Tag: Lake Poyang

Half empty: China’s vanishing “kidneys”

CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, looks at the use of remote sensing to monitor the country’s vanishing “kidneys” — wetlands that provide a range of invaluable ecosystem services that have become seriously under threat from rapid urbanization and modernization.

Is the Three Gorges Dam to blame for extreme drought in the Lake Poyang area?

(May 16, 2014) Lake Poyang, the largest freshwater lake in China, has in the past decade suffered record low water levels and its worst drought in 60 years. Although uneven rainfall patterns and industry on the lake are partly behind the decline in volume, the Three Gorges Dam has emerged as a major cause of the lake’s shocking dry-up. On a recent trip to China, Mu Lan, the editor of Probe International’s Chinese Three Gorges Probe news service, explored the link between Poyang’s crisis and the country’s hydro colossus.