Damming The Yangtze

More conservation efforts needed to save the Yangtze’s fish population By Yin Pumin

TO BE CHANGED: Twenty- fi ve hydropower plants are planned along the Jinsha River, one of the major sources of the Yangtze River, actions that experts say will threaten the survival of local fi sh species

Liang Linkun is a veteran fi sherman living in Changzhou City in east China’s Jiangsu Province. Liang fi rst started fi shing in the Yangtze River in 1977 when he could catch more than 100 kg of saury, a type of small fi sh also referred to as “mackerel pike,” in a single net. “But today, I can only net around 1 kg of saury at most,” Liang sighed.

Statistics from fishery authorities of Jingjiang, a city adjacent to Changzhou, show that the total output of the saury there was 123 tons in 1998, 217.6 tons in 2001, but only around 10 tons in 2011.

With the steeply declining hauls, saury,which used to be a staple of the dinner table up and down the Yangtze, has become a luxury food that only the wealthiest of diners can afford. In April 2012, a fi shing team caught a saury that weighed less than 0.33 kg in the lower stretch of the Yangtze, which later sold for 59,000 yuan ($9,625).

It is not only saury that is disappearing from the menu, the stocks of almost all fi sh species in the Yangtze have plummeted sharply over the past decades.

The population of the four major species of fish native to the Yangtze has shrunk from more than 30 billion in the 1950s to less than 100 million today. The number of different breeds of fi sh has similarly been reduced, from 143 to 17, according to a report released by the Yangtze River Fishery Resources Committee under the Ministry of Agriculture and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)on August 15.

Besides the sharp decrease in the number of fish, some species, such as the finless porpoise, have already become extinct, said Zhao Yimin, Director of the committee.

Paradise lost

The Yangtze, which flows for a total length of 6,418 km eastward from its point of origin at the glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the longest river in China and the third longest in the world. Its total drainage area exceeds 1.8 million square km, accounting for 18.8 percent of China’s total area.

According to statistics, the Yangtze once supported 1,100 species of wild aquatic animals, including more than 370 fish species—of which 142 were unique to the river and an estimated 20 or so of the species calling the Yangtze home have been categorized as endangered animals, including the Chinese paddlefish and the finless porpoise. Of the 35 species of freshwater fi sh farmed in China, the natural habitat of 26 of them is the Yangtze.

The recent report from the Yangtze River Fishery Resources Committee and the WWF is based on a 12-day scientific expedition in June. It was the fi rst of its kind to study the upper reaches of the Yangtze’s wetlands, aquatic diversity and water environment, according to the WWF.

The fi ndings revealed that the river’s aquatic ecosystem is on the verge of collapse due to human activity, such as the building of hydropower stations and over- fi shing.

“The diversity of life in the Yangtze is receding, leading to the development of aquaculture in the river being unsustainable since it is supported by an increasingly fragile ecosystem,”Zhao said.

“Species like ilish and puffer fi sh are hard to fi nd, while paddle fi sh were last seen in the river in 2003,” said Cao Wenxuan, a researcher with the Institute of Hydrobiology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

According to statistics from the Yangtze River Fishery Resources Committee, the fi shing yield of the Yangtze dropped from 430,000 tons in 1954 to less than 100,000 tons in 2011.

Most fish caught in the Yangtze are only six months old and some are even less than two months old, leaving them with no chance of having any offspring, and thus no chance of replenishing the river’s fi shing stocks.

“If the rate of extinction continues to stay at the rate it is at now, freshwater fi sh are expected to disappear completely within 40 years,” Cao warned. “Fish are a key part of the Yangtze’s ecosystem. Without any fi sh, the Yangtze is just a pool of dead water.”

Killing them softly

A 2006 investigative report by the Ministry of Environmental Protection disclosed that there were 20,000 chemical plants in China at the time, with nearly half of them located on the banks of the Yangtze.

Weng Lida, former Director of the Yangtze Water Resources Protection Bureau, said that the most polluted river in China today is the Yangtze. According to Weng, industrial discharges alone grew by 13 billion tons from 1990 to 2011.

The situation has worsened due to the construction of hydropower stations, which have cut off fi sh migration routes and destroyed their local habitats.

“With more hydropower projects being built along the Yangtze, the natural habitats of several species of fi sh have been gradually destroyed,leaving fewer places for them to reproduce,”Zhao said.

Cao said that a dam changes the natural tides as well as the flow of a river, and this—especially the creation of deep reservoirs—affects the local climate and reduces the river’s ability to cleanse itself due to the water becoming stagnant. Large quantities of harmful substances are produced, affecting the food chain.

According to the report by the Yangtze River Fishery Resources Committee and the WWF, there are plans to build 25 dams on the Jinsha River, one of the major sources of the Yangtze.

They will be built 100 km apart along the 2,308 km length of the Jinsha, according to the country’s energy development plan. Once completed, the plants will have a generating capacity equivalent to four times the output of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower project with a generating capacity of 22.5 million kw.

According to the report, this will make the Jinsha a series of reservoirs and disrupt the fl ow of sediment through the Yangtze.

“It will cut the river into sections, completely changing the river’s ecosystem, and it will have a devastating effect on the species living there and the water quality,” Zhao said.

According to environmental laws, a power plant has to pass an environmental impact assessment before construction starts. However,the majority of projects go ahead without any assessment, Zhao said.

The environmental impact assessment for the Shuangjiangkou hydropower project, for instance, was fi led two years after construction started in 2011.

Time to recuperate

Chen Jiakuan, a professor at the Shanghai-based Fudan University and a participant in the June expedition on the Yangtze, said that 450 million tons of sand flowed downstream through the river in the 1950s, compared to only 150 million tons today.

“The sand is creating excessive amounts of silt in the reservoirs, leading to a severe degradation in water quality which in turn changes the environment and has an effect on the fi sh in the river,” Chen said.

However, the planned power plants along the Yangtze play a sign ifi cant part in China’s efforts to tap into the river’s potential hydropower.“We don’t have too many options. Perhaps the only thing we can do is to suggest a 10-year fi shing ban,” Chen said.

Cao first proposed the idea of a total ban on fi shing lasting 10 years in 2006. He stressed that a whole decade is necessary to ensure the recovery of endangered fi sh and the Yangtze’s ecosystem.

Before that, the State Council had imposed an annual ban on fi shing starting in 2003 which lasts from April to June in 11 provinces through which the Yangtze fl ows.

Zhao complained that although fi sh populations increase during the ban period, heavy fi shing afterward negates any real recovery.

HEALING THE ECOSYSTEM: Students release fi sh into the Yangtze River in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, on June 6, 2010, as part of efforts to increase fi sh stocks in the river

Xie Songguang, an expert on saury with the CAS, agreed. He said that the current annual three-month ban allows fi sh to spawn, but it is far from enough to protect young fi sh. Most of the fi sh caught are in fact the baby fi sh, which have little economic value, but greatly affect the future fi sh population.

Wang Zhaomin, Director of the Hubei Provincial Fishery Bureau, also echoed the Cao and Xie’s sentiments. A 10-year ban is plausible,since the annual consumption of freshwater fish is 3.53 million tons in China, while the amount of fish caught in the Yangtze is only 100,000 tons, less than 4 percent of the total consumption. Thus, it will not greatly affect the overall supply, Wang concluded.

In response, the Ministry of Agriculture agreed that “the ecosystem in the Yangtze is disintegrating,” and said that it is developing a compensation plan for fishers working along the river.

Zhao believes that properly caring for the 140,000 fi shermen in the 11 provinces affected by the total ban is crucial to the success of the plan. He called for the establishment of an agency to help coordinate the different interest groups in order to solve the problem.

Ren Wenwei, Director of the Shanghai Conservation Program of the WWF, along with several other scientists, has also proposed drafting a Yangtze River Basin Management Act and establishing a coordinating department directly under the State Council.