbouring India.

The first generating unit of the 9.6 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) Zangmu Hydropower Station, which stands more than 3,300 metres above sea level, went into operation on Sunday, China's official Xinhua news agency said.

The dam on the Yarlung Zangbo river -- known as the Brahmaputra in India, where it is a major waterway -- will be 116 metres (381 feet) high when completed next year, according to reports.

It will have a total generating capacity of 510,000 kilowatts, Xinhua said, making it the largest dam ever built on the Tibetan plateau.

"The hydropower station will solve Tibet's power shortage, especially in the winter," Xinhua quoted an official from the Tibet Electric Power Co. as saying. India has previously expressed concern about damming the Brahmaputra, one of the largest Himalayan rivers and a lifeline to some of India's remote, farm-dependent northeastern states....

An aerial view of the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, shot by Akarsh Simha, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

Eastern China set for record-hot summers

Yahoo via AFP: By 2024, more than half of summers in eastern China will be as hot as in 2013, when the region was hit by a record-busting heatwave and devastating drought, a study said Sunday. Based on current global warming trends, the big heat will happen even if rising greenhouse gas emissions are braked over the next decade, it said.

The summer of 2013 was the hottest on record in eastern China -- a massive 1.1 degrees Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit) above the long-term average. On 31 days, the temperature reached or exceeded the heatwave benchmark of 35 degrees Celsius -- more than double the usual June-August tally.

Nine provinces, with half a billion inhabitants, were affected. Direct economic losses, in China's most populated and economically developed region, have been put at 59 billion renminbi ($9.6 billion).

Reporting in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists in Beijing, Canada and the United States said the probability of a 2013-like summer in eastern China had increased by a factor of 60 since the early 1950s....

China landslide kills seven

Terra Daily via AFP: Seven people died and another 20 were left missing by a landslide in China, state media reported Thursday. The landslide engulfed a village near Fuquan city in the southwestern province of Guizhou, the Xinhua news agency said.

Torrential rain complicated the rescue work, it said. Pictures showed emergency personnel levering up slabs of tiled wall. A total of 77 houses collapsed or were buried in the disaster, Xinhua said, with seven people confirmed dead and another 20 missing.

Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China, and renowned for its hilly topography and wet weather. Mining is one of its key industries but soil erosion is among the worst in China, with around 42 percent of the province affected, according to an official national survey in 2009....

Study measures steep coastal costs of China's GDP growth

Seed Daily via SPX: A new study by a team of Chinese and American conservation biologists quantifies the serious consequences of China's recent economic growth on its coastal ecosystems. By several measures, 1978 was the beginning of a hugely successful surge in the nation's ability to produce economic value, but that surge brought accelerated degradation in the vitality of its coastal ecosystems.

The combined analysis of economic growth, human activities and impacts, and environmental quality data appears in the journal Scientific Reports. It shows that after reforms declared in 1978, which liberalized the Chinese economy to spur growth, many human economic activities with deleterious environmental impacts increased markedly, even in the absence of significant population growth.

The economic reforms led to a shift from an inland agrarian economy to an industrial economy concentrated on the coast. In lockstep with that shift came environmental problems such as declines in fish size and diversity, damage to coral reefs, and a surge in harmful algal blooms.

"This study flags the problem and screams out this is a problem that has to be dealt with," said Mark Bertness, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University and the paper's second author. "This has all happened within a generation."

Lead author Qiang He of Beijing Normal University, who led the research while a visiting scholar in the Bertness lab at Brown, said the research shows that economic growth alone can generate environmental impacts. "We show that in a country with a relatively constant coastal population growth rate, economic growth rather than population growth is the major driver of coastal degradation, while previous science often addresses how increasing human population degrades the coastal and marine environment," He said....

Shanghai's Bund viewed from the Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong, Shanghai, shot by Bobak, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.5 license

Drought hits China food production

Reuters: Severe drought and scorching heat has damaged over a million hectares of farmland in China's Henan and Inner Mongolia provinces, with no immediate relief in sight, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Henan in central China is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years with precipitation at less than half of normal levels, the agency said. Some 900,000 hectares of crops have been damaged, it said.

Henan is a big producer of food crops, including soybeans, barley and rice. In some regions of the province, governments have shut off water supply to businesses such as commercial swimming pools and bath houses, while water intensive industries have been asked to restrict usage, Xinhua said....

Mudslides kill 11 in southwest China, 14 missing

Channel News Asia: Eleven people were killed and 14 others are still missing after mudslides swept through two villages in southwest China on Monday following days of heavy rain, state news agency Xinhua reported. Rescuers are working to retrieve people still buried after mudslides struck the villages in Yunnan province, the news agency said, citing local government.

Heavy downpours battering the mountainous province in recent days have caused several landslides, crushing houses, blocking roads and disrupting power supplies. More than 1,100 rescuers were stranded trying to reach the village of Huna in Dehong, western Yunnan, where a mudslide early Monday killed ten people, Xinhua reported.

"Victims are badly in need of relief supplies including tents and waterproof clothing," it cited local authorities as saying at a disaster relief meeting. Tents, bags of rice and generators have been sent to the area, it said....

Keith Edkins released this image of the path of Typhoon Rammassun into the public domain

Typhoon Rammasun kills 8 in southern China

Calum MacLeod in USA Today: The death toll from Super Typhoon
Rammasun rose to at least eight as thousands of people were evacuated in Vietnam's northeastern coastal areas ahead of its landfall there Saturday. Rammasun, one of the strongest storms to hit China's coast in decades, roared into southern China on Friday afternoon, packing winds of up to 134 mph.

Xinhua, China's official news agency, reported five people died and 99 were injured after Typhoon Rammasun hit Hainan island Friday and three later died in the Guangxi region as the storm plowed into the mainland on its way north to Vietnam.

Earlier in the week, the storm caused havoc, widespread damage and at least 77 deaths in the Philippines. Rammasun then gathered strength as it crossed the South China Sea. It was upgraded early Friday from typhoon to super typhoon status. Named after the Thai word for "thunder god," Rammasun made landfall in Wenchang City on the northeastern coast of Hainan — south China's tropical island province.

Xinhua said the storm is believed to be the strongest to hit the region in 41 years. Wind speeds reached 130 miles per hour, with the storm knocking down power lines and damaging buildings. The mayor of Wenchang, Liu Chunmei, told Xinhua that many houses have been damaged. He said a man died after being hit by falling debris as his house collapsed. More than 70,000 residents near the landfall region were evacuated....

Typhoon Rammassun on July 18, 2014, via NASA

Lightning, floods leave 20 dead in rain-hit China

Terra Daily via AFP: At least 20 people have died in the past week as torrential rain batters swathes of China, with at least six killed by lightning, thousands of homes destroyed and more than 300,000 evacuated, state media said.

There had been six deaths from lightning strikes in the central province of Jiangxi since last Friday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

There were other fatalities from lightning in Guizhou in the southwest, it said, where a total of seven people died. A landslide in the province early Thursday buried eight people, Xinhua said, with two rescued by mid-morning but six still missing.

Officials in Guizhou are bracing for more devastation, the China Daily said, reporting a warning that "local authorities should make full-scale preparations for geological disasters that could be triggered by rains".

The most severe downpours, which began on Sunday night, destroyed 5,800 homes and damaged another 16,300 in Guizhou, Xinhua said, in a re
port late Wednesday...

China arms itself for difficult 'war on pollution'

Terra Daily via AFP: Having declared "war on pollution", China is arming itself with tougher weapons from new courts to daily fines and shutting down offenders altogether, in what analysts call promising steps but no guarantee of progress.

For decades, China accepted the blight on the environment as the collateral damage of tremendous economic growth that raised the incomes of hundreds of millions of people -- who now increasingly clamour for a better quality of life as well.

The acrid air, along with vast water and soil pollution, has not only afflicted the health and environment of the world's most populous country but also embarrassed the rising power as images of its capital smothered in smog scare off tourists and business.

In recent days levels of PM2.5, the smallest and most dangerous particulates, have at times been above 300 micrograms per cubic metre in Beijing, acco
rding to US embassy measurements -- 12 times the World Health Organization's recommended maximum level.

Yet powerful industries and local officials still eager to boost their bottom lines resist changing course. At the same time, fixing the environment conflicts with the ruling Communist Party's overriding goal to grow the economy and improve livelihoods to avoid the "social unrest" that might shake its control.

"We can't say we're optimistic but we do see hopeful signs," said Ma Jun, a prominent Beijing-based environmentalist....

Reorganization of crop production and trade could save China's water supply

Seed Daily via SPX: China's rapid socioeconomic growth continues to tax national water resources - especially in the agricultural sector - due to increasing demands for food. And, because of the country's climate and geography, irrigation is now widespread, burdening rivers and groundwater supplies.

One solution to these growing problems, however, might be to reorganize the country's crop production and trade, especially in agricultural provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Hebei, according to new report issued by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and School of Engineering and Applied Science and scientists in China and Japan.

The researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reducing agricultural production in these provinces and importing food commodities from other provinces or nations instead could help China conserve more water. These provinces all use large volumes of water to produce crops that are later exported to wetter regions.

If balanced with more water-efficient irrigation systems locally, restructuring these regions could reduce national water use while avoiding an excessive geographically centralized agricultural production.

"Our analysis provides a framework for understanding how such policies would benefit China's water use in the future," said study co-author Denise Mauzerall, professor of environmental engineering and international affairs. In particular, corn production and trade at the domestic level might be an area to target as changes could significantly reduce national water use for irrigation."...

Irrigation of rice fields, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China, ca.1900-1919. A lantern slide taken by American missionaries