China announces green funding for Tibet

The Tibetan plateau is suffering from soil erosion, melting permafrost, shrinking glaciers, grassland degredation and declining biodiversity

Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 March 2009 16.24 GMT

China plans to spend 15bn yuan (£1.5bn) on environmental protection in Tibet, including measures to halt the encroachment of deserts on the roof of the world, the state media reported today .
Although the new money is presented as green spending, Tibetan exile groups fear much of it will be used to fund ecologically and culturally damaging development projects, including the damming of rivers and measures to force nomads off high-altitude pasture lands.
The Tibetan plateau, the highest region on earth, is suffering from soil erosion, melting permafrost, shrinking glaciers, grassland degredation and declining biodiversity as a result of increasing human activity and climate change.
Since 1961, temperatures have risen 0.32C every 10 years, one of the fastest rates of warming in the world, leading ice fields on the "third pole" to melt faster than anywhere else in China. The population has almost tripled in the same period as a result of an influx of migrants from China's dominant Han ethnic majority.
Under the government's new ecological protection plan, funds will be provided to preserve grasslands, woods and wetland, protect endangered animals, grow forest shelter belts to protect against gales, and expand clean energy, the China Daily reported.
The government plans to build several big hydropower dams on the Yarlung Zangbo (better known in the outside world by its downstream name, Brahmaputra), the Nujiang (Salween), the Lancang (Mekong) and the Jinsha, a major tributary of the Yangtze.
Qiangba Puncog, the chairman of Tibetan regional government, said in the China Daily: "Hydropower is clean and can greatly ease the electricity shortage in Tibet at present." It is unclear if the 15bn yuan includes the funds for dam construction.
Tibetan exile groups warn that water and other resources are being extracted at a high cost to the fragile mountain environment and its native people.
In the name of protection and climate-change adaptation, tens of thousands of nomads have been forced off the grasslands, which account for 70% of the Tibetan landscape, but many conservationists believe this ignores the real problem of over-development and mismanagement of resources.
Kate Saunders, of the International Campaign for Tibet, said: "Far from being environmentally friendly, the consequences exemplify the damaging impact of the imposition of Chinese urban and industrial models on traditional and sustainable modes of production in rural Tibetan areas."