THE sluice gates closed this week at the Three Gorges dam in China. The dam now barricades the Yangtze, the world鈥檚 fourth longest river, beginning the creation of a reservoir 500 kilometres long that will, notoriously, flood 2 million people from their homes. What isn鈥檛 so well known is that for China, in its drive to meet its energy and water needs, the project is just a sideshow.
This year, with rather fewer headlines, China also started work on a hydrological project that will cost three times as much as the Three Gorges dam. It will tap the Yangtze and take part of its flow north along three giant canals to relieve the parched basin of China鈥檚 second great river, the Yellow river, which this year once again threatens to dry up before it reaches the sea. As our cover feature reveals (鈥淩eplumbing the planet鈥�), this is just one of a series of mega-projects now being promoted from India to Spain to central Africa, aimed at replumbing the planet at costs that make even the largest dams look puny.
We don鈥檛 need these projects. It is increasingly clear that the real water problems around the world are about managing demand rather than boosting supply. They are about the failure to adopt even the most basic water conservation measures 鈥� in factories, on farms and in cities. But politicians, dreaming perhaps of large concrete structures named after them, are not listening. At the World Water Forum in Kyoto in March, the world鈥檚 water ministers responded to a week of discussions by scientists on just these options by refusing to change a word of their declaration, which was a hymn to supply-side solutions.
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Some fear competition for scarce water will trigger future water wars. If we keep pouring the concrete, that may happen. But the cheaper, more peaceful and more rational path leads in quite another direction.