Simple Green: China’s Development Strategy

Chairman Wang Shi of Vanke Co. Ltd is taking advice from all over the world. He has studied renewable energy technology in Norway and Japan. Last year, he was in Germany and the Netherlands.

His company is on the frontier of green building technology in China, particularly in water. At the moment, Vanke is working on rain water filtration for secondary usages, such as washing clothes, and using water circulation within a building for energy. This technology isn’t anything new; it’s being adapted to China’s needs from similar technology in other areas of the world.

Wang embraced the advice of a green consultancy firm that told him: In China, if you want to realize green building, it is not necessary to use high tech. Low tech, low cost is more suitable for China’s situation.

Low tech for China means adapting and innovating upon tried and true technologies to meet the country's pressing environmental challenges. Vanke has several arms including an environment fund, over half of which is spent on translating water conservation technology for China’s needs. The goal, Wang says, is not to use a single drop of water from the water company.

But nothing is as simple as it seems, explains Julian L. Wong, a regenerative systems policy analyst:

“For China to be green, it will have to do things as never before.

"People talk about China having the opportunity to leapfrog developed countries by going big on renewables. ... It will take imagination and vision to cut through conventional wisdom, ... building cities in new ways that is different from how Western cities have developed.”

China Under Pressure

China has 8 percent of the world’s arable land, three times less than the United States, which has one-fifth the population. Fifty-eight percent of the land in China is arid or semi-arid, making it poor for growing crops, and the country has lost 12% of its “highest quality” arable land due to industrialization and urbanization.

China also has five times less water than the United States, and it’s estimated that 70 percent of all water sources in China are polluted. The Financial Times recently reported that China’s coal imports are up 500 percent, coal being the one natural resource that the relatively resource poor China has in abundance. But for the first time in 2008, its coal demand matched its production. Coal power is becoming less viable for China in the short term.

China faces creeping desertification, deforestation, severe water shortages, and an inability to power itself. The reason is that China has completed about 200 years of Western-style, resource-intensive industrialization in roughly 30 years.

Facing rapid urbanization pressures over the same period of time, Beijing’s resource intensive economic development drive finally caught up with it. The few natural resources China had are being exhausted or have led to environmental degradation that will noticeably alter its way of life by 2020.

By 2020, the National Climate Assessment Report (II-2007) finds, the average national temperature in China will have increased by 1.1-2.1 degrees Celsius.