The coastal area at Bohai Sea near Beijing is one of China’s most important economical development zones with 26% of the national GDP in China, including the coastal cities Tangshan, Cangzhou and Qinhuangdao. Here heavy industry, deep harbours are mixed with aquaculture and tourism. There is a total imbalance between economical development and water security. Extreme low per capita water resources (around 150 m3,compared with Israel’s 359 m3) together with increased frequency of extreme weather events typhoons, floods and droughts set the scene for this Forum of 100 participants from key sectors.
Enlightening lectures described the severe situation, but also gave solutions forward, where water saving and recycling of wastewater ranked as most important. New water sources are the transferred water from Yangtze (South to North Water Transfer) and desalination with combined energy use in coastal electric, coal-fired power plants. The discussion gave very good feed-back to decision makers to take action and in particular to adapt to the climate change effects of raising sea-level and typhoons. Water saving campaigns involve civil society in many ways.
The discussion resulted in one direct outcome : Tangshan Municipal Women’s Federation committed themselves to promote water savings at household level in their work plan.
In spite of all this, improvements of GWP China events could be made, i.e. to bring in more experts also from other sectors, in particular from the environment, finance, and social sectors, to share their aspects and knowledge on the problem and the way forward towards sustainable development, not only from the floor but in key note presentations.