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2 Asia's river systems face
collapse By Alan Boyd
Water in the Indus River is so clouded
that the native dolphin has in effect lost its
eyesight and has to detect prey and other objects
through sound waves.
More than half of all
the industrial waste and sewage in China flows
into a single waterway, the Yangtze. And
tributaries of the Ganges, one of Asia's greatest
cultural and religious treasures, are running dry
because of the crippling burden of irrigation.
Such has been the legacy of the frantic
Third World rush to
industrialize at any cost,
according to a landmark study by the World Wide
Fund for Nature (WWF) that was released as part of
World Water Day on Thursday.
It found that
21 of the world's greatest rivers, including the
Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Ganges, Indus and
Tigris-Euphrates in Asia, were struggling to
survive against the tide of man-made pollution and
the diversion of water through dams, pipes and
irrigation.
"We're talking about a
complete collapse of the system - they're so
polluted, so over-extracted or so cut up by dams
that it's really not functioning as a river
anymore," said Tom Le Quesne, freshwater-policy
officer at WWF. "It's a challenge that humanity
faces not far off the scale of climate change."
So many lives depend on these river
systems that the economies of emerging Asia could
be ravaged and there could be immense social
upheaval, including the loss of food security and
employment. About 450 million people draw water,
food and electricity supplies from the Yangtze
alone, while many more use it for transportation.
The Mekong River basin supports 60 million
people, including parts of China, Myanmar and
Vietnam, nearly one-third of Thailand and most of
Cambodia and Laos. It supplies two of the world's
most important rice bowls, central Thailand and
the delta region of southern Vietnam.
In
India, the Ganges Plain comprises one-third of the
country's land area and 120 million people rely on
its waters for fishing and farming. Tens of
millions live on tributaries of the Ganges in
Bangladesh.
Then there are the
displacements forced by development, often
involuntary. The World Commission on Dams (WCD)
has estimated that between 40 million and 80
million people have been resettled, including at
least 10 million in China.
As habitats are
progressively destroyed, the ecological toll is
mounting and may be irreversible. About 20% of the
world's 10,000 freshwater fish and plant species
are either extinct or endangered.
In the
Yangtze, the freshwater dolphin was declared
officially extinct last year and the Chinese
alligator, baiji (river dolphin) and freshwater
finless porpoise are critically endangered. Other
dolphins are at risk in the Salween basin, Ganges
and Indus.
Hundreds of fish species have
vanished, especially species that have found their
annual migration patterns blocked by dams. Giant
catfish, one of the world's largest freshwater
fish, have not been caught in the Mekong in
northern Thailand since 2001.
As the
species decline, so do livelihoods. Annual fish
catches from the middle and lower Yangtze averaged
around 240,000 tonnes in the early 1950s, but were
down to 110,000 tonnes when the last checks were
taken, in the period 1983-2000.
The WWF
puts the blame for the deterioration of river
systems on overdevelopment, noting that at least
60% of the world's 227 largest rivers have been
fragmented by dams, leading to the destruction of
wetlands.
On a global scale, more than
45,000 large dams - those that are more than 60
meters high - are operational in more than 150
countries, while another 1,500 or so are under
construction.
"Unabated development is
jeopardizing nature's ability to meet our growing
demands," said Jamie Pittock, who heads the WWF's
freshwater program.
The report is a
follow-up to a study by the WCD in 2000 that
recommended more stringent controls on the
blocking of water flows so that the environmental
impact of man-made barriers could be contained.
The WFF concludes that governments are not acting
on these recommendations.
Most at risk is
the Yangtze, which also has the largest number of
large dams either planned or under construction -
46, including the mammoth Three Gorges.
Communities along river systems add to the
problem. Pollution in the main stem of the Yangtze
has increased by more than 70% during the past 50
years, with heaps of garbage, pig waste and
discharge from factories, hospitals and mines,
possibly including radioactive waste, accumulating
on the riverbed.
Leather-processing
industries that use large quantities of chromium
and other metals are feeding toxic waste into the
Ganges, especially near Kanpour, while about a
billion liters of mostly untreated raw sewage
spills in daily.
The extraction of water
for irrigation and runoff of chemicals from
factories and farms threaten the Indus, which
snakes through Pakistan and western India.
Meanwhile logging, poor farming
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