Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

43. Even without the coal plants nearby, this is misdirected. Carbon credits are supposed to be given to “additional” generation capacity. But these dams would have been built regardless of the Clean Development Mechanism. There is no additionality.

44. Where the authorities want to build a new dam upstream of the huge hydroelectric plant at Xiaolangdi, which is struggling to cope with the sediment buildup.

45. The “rush” is known in Chinese as xihequanshui, literally “to occupy the river.” In 2002, State Power Corporation of China was broken into five corporations, each with exclusive development rights over particular watersheds. The biggest of them, Huaneng, won rights on the Lancang (Mekong), Huadian secured rights on the Nu, while Sanxia focused on the upper Yangtze (Mertha, China’s Water Warriors, p. 46).

46. A former head of Huaneng, for example, was Li Xiaopeng, the son of former premier Li Peng, who drove through the Three Gorges project (ibid.).

47. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Agrarian Crisis, Mega-Dams and the Environment,” New Left Review 58 (July/August 2009).

48. “This was the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that a decision on an engineering project of such magnitude—a decision that had already been reached—was reversed” (Mertha, China’s Water Warriors, p. 103).

49. I read two days later in a Chinese newspaper that one wealthy resident had paid for a group of the fittest men in the area to rescue a relative in one of the cutoff villages. They reportedly turned back a day later after several were killed in landslides.

50. Though Fan never claimed to prove a link, he said that “Zipingpu has all conditions that provoke reservoir-induced earthquakes … We cannot rule out the possibility that building the Zipingpu Dam induced the earthquake because the epicentre is so close to the dam” (Fan Xiao, chief engineer of the Regional Geology Investigation Team of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, quoted in Southern Metropolitan Daily and translated by Three Gorges Probe). This possibility was also raised by several other scientists, for example, Richard A. Kerr and Richard Stone, “A Human Trigger for the Great Quake of Sichuan?” Science, January 16, 2009.

51. Cited in Kerr and Stone, “A Human Trigger for the Great Quake of Sichuan?”

52. The best-known example was a 6.5-magnitude earthquake triggered by the Koyna Dam in a remote area of India, which killed about 180 people in 1967. Others are Kremasta, Greece (1965), Kariba, Zimbabwe-Zambia (1961), and Xinfengjiang, China (1962) (Antoaneta Bezlova, “Temblor Shakes China’s Big Dam Ambitions,” Inter Press Service, June 26, 2008).

53. See note 18 of this chapter.

54. “China to Build 20 Hydro Dams on Yangtze River,” Associated Press, April 21, 2009.

1. Translation by R. Stercks, cited in Richard B. Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China’s Wild West (East Gate, 2008).

2. Including Bob Pittman from NOAA, Brent Stewart from Hubbs-Seaworld Research Institute, Tomonori Akamatsu from Japanese FRA, Beat Mueller from the Swiss Eawag Aquatic Research, Wang Ding, deputy director of the Institute of Hydrobiology, Wuhan, and Samuel Turvey, Zoological Society of London.

3. The six-nation Yangtze Freshwater Dolphin Expedition was co-organized by the Institute of Hydrobiology, Wuhan, and August Pfluger, the millionaire CEO behind the baiji.org foundation.

4. Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World (Penguin, 2007), p. 15.

5. A baiji-like creature is first mentioned in the ancient dictionary Erya in the third century BC. River dolphins are also given semimythical status along the Amazon and Mekong. In Brazil, the boto dolphin is said to take human form.

6. “Bai Qiulian,” in the ancient Chinese storybook Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio).

7. The pale, snub-nosed creature first drew attention outside China thanks to a study by Swiss biologist Giorgio Pilleri. Only six have ever been captured alive. The last of them, Qi Qi, died at the age of twenty-four in the Wuhan Dolphinarium in 2002.

8. In 1986, there were 300 baiji; in 1990, 200; in 1994, fewer than 100; in 1997, an estimated 13. Since then, there have been only two sightings, both unconfirmed.

9. Foreign environmentalists have also blamed the Three Gorges Dam for accelerating the baiji’s demise. The scientists aboard the Kekao 1 said that, compared with overfishing, the direct impact of the barrier was minimal. But it added to the pressure on the animal because less sediment was flowing downstream, which meant fewer of the sandbars formed that were an important part of the baiji’s habitat.

10. Yuan/dollar figures should be treated with caution. During the course of my writing, the exchange rate fluctuated considerably. For the sake of simplicity, I have used a uniform conversion rate approximating to $1 = 7 yuan. It is the rounded-up average during the three years before publication.

11. The others were Honghu and Tonglin.

12. Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China .

13. China is one of the globe’s most important centers of biodiversity. Altogether, there are 613 types of mammals (ranking second in the world), 1,244 types of birds, 3,862 types of freshwater fish, 51,000 insects, 35,070 plants, 9,000 forms of algae, 8,000 fungi, 500 bacteria, 376 reptiles, 284 amphibians (Yuming Yang, Kun Tian, Jiming Hao, Shengji Pei, and Yongxing Yang, “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan, China,” Biodiversity and Conservation 13, 4 [2004]: 813–26).

14. Interview with Jim Harkness, former head of the WWF in China.

15. Fossil records show the planet has endured five previous mass extinctions, but unlike the previous wipeouts, this one is man-made rather than caused by asteroid impact or climate change. In the last 400 years, 83 mammals, 113 birds, 288 other animals, and 650 plants have become extinct—nearly all of them in the past century. Of the 21 marine species on the list, 16 have died out since 1972 (Ponting, A New Green History of the World, p. 170). A quarter of all mammals are now endangered or extinct, as are 15 percent of birds. Nature magazine estimates that half of the world’s species will be extinct by 2100.

16. “Threats to China’s biodiversity come from several sources: uncontrolled deforestation, desertification, overgrazing of rangelands, overexploitation and use of animal and plant resources, atmospheric pollution, poor protection and overutilisation of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions, invasive plants and animals, overfishing, water pollution, and adverse effects of tourism, mining, wetland reclamation and other human activities. These pressures have led to a greater threat to biodiversity in China than elsewhere. Compared to a global rate of species loss of 10 per cent, the estimate for China is greater, about 15–20 per cent” (John MacKinnon et al., A Biodiversity Review of China [WWF International, 1996], p. 12). The UN’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) reports that 189 of the world’s 740 endangered species are in China, around a quarter of the total. Between 4,000 and 5,000 of China’s plant species are endangered or at risk—about a fifth of the nation’s floral diversity. More than half the mammal and amphibian species in China are classified as threatened or near threatened.

The China Species Red List (www.chinabiodiversity.com/index.php) notes that 39.8 percent of mammals are threatened, and 10.8 percent are near threatened. Among amphibians, the percentages are 39.9 and 19.6. Of 1,200 orchid varieties, 99.5 percent are endangered. The “cute factor” is important. One study has shown that funding for protection tends to focus on species with large eyes.