water and arup's planning / policy startegies
If you aren't normally fascinated by China's agricultural problems, then an obscure report issued this summer on the state of the nation's water supply might have struck you as rather dry. But in this case, dry is precisely the problem: The water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of China's wheat and a third of its corn, is falling at an alarming rate.
The study, conducted by Beijing's Geological Environmental Monitoring Institute (GEMI), reported that over-pumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well-drillers to resort to the region's deep aquifer. That's bad news, because the deep aquifer cannot be replenished. Under Heibei Province in the heart of the North China Plain, the average level of the deep aquifer dropped by almost 10 feet last year. Around some cities in the province, it fell by more than twice that.
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