85 Days Without Rain & Counting: Beijing Contemplates Water Restrictions

Due to a lingering drought and a record breaking dry winter, Beijing is to experiment with measures to more strictly regulate water conservation and recycled water usage.

According to China Daily, Beijing is to implement measures to conserve its precious water supplies. The capital is already is a net 'importer' of water, relying on Hebei province to supply over 50 percent of the city's water. Beijing's groundwater supplies, once reserved for war-time emergencies, are dwindling due to years of over extraction and an unusually dry second half of 2010 and early 2011.

As of yesterday, Beijing has gone 85 days without precipitation (a light dusting of snow in Haidian on December 29 was not sufficient to rate as an official "fall"). On January 9 Beijing broke its record for the previous driest start to winter, which occurred way back in 1954.

Beijing's water shortage is not new, but many were expecting this problem to be somewhat eased when the South-North Water Diversion Project, bringing water from the Yangtze, was scheduled to be operational in 2009. This mammoth project's opening has been pushed back until 2014, hence the desperate scramble to secure present water supplies. Even more troubling are reports that there is no guarantee the diversion project will solve Beijing's water problems when it is up and running. Jonathan Watts reported in the Guardian last July:

"China's biggest hydro-engineering project – the £39bn South-North Water Diversion Project, is so contaminated by pollution despite the construction of more than 400 expensive treatment plants, that water remains barely usable even after treatment..."

The first businesses and operations to come under the Beijing government's scrutiny under the new conservation measures will be the large scale water guzzling enterprises beyond the fifth ring road. According to the article, "the city is planning on saying 'no' to any new proposals for new golf courses, bathing houses, ski resorts... [and] all car wash facilities within the fifth ring road will be required to use recycled water."

Interestingly enough, the government appears to not be banning new car wash facilities. It seems no matter how scarce water gets, those Audi's need to be sparkling 24/7.

There also doesn't seem to be any talk of encouraging people to save water in their homes through education and measures like water-saving shower heads.

Unless the city sees a return to normal winter snowfall in 2011-2012, we can presume that Beijing will see less recreational 'activities' like the Yuanmingyuan Ice and Snow Festival popping up and wasting the city's most scarcest of resources.