South-North Water Transfer Project

3 Key excerpts on "South-North Water Transfer Project"

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  Sustainability of Engineered Rivers In Arid Lands

  Challenge and Response

  • Jurgen Schmandt, Aysegül Kibaroglu(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Some alternatives have been indicated by WWF (2007) and Azevedo et al. (2005) as a way to mitigate or, at least, diminish some of the aforementioned impacts by, mainly, improving demand management as outlined in South Africa’s Water Act of 1998 and promoting water reuse and recycling among leading industry players in the basin. The project was innovative in setting up a fund called the Lesotho Highlands Water Revenue Fund, based on royalties, dedicated to combating poverty in the affected areas. The fund has proved inefficient and opaque, leading to its termination and the creation of a new fund, now managed by a committee called the Lesotho Fund for Community Development. The irregular- ities verified have not yet been fully remedied, with the risk of cancellation of the fund. The project failed to examine both environmental and social impacts from the outset, and the mitigation costs these would require. Also, demand management was not considered as a previous step before considering the IBWT, which may represent a much lower cost solution. In fact, as was the case here, the costs of these projects are generally higher than the proponents claim (World Commission on Dams, 2000). “INTELLIGENT” WATER TRANSFERS 255 17.5.5 Asia THE SOUTH-TO-NORTH WATER TRANSFER PROJECTS (CHINA) The South-to-North Water Transfer projects (SNWT: in Chinese, Nanshui Beidiao) constitute a set of giant interbasin diversions from the water-rich Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) basin into water-short north and northwest China. Two of these, the Eastern Route and the Middle Route, pass through tunnels dug under the elevated bed of the Yellow River. They are already delivering water to both the Huai River Basin south of the Yellow and to the Hai River basin to the north.

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  Traveling the 38th Parallel

  A Water Line around the World

  • David Carle, Janet Carle(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  While the imbalance between wet regions and human thirst is geographically reversed in California, where north-to-south aqueducts serve Southern California cities and farms, the approach to water supply issues is similar: build long-distance aqueducts. Ultimately, China intends to complete 1,800 miles of canals along three routes to move almost 12 trillion gallons of water each year. Work began in 2002 on the middle route from the The South-North Water Transfer Project 34 A s i a Han River, and the eastern route from the Yangtze. Construction crews missed a goal to finish the eastern aqueduct before China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics; completion is now projected for 2013. The third, western route, which will begin high on the Tibetan Plateau at the head-waters of the Yangtze, faces even more daunting engineering challenges, so work there has been delayed. The route of the eastern aqueduct uses existing parts of China’s ancient Grand Canal. That feat of early engineering began 2,000 years ago and was continued by successive dynasties to make barge travel pos-sible along 1,100 miles of canal connecting the Yangtze, Yellow, and other rivers. (Hangzhou, in the south, was finally linked with Beijing in 600 A . D . ). Perhaps 2.5 million laborers worked on the canal and a paved high-way along its length. The twenty-first-century construction is all about water supply, rather than transportation. Water coming from the Yangtze River is highly polluted, necessitating construction of hundreds of costly sewage treatment plants in the north. Industrial pollution and China’s national demand for water increased in step with the country’s recent phenomenal growth as new industries, especially power plants, required more of the nation’s already limited water supply. The Chinese have pioneered coal-fired power plant tech-nologies that use much less water, yet overall, thirst still grows while the available water supply has actually declined.

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  Integrated Drought Management, Volume 2

  Forecasting, Monitoring, and Managing Risk

  • Vijay P. Singh, Deepak Jhajharia, Rasoul Mirabbasi, Rohitashw Kumar, Vijay P. Singh, Deepak Jhajharia, Rasoul Mirabbasi, Rohitashw Kumar(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  These dimensions are not mutually exclusive and in most cases occur in combination. Water transfer requires that there be a social, environmental, political, or economic benefit, which provides the justification to offset:

  • The cost of transferring it
  • Any compensation demanded by the donor
  • Any other costs associated with the negative externalities that the transfer may generate

  Generally, water transfer schemes have multiple complementary objectives that include:

  • To increase total water benefit by transferring surplus water to a water-scarce basin/region
  • To facilitate the reallocation of water from a low- to a high-value use
  • To reduce regional inequity by transferring water to promote socioeconomic development in water-scarce regions
  • To meet treaties, agreements, or other legal obligations
  • To facilitate broader cooperation and promote solidarity between donor and recipient regions
  • To restore degraded freshwater ecosystems

  As stated earlier, there is a wide range of transfers and a variety of terms associated with them. Water transfers are classified based on the geographic scope as follows:

  • Interproject – transfer within a water project.
  • Intrabasin – transfer from one subbasin to another in the same basin.
  • Interbasin – transfer from one basin to another basin. This is further subdivided into short and long interbasin transfers. In the case of the former, the transfer is to a basin immediately adjacent to the donor basin, whereas, with the latter, it may cross multiple basins.

  Other defining characteristics of a water transfer arrangement include:

  • Types of water – the transfer may involve surface, ground, wastewater (reclaimed, treated, or untreated), brackish and even saline water. For the sake of completeness, it could also include virtual water, that is, through trade.

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