A Tale of Two Water Supplies in China: Finding Practical Solutions to Urban and Rural Water Supply Problems

Abstract

Access to safe drinking water is among the 17 United Nations sustainable development goals. As the largest developing country, China has confronted large challenges to providing safe and sufficient drinking water to its population of 1.4 billion under the conditions of limited water sources and ubiquitous water contamination. This Account outlines these challenges as well as the practical solutions implemented by Chinese water professionals. We first provide a general introduction of the water supply in China. Next, we describe the main challenges of water source shortages and source water contamination. The practical solutions developed by Chinese water professionals are the core part of this Account, to which we have devoted ourselves to and contributed in some issues and cases. The water supply in China is a binary system that reflects the gap between urban and rural communities. Both urban and rural water supplies have been subject to water source shortages and contamination. Water shortages are mainly solved by longdistance water transportation projects. Urban water utilities generally pay attention to organic matter, ammonia, algae, and chemical spills in source water while also focusing on micro-organisms and disinfection byproducts in tap water. Microorganisms are a widespread concern for rural water supplies, whereas arsenic, fluoride, and ammonia are an endemic concern in some rural communities. Investment in updating of treatment processes significantly benefits urban water supplies, and advanced treatment of ozonation and biologically activated carbon processes are now commonly used to ensure that strict drinking water quality standards are met. However, this is not the case for rural water supplies, where expensive advanced treatment is not affordable. Thus, improving rural water supplies requires approaches such as searching for sources with better water quality, using automated ultrafiltration instruments, or connecting to urban water supply distribution systems. For rural areas with high concentrations of arsenic or fluoride in source water, specific adsorbents are a practical way to help farmers. Similar challenges will be encountered elsewhere in the world; therefore, the practical solutions applied in China will be useful to other countries in different stages of development.

Making Rainwater Harvesting a Key Solution for Water Management: The Universality of the Kilimanjaro Concept

“…The first two peer-reviewed communications presenting the Kilimanjaro Concept have clearly stated that people should be ready to accept long-distance water piping systems [18,19]. The premise of this section is that the expertise for long-distance water transport is mostly available in China [6,8,29,[58][59][60], and could just be adapted to the needs of the EARV regions. On the other hand, China can base its drinking water supply in fluoride-polluted areas on the KC and use the extended KC for groundwater recharge in the whole country.…”

“…On the other hand, China can base its drinking water supply in fluoride-polluted areas on the KC and use the extended KC for groundwater recharge in the whole country. Currently, Chinese rural areas with fluoride-polluted water sources rely on the use of specific engineered adsorbents for water treatment [6,8,61,62]. Such treatment methods have inherently low fluoride removal efficiency and are comparatively expensive [18,19,63].…”

“…In China, rural water supplies are supervised by the Ministry of Water Resources, while urban water supplies are supervised by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction. The National Health Committee routinely inspects the water quality both in rural and urban areas [8]. In the EARV regions and sub-Saharan-Africa (SSA) in general, although standards exist, accredited laboratories to monitor the quality of drinking water are very limited [64,65].…”

“…China has widely solved water supply shortages in rural areas near cities/towns by an integrated urban-rural water supply [8]. In this approach, urban water supply systems are expanded to rural areas by pipe networks [69,70].…”

“…Climate change, population growth, and rapid industrialization are regarded as the three main global drivers increasing stresses on safe drinking water supply worldwide [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Drinking water supply has two main challenging aspects: water quantity and water quality.…”