Download An Ecopartnership Project Promoting Sustainable Water Resource

An Ecopartnership Project Promoting Sustainable Water
Resource Management in Qinghai Province, China
China is undergoing dramatic economic development and rapid land use change that relies on vast
quantities of fresh water reserves. In addition to providing enough water for industry and agriculture,
China faces the challenge of managing drinking water and wastewater in its rapidly expanding cities
and many isolated rural areas. Fortunately, Chinese leaders and scholars have identified
environmental sustainability, broadly, and water resources management, specifically, as key goals for
supporting long-term development.
The Province of Qinghai, one of the largest (721,120 km2) provinces in China, is a land rich in
natural resources related to water, minerals, and terrestrial ecosystem services. Qinghai, with its vast
mountain ranges, numerous glaciers, and broad meadows and plains, is also a land of natural
extremes in precipitation, elevation, and temperature. The headwaters for three major rivers in China:
the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Mekong River, originate in this province. These rivers
ultimately provide water to hundreds of millions of people downstream, making Qinghai known as
the “water tower” or “water reservoir” of China, and elevating water quality and water availability in
Qinghai from a regional issue to one of national concern. Factors affecting these critical water
resources include shrinking glaciers, degradation of wetlands and grasslands, a warming climate, and
plant species loss.
With a population of approximately 5.5 million, Qinghai is a melting pot of cultural diversity, where
nearly half the population lives in the capital city of Xining, but also where a large percentage of
people live in small rural villages scattered over Qinghai, in regions with great diversity in climate
and geography. Despite the abundance of natural resources, Qinghai maintains one of the smallest
economies among Chinese Provinces. Although the future promises significant economic growth in
the province, changes in climate and land use will impact the population in rural communities and the
capital city in significantly different ways, requiring a broad portfolio of potential solutions adhering
to sustainability principles.
Fostered by the collaboration between the Utah-Qinghai Ecopartnership (UQEP) and the Purdue
University-led Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability (USCEES), a scientific team has
been assembled to address critical challenges related to water resources in Qinghai Province. The
team, which includes faculty from Purdue University, Qinghai Normal University (QHNU), and
Qinghai University (QHU), launched their collaboration in the summer of 2014 with three specific
projects: water management in Xining city, agricultural and grazing intensity impacts on water and
soil quality, and application of inexpensive drinking water treatment technology in small rural
communities. Details describing the inexpensive drinking water treatment project are as follows.
Inexpensive drinking water treatment technology for small rural communities
In many rural villages in Qinghai Province, the only source of fresh water
is that which is collected from rainfall on roofs and stored in underground
cisterns installed at each home for subsequent use. This water is
susceptible to particle-born contaminants and pathogens and poses a
significant health risk to people in these communities. Purdue professors
Chad Jafvert (Lyles School of Civil Engineering) and John Howarter
(School of Mechanical Engineering) have re-engineered an ancient
technology for clarifying the water: slow sand filtration (SSF). The reengineered SSF system consist of inexpensive five-gallon plastic buckets,
sieved sand, plastic tubing and a specialized porous plate all designed for
use in rural communities with limited financial resources. The SSF
systems improve water quality through microbial driven processes that
Slow Sand Filter Similar
break down dissolved and colloidal organics, reducing the turbidity of the
to the Model Used in
water to drinking water standards.
Qinghai
In July 2014, Dr. Jafvert, funded by the USCEES Visiting Scholars
Travel Grant, traveled to Qinghai with a
team from Purdue to oversee the installation
of SSF systems in two villages currently
relying on rainwater collection for home
water use. After initial training and
installation of the filters, Dr. Jafvert worked
with collaborators from QHNU to formalize
a monitoring system for water quality
analysis, and also held lectures on water
chemistry for QHNU professors and
students.
Overall, this water purification project
already has positively impacted the lives of
six families. Within just a few days of SSF
installation, the homeowners could visibly
see improvement in their household water. Even more, the villagers informed the team that their SSF
systems were a topic of discussion among the community, as many other villagers wanted to install
the filtration systems in their homes. More SSF systems are planned for construction and installation
in the next years of this multi-year project, with further sponsorship from the Provincial Government
anticipated.
This project was sponsored Purdue’s Discovery Park USCEES, Purdue
Center for the Environment, and the Purdue Water Community.
For more information about the U.S. China Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability please
see: http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/ecopartnership/.
U.S. Department of State Ecopartnership web site: http://ecopartnerships.lbl.gov.
Evaluation of Ecosystem Services in the Qinghai
Province, China
“Ecosystem Services” is a term used to describe
the benefits that people obtain from the ecosystems.
Grasslands specifically provide a number of services
including delivery of food, carbon storage, nutrient and
sediment regulation, biodiversity, and tourism. The
Province of Qinghai, located in the northwestern part of
China, supports vast areas of grasslands (~360,000 km2,
approximately half of the area of Qinghai province).
Among these grasslands, the majority are high-cold
meadow and steppe, which have been mostly
overgrazed and experienced moderate to serious
degradation. Grassland degradation has great impacts on ecosystem services and may cause
species loss, poor productivity, and degradation of flood, nutrient, and sediment regulation.
The U.S.-China Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability is working with Qinghai
University and Qinghai Normal University, as part of a collaboration with the Utah-Qinghai
Ecopartnership, to address issues of grassland degradation and associated impacts in this region.
As part of this collaboration, Ph.D. student Ms. Rebecca Logsdon (Department of Agricultural
and Biological Engineering, Purdue University) along with her thesis advisor Professor Indrajeet
Chaubey, has focused part of her research on evaluating the impacts of over-grazing on
ecosystem service provision in Qinghai using process-based biophysical models such as the Soil
and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). In June 2014, Ms. Logsdon traveled to Qinghai to begin a
project in Xining with Professor Huilan Shi of Qinghai University and scholars from the Chinese
Academy of Sciences Insitutue for Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research and the
Northwest Institute for Plateau Biology. Additionally, researchers from the Qinghai Grassland
Research Center, Qinghai University for Nationalities, Qinghai Academy of Animal and
Veterinary Science, and Qinghai Normal University will be taking part in the study.
Ms. Logsdon’s visit was geared toward primary data collection from remote field sites in
Huangnan prefecture. She and her colleagues engaged local herders to learn about how they view
the changing states of their ecosystems, what observations they had about declining ecosystem
services, and how their management of the land has adapted. These data, along with modeling
outputs from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, were essential for her
paramatization of the models she is using to predict how changing management regimes could
amplify or mitgate ecosystem stresses. She will continue partnering with Qinghai researchers on
this project and her work will lay the groundwork for the next stages of the project which will
involve detailed geochemical analyses of soil cores from the region. Ms. Logsdon will be
graduating from Purdue with her PhD in December of 2014.
From left to right: 1) Group photo with Mongolian herders and researches from the local
grassland research center; 2) Professor Yang from Qinghai University for Nationalities showing
Geographic Information System data available in the study area; 3) Group picture in one of the
degraded grassland sites.
This project was sponsored Purdue’s Discovery Park USCEES, Purdue
Center for the Environment, and the Purdue Water Community.
For more information about the U.S. China Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability
please see: http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/ecopartnership/.
U.S. Department of State Ecopartnership web site: http://ecopartnerships.lbl.gov.
Urban and Community Water Planning and
Management in Qinghai, China
China’s National Plan on New Urbanization (2014-2020) includes dramatic increases in the rate of
urbanization, with considerable impacts on over 100 million citizens. This push for urbanization is
occurring throughout China but it has particular impact in relatively underdeveloped western areas,
including the Province of Qinghai in northwestern China. Qinghai is one of the largest provinces
(721,120 km2) in China, but has one of the lowest populations (5.03 million). Its lands are rich in
cultural, ecological and mineral resources, and it includes the headwaters for three of the major rivers
in Asia: the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Lancang (Mekong) River. Dramatic land-use
change, associated with rapid urbanization of its major city, Xining, and increased grazing pressures
have created challenges related to water security for both the province and for the billion people who
live downstream along these major rivers. Thoughtful land use planning and development are critical
for the future of water resources in Qinghai.
(From www.tibet3.com)
For over two decades, planners and decision makers in the USA have been using a decision support
tool called L-THIA (Long-Term Hydrologic Impact Assessment) to incorporate water resource issues
into the decision-making process for effective land use planning. L-THIA was developed at Purdue
University specifically to meet the needs of planners and decision makers in areas with urban land use
change, and is an advanced decision support tool that is now available through an online interface
(https://engineering.purdue.edu/~lthia/). Based on a well-respected hydrologic model, using only data
that are easily available to planners, and leveraging today’s GIS (Geographic Information System)
computational capability, L-THIA simulates the impact of different decisions for land use change on
water resources in terms of long-term runoff and surface water quality. Because of its easy
accessibility, L-THIA has been widely adopted by many regional and local communities in the USA as
an important tool to balance economic growth with environmental sustainability. With L-THIA,
communities can minimize the impacts of land use change on key water resource issues. There is a
pressing need for this sort of water resources planning tool in the largest, most rapidly urbanizing
country in the world, China.
The original creators of LTHIA, Purdue Professors
Jonathan
Harbor
(Department
of
Earth,
Atmospheric, and Planetary
Sciences) and Bernard Engel
(Department of Agricultural
and Biological Engineering)
and Mr. Feng Yu (PhD
student of Professor Harbor),
are
now developing a
version
of
L-THIA
specifically focused on land
use management practices
and decisions in China (LTHIA-C). As part of an integrated water resources management collaboration between the UtahQinghai Ecopartnership and U.S.-China Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability (USCEES),
the L-THIA-C team includes a partnership with academic colleagues at Qinghai Normal University
and provincial and municipal government offices in Qinghai. The L-THIA-C team is developing a
prototype model that can be used for water resource professionals working in Xining City, the capital
of Qinghai. The L-THIA-C project is the first of a series of urban water management and pollution
monitoring tools and programs planned for a wide cooperation through the Ecopartnerships. Leading
the collaborative effort for the partners in China is Professor Xia Zhao from Qinghai Normal
University. Her program specializes in water pollution loading evaluation and water quality modeling
of the Huangshui River Basin in Qinghai Province. “A critical factor in the long-term success of this
program is frequent communication and a willingness for long-term faculty and student exchange”
according to Prof. Timothy Filley, the U.S. Director for the Ecopartnership for Environmental
Sustainability. In the past year Purdue Researchers have made two trips to Xining and Utah-Qinghai
academics have visited Purdue. In November 2014, Mr. Feng Yu will visit Qinghai to conduct data
assessments and to meet environmental professionals and local planners in Qinghai in order to identify
their needs and expectations for L-THIA-C as a decision making tool. Feng’s visit will be followed by
a one-year research visit to Purdue University by Professor Zhao to maintain the strength of the
collaboration. In 2015 the L-THIA-C team will lead a series of hands-on workshops for academics
and city managers in Xining, and will work on extending the use of L-THIA-C to address
environmental priorities in other parts of Qinghai Province, such as wetland protection in the Sanjiang
Yuan Area. The long-term vision for this project is to build a comprehensive version of L-THIA-C that
will be used throughout China to help with decision-making needs in rapidly urbanizing regions. The
team anticipates that L-THIA-C will play an important role in sustainable development for China.
This project was sponsored Purdue’s Discovery Park USCEES, Purdue
Center for the Environment, and the Purdue Water Community.
For more information about the U.S. China Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability please
see: http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/ecopartnership/.
U.S. Department of State Ecopartnership web site: http://ecopartnerships.lbl.gov.