Chinese engineering projects, Water works

...but was prevented by "green" activists.

(...)

The trouble is that for most of our history, we have seen hardware as the quick fix, as the simplest solution to our water problems. Laying pipe and pouring concrete is, in many ways, a lot simpler — and a lot more politically attractive — than changing human behavior with rules and incentives. But large new infrastructure projects have never been the easy answers they seem to be, and they’re even less so now. We know, from years of research and experience, that we tend to underestimate their costs and overestimate their benefits: The Danish economic geographer Bent Flyvbjerg reports that 9 out of 10 so-called megaprojects are over budget, and most are behind schedule. (China’s South-North Water Diversion project is both.) Because megaprojects take so long to build, they are also especially vulnerable to “black swan events” — rare but consequential events such as natural disasters and stock-market crashes.

And climate change isn’t just altering the size of our water supplies. It’s making them less predictable, and more subject to weather extremes. In the future, the technology we use to deliver our water will have to function in a wider range of conditions — as an engineer might say, it will need more tolerance. Large, fixed pieces of water-moving and water-storing infrastructure don’t have a lot of tolerance. To count on them for drought relief is to play an increasingly risky game of chicken with the black swan.

Technology most certainly has a place in our water future. The dams and pipelines that fueled the growth of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix are still with us, and they’re not going anywhere soon. Desalination plants, though expensive, may eventually be needed to boost supplies of fresh water in coastal cities. Stormwater capture and water recycling technologies are in use and will probably expand. But Gleick, Famiglietti, and others argue that the cheapest, fastest, and most dependable response to a water crisis is to do more with less water — with the help of technology and without. This past summer, after Gov. Brown imposed mandatory restrictions on the state’s urban water districts, residential water use dropped by more than 30% compared to 2013, exceeding the state’s 25% reduction goal.

“I think the strategy is conservation and efficiency first, because it’s cheap, because it’s easy, and there’s still so much we can do to reduce both agricultural and urban use,” says Famiglietti. “With pipelines, there’s this sort of fantasy, this hope, that we can continue our lavish water lifestyle, and I don’t think we can. We can’t.”

Country seemingly run by engineers (The West is run by lawyers and bankers).