Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [228]
If all that were not enough, under way in China are the world’s largest development projects, all expected to cause severe environmental problems. The Three Gorges Dam of the Yangtze River—the world’s largest dam, started in 1993 and projected for completion in 2009—aims to provide electricity, flood control, and improved navigation at a financial cost of $30 billion, social costs of uprooting millions of people, and environmental costs associated with soil erosion and the disruption of a major ecosystem (that of the world’s third longest river). Still more expensive is the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which began in 2002, is not scheduled for completion until around 2050, and is projected to cost $59 billion, to spread pollution, and to cause water imbalance in China’s longest river. Even that project will be exceeded by the projected development of currently underdeveloped western China, making up over half of the country’s land area and viewed by China’s leaders as the key to national development.
Let’s now pause to distinguish, as elsewhere in this book, between consequences for animals and plants by themselves, and consequences for people. Recent developments in China are clearly bad news for Chinese earthworms and yellow croakers, but how much difference does it all make for Chinese people? The consequences for them can be partitioned into economic costs, health costs, and exposure to natural disasters. Here are some estimates or examples for each of those three categories.
As examples of economic costs, let’s start with small ones and proceed to larger ones. A small cost is the mere $72 million per year being spent to curb the spread of a single weed, the alligator weed that was introduced from Brazil as pig forage and escaped to infest gardens, sweet potato fields, and citrus groves. Also a bargain is the annual loss of just $250 million arising from factory closures due to water shortages in a single city, Xian. Sandstorms inflict damage of about $540 million per year, and losses of crops and forests due to acid rain amount to about $730 million per year. More serious are the $6 billion costs of the “green wall” of trees being built to shield Beijing against sand and dust, and the $7 billion per year of losses created by pest species other than alligator weed. We enter the zone of impressive numbers when we consider the onetime cost of the 1996 floods ($27 billion, but still cheaper than the 1998 floods), the annual direct losses due to desertification ($42 billion), and the annual losses due to water and air pollution ($54 billion). The combination of the latter two items alone costs China the equivalent of 14% of its gross domestic product each year.
Three items may be selected to give an indication of health consequences. Average blood lead levels in Chinese city-dwellers are nearly double the levels considered elsewhere in the world to be dangerously high and to put at risk the mental development of children. About 300,000 deaths per year, and $54 billion of health costs (8% of the gross national product), are attributed to air pollution. Smoking deaths amount to about 730,000 per year and are rising, because China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of tobacco and is home to the most smokers (320 million of them, one-quarter of the world’s total, smoking an average of 1,800 cigarettes per year per person).
China is noted for the frequency, number, extent, and damage of its natural disasters. Some of these—especially dust storms, landslides, droughts, and floods—are closely related to human environmental impacts and have become more frequent as those impacts have increased. For instance, dust storms have increased in frequency and severity as more land has been laid bare by deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and partly human-caused droughts. From A.D. 300 to 1950 dust storms used