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Posted: 11-08-2013 10:23 Post subject:

This is a stark example of the competition for resources that ever-growing populations will have to deal with, the struggle to control much of the world's water.

China and India 'water grab' dams put ecology of Himalayas in danger
More than 400 hydroelectric schemes are planned in the mountain region, which could be a disaster for the environment
John Vidal
The Observer, Saturday 10 August 2013 13.59 BST

The future of the world's most famous mountain range could be endangered by a vast dam-building project, as a risky regional race for water resources takes place in Asia.

New academic research shows that India, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan are engaged in a huge "water grab" in the Himalayas, as they seek new sources of electricity to power their economies. Taken together, the countries have plans for more than 400 hydro dams which, if built, could together provide more than 160,000MW of electricity – three times more than the UK uses.

In addition, China has plans for around 100 dams to generate a similar amount of power from major rivers rising in Tibet. A further 60 or more dams are being planned for the Mekong river which also rises in Tibet and flows south through south-east Asia.

Most of the Himalayan rivers have been relatively untouched by dams near their sources. Now the two great Asian powers, India and China, are rushing to harness them as they cut through some of the world's deepest valleys. Many of the proposed dams would be among the tallest in the world, able to generate more than 4,000MW, as much as the Hoover dam on the Colorado river in the US.

The result, over the next 20 years, "could be that the Himalayas become the most dammed region in the world", said Ed Grumbine, visiting international scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming. "India aims to construct 292 dams … doubling current hydropower capacity and contributing 6% to projected national energy needs. If all dams are constructed as proposed, in 28 of 32 major river valleys, the Indian Himalayas would have one of the highest average dam densities in the world, with one dam for every 32km of river channel. Every neighbour of India with undeveloped hydropower sites is building or planning to build multiple dams, totalling at minimum 129 projects," said Grumbine, author of a paper in Science.

[Graphic: Observer]

China, which is building multiple dams on all the major rivers running off the Tibetan plateau, is likely to emerge as the ultimate controller of water for nearly 40% of the world's population. "The plateau is the source of the single largest collection of international rivers in the world, including the Mekong, the Brahmaputra, the Yangtse and the Yellow rivers. It is the headwater of rivers on which nearly half the world depends. The net effect of the dam building could be disastrous. We just don't know the consequences," said Tashi Tseri, a water resource researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

"China is engaged in the greatest water grab in history. Not only is it damming the rivers on the plateau, it is financing and building mega-dams in Pakistan, Laos, Burma and elsewhere and making agreements to take the power," said Indian geopolitical analyst Brahma Chellaney. "China-India disputes have shifted from land to water. Water is the new divide and is going centre stage in politics. Only China has the capacity to build these mega-dams and the power to crush resistance. This is effectively war without a shot being fired."

etc...

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/aug/10/china-india-water-grab-dams-himalayas-danger

Posted: 18-08-2013 19:09 Post subject:

But this means an area short on lakes will now be able to take up dingy sailing and fishing...

Posted: 18-08-2013 19:39 Post subject:

Posted: 18-08-2013 19:49 Post subject:

Ok, they will have to use Mirrors; Red sails and so less chance of showing up the dirt.

Posted: 18-08-2013 19:50 Post subject:

Posted: 25-08-2013 08:16 Post subject:

Green-belt housing doubles in a year
The number of houses planned for England’s green belt has doubled in a year, a report discloses.
By Robert Watts
9:00PM BST 24 Aug 2013

Plans now exist for more than 150,000 homes to be built on protected land, an analysis of council documents has found.
The sites include some of England’s most scenic areas, including parts of Dorset and the rural outskirts of York.
In addition, more than 1,000 acres will be lost to office blocks, warehouses and the HS2 rail link, according to the research carried out by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).

The increase comes after planning reforms diluted the protection given to the green belt and introduced a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”.
The CPRE analysis shows that there are now dozens of areas of protected land where councils have given the go-ahead to development, including:

• More than 46,000 dwellings and 607 acres of warehouses proposed across Yorkshire, with Leeds, York and Calderdale to lose the most of their surrounding countryside;

• Up to 30,000 homes to be built as part of a development around Birmingham’s airport;

• Nearly 10,000 homes at sites across the South West, including plots close to Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham and Gloucester;

• Plans for 1,250 homes in Epping Forest and 1,400 on the edge of Oxted, Surrey.

Widespread building on unspoilt land comes despite repeated promises by Coalition ministers that they would safeguard the green belt.
Approximately 12.4 per cent of England is designated as green-belt land, a status introduced in the Fifties to protect the countryside around major towns and cities, prevent urban sprawl and encourage the re-use of derelict urban land.
But in total, the CPRE found that 150,464 houses are planned for green-belt sites, compared with just over 81,000 when the same exercise was conducted in August last year.

The CPRE’s report says that “swathes” of green-belt land in the Midlands and the North will be lost to HS2, including large sites near Manchester and Birmingham, to accommodate stations.
The proposed high-speed rail line between London and the North will also cut into green-belt land near Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire and Ruislip in north-west London.

Campaigners have suggested that Conservative ministers are at war over the building programme, with George Osborne, the Chancellor, at loggerheads with Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary.
The extent of green space at risk of development is also causing growing alarm on the Tory back benches.

Shaun Spiers, the chief executive of the CPRE, said ministers are “deeply divided” over how much protection the green belt should have from development.
He said that Mr Pickles is fighting to preserve the countryside but Mr Osborne, regards the green belt as an “irritating impediment” to economic growth.

Nick Boles, the planning minister, has indicated that the large increase in Britain’s population has made modest building on these areas unavoidable.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenpolitics/planning/10264644/Green-belt-housing-doubles-in-a-year.html

Posted: 25-09-2013 09:04 Post subject:

Thin end of the wedge?

China 'to rent five per cent of Ukraine'
Ukraine has agreed a deal with a Chinese firm to lease five per cent of its land to feed China's burgeoning and increasingly demanding population, it has been reported.
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
7:18PM BST 24 Sep 2013

It would be the biggest so called "land grab" agreement, where one country leases or sells land to another, in a trend that has been compared to the 19th century "scramble for Africa", but which is now spreading to the vast and fertile plains of eastern Europe.

Under the 50-year plan, China would eventually control three million hectares, an area equivalent to Belgium or Massachusetts, which represents nine per cent of Ukraine's arable land. Initially 100,000 hectares would be leased.

The farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region would be cultivated principally for growing crops and raising pigs. The produce will be sold at preferential prices to Chinese state-owned conglomerates, said the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC), a quasi-military organisation also known as Bingtuan.

XPCC said on Tuesday that it had signed the £1.7 billion agreement in June with KSG Agro, Ukraine's leading agricultural company. KSG Agro however denied reports that it had sold land to the Chinese, saying it had only reached agreement for the Chinese to modernise 3,000 hectares and "may in the future gradually expand to cover more areas".

Any sort of "land-grab" deal can be highly sensitive politically. Madagascar was forced to scrap a plan to lease 1.2 million hectares to South Korea in 2009 after angry protests against "neo-colonialism". The Philippines has also blocked a China investment deal.

"This reminds us of a colonial process even when there is no colonial link between the two countries involved," said Christina Plank, co-author of a report by the Transnational Institute on "land-grabbing".

With its current population of 1.36 billion predicted by the UN to rise to 1.4 billion by 2050, China is among the leading renter of overseas farmland in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, though the XPCC deal would make Ukraine China's largest overseas farming centre.

China consumes about one-fifth of the world's food supplies, but is home to just nine per cent of the world's farmland, thanks in part to rapid industrialisation.
"As urbanisation speeds up, consumption has led to greater food demand and domestic grain prices have stayed above global prices," Ding Li, a senior researcher in agriculture at Anbound Consulting in Beijing, told the South China Morning Post. "Therefore, China has been importing more and more grain."

Apart from China, India, South Korea, the Gulf states and western European corporations began taking tracts of land, especially in Africa, after global food prices spiked in 2008.

XPCC however is making the first such major foray into continental Europe. It has a country that has the largest land area in the continent and was known as the "bread basket as the Soviet Union" but which has progressed slowly since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
"The special thing about Ukraine is that there is so much land and so much food left, so there is not a danger of shortage. They already export a lot of grain that they cannot consume on their own," said Ms Plank.

Campaigners are however concerned about major land deals pushing smaller farmers off the land, causing unemployment and blocking long-term rural development.

The Dnipropetrovsk transaction comes with considerable side benefits for the region. The Chinese firm said it would help build a motorway in the Crimea and a bridge across the Strait of Kerch to connect the Crimea with the Taman peninsula in Russia.

Cultivation methods in the area controlled by the Chinese would be modernised.
"On the one hand you can say this is good because you have these technological innovations and more efficient production, but then you have got to ask 'is it sustainable'?" said Ms Plank.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10332007/China-to-rent-five-per-cent-of-Ukraine.html

"Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC), a quasi-military organisation..." How long before 'quasi' and 'lease' get dropped, and a physical take-over becomes the reality?

There's only so much planet to go round - population growth must be curbed.

Posted: 25-09-2013 09:40 Post subject:

This looks like the right thread for this:

Posted: 25-09-2013 14:18 Post subject:

Round here its barley and leggy nags, ie, betting and beer.

Posted: 29-09-2013 08:49 Post subject:

For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert:

Is population growth out of control?
By Hannah Barnes, BBC News

The respected broadcaster and naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, told the BBC recently that population growth was "out of control" - but one expert says the number of people on the planet could peak in 40 years. Who should we believe?

"The world's population is increasing out of control," Sir David told the BBC's Today programme.
"Since I first started making programmes 60 years ago, the human population has tripled."
Two striking claims.

Let's take the second one first - that the world's population has tripled in 60 years.
In 1950, around the time Sir David began his broadcasting career, there were 2.53 billion people in the world. Sixty-three years later and the latest estimate of world population is 7.16 billion.
That is a little shy of tripling - more like a factor of 2.8 - but it's not far off.

The "out of control" claim is less easily measurable, but perhaps it could be interpreted as the idea that the population will continue to grow at the same rate, roughly tripling in 60 years.
If this happened, the world population would reach almost 40 billion people by the end of this century.

But the latest United Nations projection puts the figure at little more than a quarter of that - less than 11 billion.
That's still 50% more than we have today, but it shows the UN expects much slower population growth in the decades to come than in decades gone by.
Some might consider that an increase in the world population from seven billion to 11 billion by 2100 still represents out-of-control population growth.

But this UN figure - contained in its World Population Prospects, published every two years - is considered by one expert, at least, to be much too high.
"When I looked at them I discovered that they were almost certainly wrong," says Sanjeev Sanyal, Global Strategist for Deutsche Bank, of the latest update of the World Population Prospects, released in June this year.

Population growth projections feed into many other forecasts and models - projections of energy use, for example, or corporate profits - so people like Sanyal scrutinise these UN figures carefully.
And he finds the UN projections "difficult to justify" for a number of reasons.

"If you look at fertility rates - the number of babies that a woman has over the course of her life - in very large parts of the world, those fertility rates are now below what is needed to replace the population," he says.
"Much of Europe, Japan, large countries like China, even Brazil, don't produce [the necessary] 2.2 or 2.3 babies [per woman]. Some of them are way below that level and as a result it is almost certain that these huge countries are going to see rapidly declining populations within a few decades from now."
The replacement rate is higher than two, because some women will die before they reach the end of their child-bearing years.

Also, in developing countries the UN predicts rapidly expanding populations.
In Nigeria, for example, it expects the current figure of roughly 160 million to increase to almost one billion by the end of the century.

Sanyal is sceptical.
"Surely Nigerians will recognise at some points that things are getting crowded and stop having so many babies?" he argues.
He predicts the Nigerian population in 2100 will be 400 million fewer than the UN suggests.

His forecasts are lower for the world's two largest countries too. He predicts China's population will be 60 million fewer than the UN forecasts for 2100, and India's 100 million.

"Even the US is quite suspect," Sanyal says.
Here, the UN predicts a rise from 312 million today to 462 million in 2100.
"That would be extraordinary for a country which already has birth rates below the replacement rate… You will need huge amounts of migration into the US to reach anywhere near [that]."

It is likely that lots of people will migrate to the US. Sanyal accepts that the US population will grow.
But to increase at this rate he insists that other countries would have to be showing falls in population - falls that do not appear in the UN figures.

Overall, Sanyal paints a very different picture from the UN, with world population peaking around 2050 at 8.7 billion and declining to about 8 billion by the end of the century. That's about a billion higher than it is now, but well short of the UN's 11 billion.

Both Sanyal and the UN start with the same data - national censuses from 2010. The difference arises because they make different assumptions about fertility, mortality and migration.
"I took into account two or three things which I think are inadequately reflected in the UN [report]," Sanyal explains.
"I have probably accounted more aggressively for things like gender bias in countries like China and India. The fact that they are countries with far fewer women of childbearing age than their overall population would suggest."

The UN predictions also assume, according to Sanyal, that all fertility rates will eventually converge towards the replacement rate - an "odd assumption" in his view.
"We have not seen any country where fertility rates have declined very dramatically [only] to have seen them drift back up to the replacement rate," he says.

And the UN has underestimated the impact of urbanisation on reducing fertility rates, he argues. Up to now, as he puts it, urbanisation has been "a very powerful contraceptive" in all countries.

For their part, the UN experts say that Sanyal must have been assuming very sharp declines in fertility rates, which they do not share, and very small changes to the global fertility rate can have a huge impact decades down the line.
The UN's own predictions highlight this.
[Graph]
The blue line is the medium variant, red is high and green low
The 10.9 billion figure in 2100 is what is known as the "medium-variant" - it represents what the UN sees as the middle road.

But if you assume a fertility rate of half a child below that, the world's population would have fallen to 6.8 billion by the end of the century. Go up by half a child in the UN's model and it hits 16.6. billion.

What's more, small changes in fertility rates have a more pronounced effect over time. Sanyal's forecast and the UN's differ by 800 million at 2050. Yet, this increases to 2.8 billion by 2100.

There is plenty of room for disagreement. Let's hope the disagreements don't get "out of control".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24303537

Discussion of figures and the effects of small changes is mathematically very interesting, but the fact is the world population continues to grow. The more we highlight the problem, the more chance of this growth being halted, or even reversed, before Nature kicks in with its more drastic methods of population control.

Posted: 30-09-2013 22:07 Post subject:

Since 2013 the majority of countries in the world have had sub-replacement fertility. If this goes on we will start having a population crisis all right, but it will be a crisis of too few people rather than too many.

I don't think it will go on, by the way - fertility is almost certain to continue to reduce over this century, but life expectancy will increase over time until the death date is astonishingly low. If this happens we will have a population mostly made of older people.