Water
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Water
Objective
To increase knowledge and understanding of water challenges in Asia and to facilitate action to better manage and protect our water resources.
Our Strategy
Water concerns traditionally have been a focus of governments and NGOs primarily in relation to poverty alleviation, improving sanitation and preventing disease. Our strategy has been to work where we perceive gaps. To date, our focus has been on water scarcity in China, initially with a pollution and supply chain focus. Later, we extended into educating investors and companies relative to water as material risk across the business sectors.
More specifically, our strategy is to foster efficient and responsible use of China’s water resources by engaging the global investment and business community, civil society and individuals in understanding and managing China’s water risk.
More recently, we have also turned our attention to Hong Kong’s water security, a challenge that no NGOs are currently addressing and where there is minimal government attention. In Hong Kong, our focus is to develop and support the implementation of a comprehensive strategy to raise awareness, educate and promote action to ensure the city’s water security.
China’s ground water is unfit for human touch
Over 60 per cent of groundwater in China is unfit for human touch. Polluters are not obvious – for example, the textile apparel & footwear industry in China discharges twice as much water than China’s entire coal industry.
Why we care about Water
Vast quantities of water are used globally to generate power, as a raw material, in manufacturing and in providing sanitation and food. As the world continues to develop, populations expand and the demand for resources continues to increase, our water resources have come under intense pressure. Particularly in developing Asia, this is aggravated by widespread pollution, poor resource management and climate change. Ultimately, water crises have the potential to threaten economic growth and social stability on a global scale.
A case in point is China, which is drier than you think. China alone is home to 7% of the world’s freshwater reserves and 20% of its population. The driest 11 regions in China have the water resources similar to that of the Middle East.
Managing water use is also not easy and trade-offs may have to be made – for instance, adding too much coal-fired power could mean glaciers melt faster but more hydropower on transboundary rivers could raise regional geopolitical tensions. Proper management and a comprehensive understanding of water risks are required, only then can realistic and holistic solutions be found.
In Hong Kong, we import between 60 and 80% of our water from China’s Dongjiang River, in the Pearl River Basin. The Dongjiang flows through Guangdong, itself one of the largest manufacturing hubs in the world. In 2013, Hong Kong’s annual fresh water usage was nearly three times its own water yield.
The Pearl River Basin is at times clearly water stressed, and although Hong Kong’s supply currently is guaranteed via a regional agreement, there is no promise that this will remain so looking forward as cities in the region continue to grow and develop economically. It is possible that Hong Kong could find itself subject to a more stringent cap on water or even facing decreasing total supply of water from the Dongjiang. Despite this, water is taken for granted in Hong Kong. Its water tariffs are among the lowest in the world and it is one of the highest per capita water consumers when compared to other advanced cities such as Shanghai, London, Singapore and Melbourne.
We believe we have reached a point where water risk affects us all – as businesses, as investors and ultimately as individuals. Since China hosts the headwaters of seven of Asia’s major rivers, we believe the country’s water scarcity challenges in the future will impact us all.
Our Impact
In 1999, Ma Jun had written China’s Water Crisis, the country’s call to arms, perhaps similar in significance, to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the USA. But in 2006 there was still little apparent understanding of the urgent need to protect already scarce water resources from the pollution accompanying the global transfer of manufacturing to China.
Amid accelerating pollution, Ma Jun that year started the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a nonprofit environmental research organisation to draw attention to lax adherence to environmental laws as China became the workshop to the world.
Using the country’s new disclosure laws, IPE developed China Pollution Maps for air and water, the country’s first online national pollution monitoring tool links publicly available data on local pollution infractions to specific company names and locations.
ADM Capital Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund supported the name-and-shame campaign in its early days, then later helped along IPE’s Green Choice Alliance. The goal was to curb environmental pollution in China’s manufacturing hubs by integrating transparency and stakeholder participation into existing supply chain management systems – a to challenge to brands to acknowledge their supply chains and work with factories to clean up their mess.
At a certain point, it became clear that although brands were using the pollution maps and factories were starting to take note, the finance sector was not viewing water risk as material when investing. With IPE support, we built first Asia Water Project as a pilot and then a more targeted China Water Risk to address this lack of knowledge and awareness in relevant language.
Since CWR’s launch in 2011, there has been significant recognition of water risks from water pollution to water scarcity, as well as climate related water risks such as floods and droughts. There has also been substantial action taken by the government to address these different types of water risk with a slew of regulations across various sectors.
Today, in striving for a Beautiful China with blue skies, clean water and green land, the nation has embarked on several fronts to leapfrog towards a cleaner and greener Industry 5.0. These include the global fashion and electronics industries, which have highly-polluting long supply chains in China.
Using the country’s new disclosure laws, IPE developed China Pollution Maps for air and water, the country’s first online national pollution monitoring tool links publicly available data on local pollution infractions to specific company names and locations.
CWR’s work in dirty and thirsty fashion as well as toxic rare earths, which are essential for smart and clean tech have resulted in noteworthy shifts. These include the fashion industries’ accelerated transition towards circular economy and the tabling of China’s rare earths supply as a global emerging issue for investors by the UNPRI alongside cybersecurity and antibiotics.
This fast-moving regulatory landscape has also been shifting attitudes towards water risks. We have moved from little to no awareness in the investment and financial community to now wanting to quantify the impact on valuations. The growing utility of CWR’s work to the financial sector is testament to the urgent need to address these rising water risks.
Our Latest Blogs
Hong Kong
June 5, 2018
Kelly Chan
Since the launch of SupportHK in 2013, we have received a large number of petitions related to urban planning. In fact, two thirds of 111 petitions over this period, have been planning related. Notably, over the years, numerous ...
Hong Kong
May 9, 2018
Kelly Chan
This year marks five years since SupportHK.org was launched as Hong Kong’s first and still only environmental petition platform. A lot has changed since then, including our logo! In addition, to stay up with the fast-changing ...
Hong Kong
October 9, 2017
Redress
Written by Christina Dean – Founder, Redress Redress’ war on reducing textile waste in the fashion industry victoriously and stylishly raged on this month with our fight to drive the circular economy in apparel ...
