Hello, welcome to Roundtable, where we serve up piping hot debates on the issues that sizzled in China and beyond.
I'm Yeo Han -lin. Think about it.
If your household doubled in size, but your water bill stayed just the same, you'd either be a budgeting genius or some scientific breakthrough had your back.
Well, China has pulled off something just as incredible.
Zero growth in water consumption despite massive economic expansion.
What's the trick? Water saving wizardry?
Serious policy changes?
Or just really short showers for everybody?
Well, join me. Let's find out.
For this episode, I'm joined by Yu Shen and Steve Hathorly.
Now grab your virtual compass and follow us to the heart of the discussion.
Water security isn't just about having enough water it's about using it wisely.
With climate change, intensifying floods and droughts, managing water resources has never been more urgent.
China's water saving strategies are making headlines but do they hold the key to solving the world's water crisis.
March 22 to the 28th marks China's Water Week.
The theme of this year's China Water Week is promoting high -quality development in the water sector for national water security.
So what has China done to save water usage?
How will China deal with water security challenges in the future?
And exactly what happened so that China can maintain the same level of water consumption yearly while achieving a great improvement in GDP.
Yes, so at a recent press meeting, Minister of Water Resources Li Guo -yin stated that China has improved its flood control efforts, reducing losses and enhancing its ability to manage increasingly severe climate -induced challenges.
The minister noted that China successfully weathered the severe floods of 2024, which impacted 1 ,300 reverse nationwide, and in that year, the minister issued more than 4 ,000 early flood warnings and activated almost 7 ,000 large and medium -sized reservoirs for flood control operation.
The operation facilitated the storage of more than 147 billion cubic meters of floodwater, preventing the inundation of more than 2 ,300 urban areas and over one million hectares of farmland.
Also, it safeguarded almost 11 million times of relocation of people due to the dangers posed by flooding.
There was a report to you from China News Service and it was pointed out that in the last 10 years or so, while the GDP the Gross Domestic Product has nearly doubled, the total amount of water used in the country has achieved zero growth.
This is what you were referencing in the opening.
I love that example by the way.
Your household doubles, but your water doesn't increase in usage.
excessive water intake, it's going to happen from time to time, as is a waste of water.
In recent years, due to factors like things like global warming and extreme weather patterns and climate events, they've become more frequent.
They've also become more intense.
And that's led to more water and drought disasters.
And it's also intensified the contradiction between water supply and water demand.
And this poses a lot of challenges to water security around the world.
In recent years as the threat of climate change has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, China has experienced a surge in extreme rainfall events and flooding disasters.
So when it comes to water, there are multifaceted areas.
We think about, we consume water in different ways.
Of course, for human beings, we drink water, so we need fresh and clean water.
And when I was a little girl, I hear people, teachers and people, social security workers, people say that 71 % of the Earth is covered by water, but freshwater resources account for only 2 .5 % of which less than 0 .3 % are available for you.
So we really, really need to save water.
And that is why when you're done washing your face, washing your feet, you should save the water and use it to flush the toilet.
And guess what? Nowadays, here in Chinese neighborhoods and Chinese residential communities, We pay for two types of water bills one type is for the fresh water that you use to clean yourself You use to drink or cook and there is another type.
They use the less clean water to flush the toilet already so there's that type of water ready so the government is basically doing what They did what they used to ask you to do as a way to save water So these little things are happening gradually little by little in different places in different ways to save water And I think I've heard the idea of how much water there is on the Earth and what should we do frequently.
When I was a kid, it was a kind activity that happened in not specific dates.
But now since we have water week, water days, apparently many activities or many kinds of promotion and knowledge sharing happen during these parts of the year.
Exactly. basically from the website of the Ministry of Water Resources, March 22nd, 2025 is the 33rd World Water Day.
Well, March 22nd to 28th marks the 38th China Water Week.
So yeah. They were earlier, it was seven days earlier.
This is basically the same theme but with different kind of theme of water day and water week.
So the United Nations sets the theme of 2025 World Water Day as Glacier preservation and the theme of China Water Week is promoting high -quality development in the water sector for national water security as Ane -Ho -Ling just said before.
So about this China Water Week, you know, after China published its water law in 1988 which took effect on October the first in the Ministry of Water Resources designated July 1st to 7th as China Water Week.
However, considering that objectives of World Water Day and China Water Week are basically the same, China Water Week was changed to March 22nd to 28th every year, starting from 1994.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, World Water Day is a big deal.
They've been doing it since the early 1990s, I believe, and to mark the day local environmental advocates, they call on community leaders, they call on the public to do more to protect fresh water resources.
I was just looking up just before the show to see, you know, headlines from different parts of the world and I found headlines from Hawaii, Iraq, the Amazon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, all talking about water and what they can do to better preserve it in their part of the world.
I also found an interesting story.
This is from time .com.
The story was written by Matt Damon. You know Matt Damon?
So Matt Damon, the actor, in 2006 he founded H20 Africa Foundation to raise awareness about safe water initiatives on the on the continent, and he was quoted as saying, You can't solve poverty without solving water and sanitation issues.
And I think that's one of the things about water when we talk about the global water crisis, we often focus on water scarcity, but in many regions of the world, even where water is available, access can be unreliable and unaffordable.
And Matt Damon wrote about in the story as well, how this affects women and young girls because they spend countless, countless, countless hours every single year spending time to go gather water in certain parts of the world.
and this takes away from their opportunities to enhance their education, for example.
So there's so many, this is a big snowball effect, right?
And there's things that we don't even think about, that we should be thinking about when we think about water.
Definitely. And here in China, there are different activities held around the country.
For example, in Jiangsu Province in the city of Huan, water quality inspectors would lead children to parks near urban drinking water resources and sources and demonstrating water, their sampling and testing process to educate the public on the impact of water quality on house and the importance of water conservation and source protection for sure.
And in Chongzhou, another city in Jiangsu province, they let students to visit the Water Saving Corridor to conduct experiments on water recycles and utilization.
And they teach little kids how to build their own rain water purifiers to explore the ministry tree of water reuse.
They can use that water too.
I don't know, flush the toilet.
Maybe not a good idea to drink them.
And also in Fujian province, in Fujiu City, they also launched a series of World Water Day, China Water Week activities.
They would invite kids to observe and to visit the water treatment plants where they toured purification facilities, participated in experiments and engaged in interactive games, to learn about water purification process.
When I was in college, since my major has something to do with the environment, I had also had the experience.
A little bit more scientific than, you know, pupils going to these plantations, but I did went to a water purification site.
It was not that pleasant, to be honest, because at that time, around 10, 12 years ago, I think still - there still are some open water area at the very first stage when it comes to the clarifying and the purifying of the water.
But I have consulted some of my classmates and friends back in college.
They say that these kind of factories are also getting more and more high tech as an effort to not only have better efficiency in purifying water, saving more energy in doing so and making sure the quality of the water so just it's it's a system it's a whole package so what are some efforts that China has made to for water conservation for water saving and all that is related to water.
Yeah, so in the area of you know water conservancy, a China Daily article saying that Li Guoying, the Minister of Water Resources, highlighted that the ministry implemented a series of measures to strengthen flood control infrastructure and also monitoring facilities.
According to an earlier China Daily report in 2025, a record 1 .3 trillion yuan, that's about US $185 billion worth of investment was made for building water resources management facilities across the country in 2024, marking that the third straight year of investment exceeding one trillion yuan being made for the purpose also Chen Ming, Vice Minister of Water Resources said 47 ,000 projects were implemented through the year.
Yeah lots of projects put into implementation lots of construction as well the country built 94 ,000 almost 95 ,000 reservoirs with a combined flood control capacity of almost 190 billion cubic meters and to enhance the flood discharge capacity of water courses, 325 ,000 kilometers of river embankments have been erected nationwide.
325 ,000 kilometers, that's a lot of construction, a lot of support.
And in the case of severe flooding events, or when we see exceeding river discharge capacities in that kind of a situation, 98 national flood storage and detention areas have been built with a collective storage capacity of almost 110 billion cubic meters.
So the country has really done a great job of significantly bolstering its monitoring system for flood control.
They did this through continuous enhancements.
They use satellites, as a matter of fact, meteorological satellites, rain measuring radars, rainfall monitoring stations, hydrological stations too.
So, there's lots being done with infrastructure for when excessive water situations happen, and a lot has been done for monitoring, so that people can respond appropriately when things happen, or even be able to predict them, perhaps.
And when it comes to the construction of different reservoirs, different dams, actually, there is a concept of National Water Network Construction Plan.
This is a very interesting thing because if you think about it, yes, the country is massive.
It's really huge. It's vast. Yet, China has been described as with a lot of summer floods and winter droughts and we describe the country as water scarcity in the north and abundance in the south.
So if you think about the country as a bigger picture, if you want water resources to be used wisely to be allocated properly, properly then we need to do something about it.
We need to take care of the spatial and temporal distribution of water resources the uneven of the situation.
And that is why there is the idea of a national water network.
And the national water network is a comprehensive system that integrates water resource optimization.
And what's very interesting about it is you can think of the map of the whole country and think about the water allocation and think about how to put them, how to better utilize the resources and to optimize the construction layout of the national and key regional water networks, accelerate the implementation of major national water diversion projects, and actually deepen the feasibility study of the follow -up project of the eastern route of the south to north water diversion and advance the planning of the western route project, promote the development of key regional water networks including
the northeast Songliel Regional Network, southwest Inland River Regional Network, southwest original network, and the southeast the Pearl River Delta and Bay Do Gulf Regional network.
I'm listing those because It's harder than we think if we're only linking two little villages We want to use the water resource in village a Four village be it's easier But if you think about the entire country as a whole system, it's much harder than that It takes a lot of planning a lot of very scientific calculating and Again with a country so vast you do not know Relocating for example a tiny little stream in one village will or will not affect the situation in another far away place.
100%. And we talked about resource allocation before on the show, right, getting energy from one part of the country to another part of the country.
China is a huge, huge, huge space, geographically speaking.
So making everything even and balanced is a real challenge.
And talking about this, kind of reminds me of the Grand Canal, you know.
China has a long history of water.
Manipulating water.
And the Grand Canal historically, you know, the resources that were abundant in the south needed to be brought up to Beijing as the capital at the time.
And the Grand Canal accomplished that, and that was a manmade project, which was a really cool thing.
So this isn't a new thing in China.
No, it has been there for quite a long time.
Quite a long time, yeah.
Now with people getting more and more experienced, they also think about how to separate or how to classify a different level of clean water, because we mentioned that for us ordinary people we think about using water for food and for beverage.
We think about using water to wash our dishes and wash our clothes.
But actually when it comes to, for example, agriculture, which in fact takes 70 % of water consumption, you need water to irrigate.
and when it comes to industrial use of water, it takes some people, some industries would require really clean water much more cleaner than the water that you drink for experiment, for manufacturing certain kind of, for example, chemical or biochemical products.
How about training AI?
Training AI takes water because you need water to cool down facilities for energy, and that is another way of using it, using it as cooling water.
That is millions and millions of liters of fresh water training a model like chat GPT or whatever.
And now we're getting more and more AI models, so what does that mean?
We need more and more water to cool those systems down.
Or we need to find better ways to, let's say, use the water wisely.
Or save the water. Yeah, you talked about it before, didn't you?
71 % of the Earth is covered by water, but freshwater resources account for only two and a half percent and that's less than 0 .3 percent that are available For use and there are almost 3 billion people about 2 .7 billion people around the world that face serious water short shortage I'm reminded of a poem from the 1800s.
You ever heard of this?
The Rime of the ancient mariner?
It's by samuel coleridge.
It's about a guy who's out at sea and he's dying of thirst or something like that and he's on a boat And the famous line is water, water everywhere, nor not a drop to drink, meaning he's staring at an ocean filled with water dying of thirst. That's kind of our situation now.
We have 71 % of the earth covered in water, but yet we still don't have enough of it for the things that we need to do and also to take care of the people on this planet.
Also, they're using a lot of digital and high technologies to try to save the water, the forecast, warning, rehearsal and contingency planned functions of the digital Zwing Xiaolangdi platform can achieve comprehensive control of multiple objectives such as safety monitoring and reservoir scheduling, the Da Tong Xia Reservoir can realize complete data collection and share water information And also, by speaking of, you know, saving water, this topic or this theme of China Water Week is one product of telling people and raising people's awareness of protecting water and saving water.
As Nyoling said, there are a lot of activities calling our people to take measures, take actions, no matter it's, like, little details of your daily life or for these huge enterprises to save water.
these are all things that we are reminding people to save water.
And I remember back in my primary school, we have that kind of little project that will give you several packs of materials.
There are sands, beans, little rocks, and you can put them together, and you can filter ring water to a cup of, maybe, they say it's gonna be clean and drinkable water, but I was not there to drink it.
Anyway - Let somebody else do it first. At least, they're telling you ways to actually use the water resource in this world and trying to remind the importance of protecting and saving the water.
Robots are helping us too, by the way.
This was a report from China Daily Zhejiang Provincial Water Resources.
The department there announced that the province has introduced AI -powered Water Conservancy robots to enhance flood prevention, emergency response, and water management.
The robots... Their names Smart Jiaoyu, I think, and Smart Jiaochuan, if I'm saying that correctly.
And they incorporate advanced AI functions like human -machine interaction, intelligent computing, the normal things that AI can do.
And officials said that the initiative reflects the region's efforts to integrate AI with digital water -conservancy platforms. Yes, actually.
Great idea. It's happening in a lot of different places here in China.
I see one specific AI powered system allowing AI intelligent algorithm platform to detect abnormal floating objects on the water surface such as garbage, plastic waste.
And also the smart analysis system can identify water pollution indicators including significant color changes and harmful blooms of Algol.
and there is also AI video analysis system integrated in the entire system allowing the system to monitor water levels against designed alert thresholds identifying instances where water levels exceed the warning lines so that people can better, not only better, but more energy savingly take care of the water in their area.
You shouldn't previously mentioned that purifying water to the level that you can drink it.
Actually when people are actually doing it, when companies are doing it in different places, the kind of element, drinkable or non -drinkable edible element in the water are actually different, meaning that using one type fits all kind of water purifying solution is okay in a stage where we needed to be popularized around the country really fast when we need everybody to do it instantly it's okay but now we're in a stage where different companies are basically customizing their systems and reinventing and we're adjusting or improving their facilities in different places according to local water
situations and I find it quite smart and besides that I find a very interesting little, I'm not gonna call it a little invention to belittle their progress, but actually, this is a new generation of high -efficiency water pumps.
And by incorporating a lot of very interesting cool techniques such as optimized models, pressure balancing devices, nano -coating technology, and system pipeline optimization, This kind of new pump compared to traditional ones, these high efficiency energy saving pumps have increased efficiency by 10 to 30%.
That is very much a huge save in energy.
So, yeah, these are some quite interesting achievements that you see these years.
Yeah, and don't forget, there's things that we can do as well.
They say if you're a bath person maybe switching to a shower is an easy way to save some water although convincing people to give up a nice hot bath might be a hard thing to do.
Don't leave your tap water running right.
You can save as much as six liters of water a minute a minute so you are making a difference.
You know a lot of people might think oh what's the difference if I turn off the water if I'm brushing my teeth?
Well there you go there's the statistic it does make a difference.
There's lots of little tiny things that we can do so collectively if we all do those things we can all make a difference.
Yeah, so now we live in the cities, we see a lot of open areas with pond with little designed waterfalls with the kind of view that you would like to enjoy.
Well, actually, they are not only to make your city walk a bit more pleasant, they are also a way to make the entire ecosystem in the city a little bit better.
And these kind of waterfall would integrate much oxygen in the water and enhance, it will also make sure that the underground water quality of your city gets better.
So yeah, a lot of different parks.
And next time, when you walk around a spring, a very beautiful one in the nearby park in your neighborhood, just also remember do not litter that beautiful scene.
The world's water crisis won't be solved overnight, but our country's recent achievements prove that smart planning, investment and technology can make a difference.
The challenge now? Scaling these solutions globally because water security isn't just a national issue it's a human one.
