On October 7th, Circleofblue.org published an article entitled “China’s Climate Emissions are a Global Issue, But Water Scarcity is a Greater Domestic Priority”. The article is extremely comprehensive in its reporting on China’s recent economic growth, the water-energy nexus, and issues that will be key to China’s future development and well-being. Below are some quotations from Keith Scheider’s Circleofblue.org article:

… the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a new report that looks at various scenarios of economic growth and China’s ability to diversify its energy sources, still projects that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double by the end of the decade.

The effect of China’s surging growth in coal production has even more dire consequences for the nation’s water supply.

“People outside China talk about emissions,” said Fuqiang Yang, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Solutions project in Beijing. “Inside China, water is the highest priority.

Municipal and domestic [water] use has been stable at around 12 percent [of total water usage], and industry uses 23 percent; 80 percent of that is used to operate and cool China’s 10,000 coal-burning generating units at 550 power plants.

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