Week 8: Water Pollution

Water has been the hot topic for the past couple weeks (accordingly so as both Weeks 7 & 8 focus on water issues in China), and it continued this week with a conversation on water pollution. Water was one of the first resources protected in modern Chinese environmental legislation, yet this early acknowledgment by the Chinese government of the importance of water plays against an astonishing irony at how bad the overall quality of water is in contemporary China. Week 8 addressed this water pollution problem.

With my presentation focusing on the current and future management practices for water pollution, I built upon last week's World Bank paper on the world's water and then added to that papers from Greenpeace China and the Wilson Institute.

The World Bank stated that the lack of transparency and public participation remain issues that are not helping abate water pollution. This is especially true for China, whose governments are quite reluctant to pubicly release water resource and pollution information. Perhaps in part due to such hush efforts, the Chinese public have not really participated in addressing water pollution issues and participation remains low.

Greenpeace China has an excellent report on water pollution in the Pearl River Delta, "Poisoning the Pearl". Detailing the structure of water pollution standards in China, Greenpeace China found that the current Chinese water pollution regulatory framework fails to regulate many hazardous pollutants, whose concentrations need not be large to affect ecosystems. The enforcement of those laws that do remain is not effective. Finally, the "end-of-pipe" solutions that the Chinese government has in place to address water pollution are backwards, expensive, and ineffective. In conclusion, Greenpeace China recommended a holistic approach to combating water pollution and suggested an entire lifecycle approach beginning with the manufacture of products and pointed to the 2002 Cleaner Production Promotion Law written by the Chinese legislature as a great step towards this holistic thinking.

Finally the Wilson Institute paper on China's water pollution laws mentioned legislative compromises that have hurt China's ability to fight its water pollution in its 2008 Water Pollution Control Law as a "result of compromise with other ministries and the business community". The compromise in question was dropping the very effective "penalty per day" for continuing violations. Though a step in the right direction, the law will not be revised again for at least another eight to ten years.

Week 8.ppt