China is so bad at conservation that it had to launch the most impressive water-pipeline project ever

By on • ( 1 Comment )

(March 17, 2014) Reporter Lily Kuo takes an in-depth look at China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project — the world’s largest water diversion conceived originally by Mao Zedong as a way to relieve North China’s dwindling water resources by “borrowing” from the south of the country. But not even the project’s leaders are pretending the mammoth, ultra-complex, $80-billion scheme will solve China’s water problem. Moreover, it has already created extra problems. Kuo concludes the project is another example of an engineer-dominated government’s fondness for huge-scale vanity projects with a particular weakness for mega-water works. No wonder. Without the man-made institutions — a robust regulatory regime and the rule of law — the Chinese government is bereft of tools to induce the efficient use (and conservation) of water. And so it builds canals and moves water from one watershed to another, creating havoc and perpetuating the problem of China’s crippling water crisis.

China’s desperate need for water is forcing the relocation of hundreds of thousands of people

By on • ( Leave a comment )

(March 17, 2014) Part two of Lily Kuo’s substantial overview of China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project (SNWDP) and its resettlement process. Kuo notes that since 1949, more than 45 million Chinese have been displaced by infrastructure projects and, of those, 12 million have been moved for water schemes. The water projects, she notes, have a particularly depressing record in terms of outcomes for the resettled. Although there are signs, she says, of villagers moved for the SNWDP receiving better care than those in the past, the same old resettlement problems abound. Worst of all, there are no farms to tend and jobs to do. “This isn’t a life,” says one migrant of the soul-destroying joblessness. “In the morning, you see everyone sleeps in. In the afternoon, they play cards. That’s it.”

Fighting for compliance again: Belize’s Macal River

By on • ( 2 Comments )

(February 28, 2014) Candy and George Gonzalez from the Belize Institute of Environmental Law and Policy (BELPO) — longtime champions of Belize’s Macal River and active monitors of the controversial Canadian-owned Chalillo dam and its impacts on the river — say they are again trying to press various Belize government departments to adhere to the Environmental Compliance Plan agreed to for the project. Under the plan, the Macal’s water and fish require regular testing and the results published to protect public health and safety. At present, the Gonzalez’s say public health is in danger from high mercury levels in fish caught in the Macal and high levels of E. coli in the river’s water, but the departments responsible for implementing the project’s risk management program are not doing their job.

“An independent Catalonia should not pay” for Spain’s “odious debts,” says employer association CCN

By on • ( Leave a comment )

(February 18, 2014) As Catalonia’s secession movement gains new momentum, Albert Pont, the leader of a Catalan pro-independence business lobby, recently called out part of the national debt owed by the government of Spain — estimated at 962 billion euros in 2013, its highest level in a century — as “odious debt.” In the event of separation from Spain, Pont said that while an independent Catalonia — currently a province widely known as “the factory of Spain” and as the country’s wealthiest region — would be willing to “assume part of [the Spanish] debt; obviously, a proportionate one…. there are shares of the debt that we are not responsible for.”

‘The Office’ meets NGOs

By on • ( Leave a comment )

(February 12, 2014) That’s how Hussein Kurji, the creator of Kenya’s first mockumentary, describes his new television series, ‘The Samaritans’ — a satirical look at the absurdities of the international aid sector. Comic though the premise is, a far more serious critique of NGO accountability and effectiveness lies beneath.