In 2011, a group of researchers, photographers, and student interns led by Civic Exchange undertook a fifteen-day journey along the Dongjiang (also known as the East River) in Guangdong Province. Their goal was to document conditions along the river, a source of water for Hong Kong for more than fifty years. A few years prior to the Dongjiang expedition, in 2008, a group of Los Angeles kayakers and environmental advocates had made a three-day expedition along the Los Angeles River with the goal of demonstrating that the channelized and much-maligned LA River was still a river. These two unusual river journeys were each designed in their own way to visually identify some of the key water issues facing Hong Kong and Los Angeles.
The Dongjiang journey began in Huizhou, one of the six cities dependent on the river for their water. (Aside from Hong Kong, they include Heyuan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.) Nearly forty million people live in those cities, in one of the densest regions in the world. The area also includes a range of industrial facilities, sewage and waste management systems, and agricultural activity.1 Huizhou, with its nearly two million residents, is located at the upper end of the Dongjiang. Along with the smaller city of Heyuan,2 the two cities’ mix of petrochemical, electronics, paper, iron and steel, warehousing, and information technology industries and their rapidly expanding urban population (with greater sewage discharges and waste generation) provided an effective visual demonstration of the water quality and water supply problems the expedition sought to document. Both Huizhou and Heyuan are also sites for Guangdong’s policy of industrial relocation to shift industries from one area to another, partly for development purposes and partly to relocate the pollution, including from areas with more labor-intensive industries.3
As the group made its way along the Dongjiang, they witnessed the results of the combination of factory relocation, industrial development, rapid urban expansion, declining agriculture, and the gap between rich and poor. At Huizhou, the team photographed the high-rises that had sprung up along the Dongjiang as it made its way through the city. They documented the hardening of the riverbanks and the river’s increasing eutrophication and the growth of highly invasive and ecologically damaging water hyacinth along its sides. At Heyuan (whose name signifies “the origin of the river”),4 the expedition photographed the industrial wastewater that had been discharged from one of the new industrial parks. Despite the construction of new wastewater facilities, the team learned that less than 60 percent of Heyuan’s wastewater had been treated at the time of the expedition.5 They also photographed a new urban development next to a reservoir in the city and the nearby mountainsides covered with fast-growth eucalyptus, another invasive. Further downstream, the group recorded an enormous open-air quartz quarry and processing plant also next to the river. Their most poignant photograph was of a father and daughter living in a garbage pile, representative of those displaced by the dramatic changes in the Dongjiang Basin area.6
Figure 4.1 Garbage blocking water flow, Huidong County, Guangdong Province. Source: Civic Exchange.
The Los Angeles River kayak journey had its own core objective: to demonstrate that the LA River, which passed through the heart of the city, should not be considered just a desolate, dystopian urban landscape. Contained and straightened, the river, which has served as a backdrop in several Hollywood films such as Terminator 2, is now largely a bed of concrete. It was even once humorously characterized in 1985 by a Los Angeles Times reporter as a “threadbare coat of unspeakable slime.”7 After the US Army Corps of Engineers had completed cementing the river in the 1950s and had constructed the high walls along its banks (placing barbed wire along several of its sections), the river became a dry bed for most of the year. The exception was the relatively short rainy season from November through March. Then the river/flood-control channel was transfigured when larger storms took place, perhaps involving a few inches of rain, far milder than the “black rainstorms” and typhoon conditions that can descend on Hong Kong. During Los Angeles’s largest storms, water cascades down from the San Gabriel Mountains, sending a torrential flow through the concrete bed until it reaches the river’s mouth, where it empties out into the ocean at the Port of Long Beach. Since the river bed has been straightened and cemented, those occasional rain storms turn the LA River into a place of danger, sweeping everything in its path and reinforcing the river’s reputation as a forbidding landscape, enclosed and separated from the rest of the city.
That pattern began to change in the late 1980s when a new sewage treatment plant near the source of the LA River began to discharge its tertiary treated water into the river bed, causing a small twelve-month flow of water along its fifty-one-mile path. In three “soft bottom” areas of the river where concrete had never been laid due to the high groundwater table, new life resurfaced—vegetation, trees, birds, even egrets and marine life. A very modest river began to be visualized, reinforcing the growing environmental advocacy about river restoration and a push for new environmental-oriented flood management strategies.8
These changes helped spark the idea of the kayak expeditions. This would be the first attempt to test the possibility—and politically promote the idea—that the river was “navigable” in order to place it under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act, with its various river protection mandates.9 As described in his daily blog by LA River advocate and kayaker Joe Linton, the group took off about five miles downstream from the river’s source, in eight bright-yellow kayaks and a couple of bright-green canoes. The launch area was one of the three places with earthen bottoms and tall trees, and became one of the more pleasurable parts of the trip, enabling the kayakers to see night herons, great blue herons, and mallards. But not all was so simple after that. During the next stretch of river, the kayakers had to walk their boats through the rocks and debris and other barriers, but they ultimately completed their journey—and made their point. “This is a River!” they proclaimed. Through that assertion they hoped to change the way Los Angeles residents could view this still bleak landscape and begin to reconstruct the way they thought about water in and for the city.10
Figure 4.2 Los Angeles River kayak expedition. Source: Joe Linton.
The two expeditions, as different as they were in what they encountered, shared the idea that water was precious—central to the landscapes they intersected and the places they served. Whether polluted, reconfigured, dried up, hemmed in, contested, or free flowing, the waters still had a “life of their own,” as the Ute Indians in the southwestern United States said of all water sources, with the reverence they felt they deserved.
Water Supply
Los Angeles
Water has long played a defining role in the growth and development of the Los Angeles region, whether its water could be sourced locally or tapped from more distant locations. Local sources have included the Los Angeles River and San Gabriel River watersheds and related groundwater basins throughout the region. The push for a more distant or imported water supply was linked to the push for regional expansion, led by those promoting an extension of the city’s (and later the region’s) boundaries.
Figure 4.3 Los Angeles region watersheds. Source: Council for Watershed Health.
It was the development of those distant water sources that fundamentally reoriented Los Angeles’s water supply and influenced its development patterns. Development began with the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913, which brought water to the city from the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains (via the Owens River watershed), 230 miles northeast of the city’s limits. As a result of this new imported water supply, the City of Los Angeles was able to expand four times between 1913 and 1928 by making the water available to adjacent areas contingent on their annexation to the city. The Owens Valley water also provided the basis for a frenzy of real estate speculation and new developments in Los Angeles far from the city’s core.11
The next major imported water project involved the development of Hoover Dam in Nevada and the construction of the Colorado River Aqueduct, which diverted Colorado River water into California. After this imported water supply became available in 1941, it triggered new urban growth and territorial expansion. A pattern had been set: each new imported water source enabled new urban development, which in turn created pressure for yet additional imported water. With the Colorado River water came the extension of new urban growth well beyond the city’s boundaries. The allocation of this supply was undertaken by a regional water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD, or Metropolitan), which had been formed as a special district in 1928 in the wake of the Colorado River plans. Metropolitan subsequently divvied up this new imported supply to city and county water districts throughout the region (including but no longer limited to the City of Los Angeles) once they annexed to Metropolitan. Metropolitan’s service area then stretched beyond Los Angeles as far as Orange and San Diego counties more than a hundred miles to the south and areas to the east (Riverside and San Bernardino counties) and west (Ventura County).12
Figure 4.4 Metropolitan Water District of Southern California service area. Source: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The third major imported water system involved the development of a conveyance system from tributaries of the Sacramento River in Northern California through the Sacramento Bay Delta to the central and southern parts of California. The completion of the Southern California end of this California Aqueduct in the late 1960s reinforced the notion of continuing future urban-edge expansion, accomplished in part through conversion of agricultural and undeveloped lands into urban development. Each of these annexations—first to the City of LA and then on an expanded regional basis to Metropolitan’s system—disregarded any land use planning logic other than the ability to expand the outer edge of development. By the 1960s, Metropolitan had become a de facto regional land use planner, contributing to the horizontal pattern of growth and development in Southern California that became the prototype of post-World War II suburban expansion in the United States.13
From the late 1960s through the 1980s, the development interests and the water agencies assumed that this pattern of growth could continue by identifying yet more distant water supply projects. Some of the schemes were truly extravagant in scope—for example, a proposed transnational, interbasin water transfer program from water sources in British Columbia, Canada. This proposed project, known as the North American Water and Power Alliance, would have included a 400-mile-wide storage basin across the border in Montana before delivering water thousands of miles to Los Angeles as well as to southwestern states such as Arizona, and even to the Great Lakes area in the midwestern United States. There were even more fanciful water transfer ideas, such as creating an undersea aqueduct to transport Alaskan waters to the Port of Los Angeles that could then be sent to various locations in the Southwestern United States.14
But by the 1970s and 1980s, the era of the Big (imported) Water Project and a continuing cycle of urban expansion had reached its limits, partly due to prohibitive costs and partly due to recognition of the problems associated with horizontal/suburban expansion. In California, the culmination came with a 1982 referendum on construction of new water facilities (a Peripheral Canal, among others) that could better expedite the transfer of Northern California water through or around the Sacramento Bay Delta to the industrial agricultural lands on the west side of the Central Valley and then over the Tehachapi Mountains to urban Southern California. The defeat of the Peripheral Canal proposal (due to huge margins in Northern California, but a surprising number of opposition votes in Southern California) signaled that the old strategies of imported water expansion had conceivably reached its end point.15
Over the course of the 1980s, a subtle yet critical shift took place in the debate about future water policy, a change that became more noticeable in subsequent decades. During the 1982 Peripheral Canal campaign, dire predictions by advocates of imported water expansion (“people will have to drink water from the toilet bowl to meet mandatory cutbacks [if these facilities are not built],” one MWD board member argued)16 brought a note of desperation to the debates about the future of water in Southern California. Yet, after the defeat of the Peripheral Canal and the failure two years later to get the California legislature to adopt yet another plan to transfer Northern California water south, the mood of crisis began to give way to recognition that the link between imported water and future urban-edge expansion had frayed. A series of dry years between 1987 and 1992 and consequent reduced demand due to restrictions on water use created a new kind of crisis—the need to raise water rates on an emergency basis, since lower sales of water to Southern California customers meant there was insufficient income to pay for the fixed costs of a system now dependent on imported water and its facilities.17
By the 1990s and into the new century, a combination of growing environmental advocacy coincided with an increased focus by the water agencies on water planning and water management strategies.18 This new emphasis had multiple layers. Within the City of Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power (or LA DWP, the public body that manages both the water and electricity systems for the city) finally resolved long-standing disputes with communities in the Owens Valley and Mono Lake watersheds where the DWP had been drawing water (and electricity from hydroelectric generation) since 1913. New water pricing strategies based on levels of use, indoor water and landscaping conservation measures, and even exploration of whether and how to once again use the LA River for storage and replenishment purposes began to modestly shift the city toward more of an efficiency-oriented, conservation, and demand management camp. The city’s approach, however, was not without its critics, who felt it remained far too reliant on imported water and unwilling to fully address alternative supply and demand strategies.19
Beyond the City of Los Angeles, changes were uneven at the regional level at Metropolitan and among some of the cities and water districts in the urban-edge areas of the region. On the one hand, there was interest in developing new conveyance facilities for imported water. For example, San Diego’s concern about limited local supplies—and its reliance on the Metropolitan system—translated into a desire to establish a pipeline from the Imperial Valley to pay for and access Colorado River water otherwise allocated to the agricultural water users in Imperial. Such a project could reduce the same supply source for other member agencies of Metropolitan, which led to sharp interagency conflicts. There was also interest in building large capital- and energy-intensive desalination plants to convert ocean water for use in Southern California; these proposals resurfaced periodically, particularly during drought periods. Some strategies oriented toward water management, efficiency, and conservation also began to be developed. These included incentives for less-water-intensive landscaping; the integration (or conjunctive use) of local, groundwater storage and imported water storage; and water reuse or recycling for places like golf courses.20
This shift at the regional level toward more of a water-planning and efficient use of resources approach became the focus of Metropolitan’s “Integrated Resources Plan” (IRP). The IRP was first introduced in 1994, with a post-drought recognition that traditional supply strategies needed to be balanced with an efficiency and water management approach. With political support for the traditional supply strategies waning and climate change adding uncertainty to future supply sources, the new buzzword in the IRP and among water agencies became reliability. In an October 2010 and subsequent 2011 update of the IRP, this shift was made explicit. Metropolitan’s IRP manager warned directly, in 2011, that reliability had become the central concern of the agency. “If no action to improve local and imported water resources occurs,” he argued, “the region could experience significant water supply shortages once every other year (or 50 percent of the time). Of course this level of reliability would be unacceptable.”21
Despite these efforts to address reliability, the water supply situation for Los Angeles and Southern California has remained challenging. It has become dependent not only on external factors (e.g., climate change) and problematic long-distance sources, whether from Northern California, the Colorado River, or the Owens River and Mono Lake watersheds, but also on whether and how changes in attitudes and practices regarding the use of water could be accomplished. Los Angeles could utilize local sources, especially its groundwater, but that supply has also been subject to challenges, not the least of which have to do with the quality of the water. Partly due to those water-quality-related problems, the city has been forced to shut down a number of groundwater wells and still receives as much as 89 percent of its water from imported sources. At the regional level, about 50 percent of the entire region’s water supply is derived from local sources, with another 50 percent coming from imported sources, primarily from Metropolitan’s imported water sources.22
Table 4.1 Sources of Water Supply to the Metropolitan Water District Service Area, 1976–2015
Source: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Figures are in acre‐feet.
The most recent drought, which began during the 2011–2012 water year (July 1–June 30) and reached crisis proportions by 2015, brought to the fore the unreliability and insecurity of the region’s water supply and the need for a far more expansive water management focus. A mood of crisis—and a desire to act—culminated in 2015 when California Governor Jerry Brown announced 25 percent mandatory reductions in water use (and as much as 35 percent or more for some water agencies). These were the first mandatory restrictions ever put in place in California. With the heightened attention and the threat of major economic penalties if reductions failed to meet targets, Californians began to adopt major changes in how they used water, such as elimination of turf-based lawns and landscaping and, through regulations, installation of appliances and toilets with even greater water efficiency.23
The critique of the long-standing prevalence of what has been called the “super-green lawn” presents an interesting example of the efforts to mandate water use restrictions. For more than a half century, the highly manicured, continually irrigated, grassy lawn had been seen as an “American obsession,” the quintessential American phenomenon. Associated with a suburban lifestyle and a manufactured form of nature in the city, its promoters happily characterized the lawn as a homeowner’s “own little piece of the earth.”24
In Los Angeles, the lawn had been prized as essential landscape, regarded as important for property values and for the look of the home. For many suburban developers and residents, it became central to the character and identity of the suburban home. In 1934, the City of LA passed a yard ordinance requiring that all residences have yard space, as the detached dwelling surrounded by landscaping became the region’s dominant urban form.25 This mutated into the super-green lawn look during the 1950s, reinforced by a kind of quasi-regulatory instrument to maintain that look and that uniformity. Almost from the outset of the development of the post-World War II suburbs, residents came to serve as gatekeepers, complaining about any lawns not well maintained by their neighbors and even pushing for local policies that mandated such upkeep.26
But water availability emerged as the super-green lawn’s biggest problem. As early as 1980, a group of water activists began to talk about a “landscape ethic,” focused on the 40 to 50 percent of water in Los Angeles used primarily for landscaping. Still, policy initiatives to address landscape use remained modest until the 2011–2015 drought led to a major shift in both consciousness and policymaking. Policy changes included the combination of mandated cutbacks and turf removal incentive programs that became hugely popular.27 In 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order banning homeowners’ associations from fining members for having brown lawns, a policy extended the following year by city and county regulations and fines. Social pressures shifted from residents with dry or unkempt yards to the “drought shaming” of households perceived to overwater, especially wealthy residents or celebrities who appeared to be buying their way out of conservation efforts. These policy changes and social pressures have helped transform the lawns (or at least front lawns) in many LA neighborhoods. Today, expanses of green, irrigated turf have given way to an assortment of succulents and cacti, crushed granite, bark or mulch, artificial turf, dead or dying lawns, raised bed gardens, and hardscapes like concrete, brick, or pavers.28
Turf removal can be seen as a type of low-hanging fruit in an evolving era of water use, particularly when implemented through incentives or rebates where the public response has exceeded expectations. The challenge has been how to extend what can be considered “dry year” conservation strategies, identified as one-time, drought-related changes, into “normal year” conservation based on changes that have already been undertaken or are about to be implemented. But as short-term (“dry year”) conservation practices become institutionalized (becoming “normal” conservation practices), it reduces the margin for further reductions during any future dry-year events. It is quite possible, for example, that the turf removal programs will soon come to be seen as a “normal year” conservation practice, particularly after incentive programs are eliminated, as they were in 2016 when drought conditions eased. And while some of the discourse about water use has changed, it has underlined the need to extend a landscape ethic to deeper and more lasting changes in land use practices in the region. Climate change, in that context, becomes a critical, if not determining factor, reinforcing the need for even more dramatic shifts. While imported water had fueled Los Angeles development scenarios, the problem of future reliability poses the need for an entirely refocused water management approach.
Hong Kong
While Los Angeles became dependent on imported water, Hong Kong never had the luxury of fully relying on its local water, despite a history of efforts to capture whatever local sources could be developed. The interplay between local and more distant sources for Hong Kong was not so much a question of how to accommodate future growth, but how to meet existing and even immediate needs, especially in periods of insufficient supplies amid debilitating droughts.
In contrast to Los Angeles, Hong Kong gets plenty of rain. Its rainy season occurs during its warmest months, from May to September, when it receives 80 percent of its annual rainfall. The yearly rainfall may range between 40+ inches (1,000 millimeters) to more than 140+ inches (3,500 millimeters). Los Angeles annual rainfall, in contrast, may be as low as 3 inches (75 millimeters) or as high as 35+ inches (825 millimeters), less than even Hong Kong’s driest period. But rainfall in both places is uneven and unpredictable, with major swings between dry and wet years. Even more than Los Angeles, Hong Kong can experience extreme droughts that can turn into crises. That possibility has shaped the city’s approach toward developing its water supply.
Water for a Barren Rock is the title of a 2001 book by Chinese University of Hong Kong Professor Ho Pui Yin that was commissioned and published by Hong Kong’s Water Supplies Department. It is an apt title for conveying Hong Kong’s essential challenge—despite its massive storms and heavy rainfall, Hong Kong lacks sufficient usable freshwater resources and is largely devoid of any groundwater. Instead, it has a long history, dating back to the British takeover of the island in the 1840s, of constantly searching for ways to develop a water supply for a growing population. The early lack of any significant water infrastructure (both for water supply and sanitation purposes) also became a major contributor to health problems and poor living conditions during much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. These problems were exacerbated by class and colony-related divisions. The colonial and wealthier residents who lived in private houses with their water containers, swimming pools, gardens, and fountains, for example, were not charged extra fees for their high water consumption, but paid the same amount as those with no running water. Water wastage was also a serious problem caused by the private home owners (called “Westerners”) who would let their water cisterns run all night and would not automatically turn them off when they became filled. Similar tensions along a class and ethnic divide in water services took place in nineteenth-century Los Angeles, where the development of the city’s water sewer services initially did not extend to the Mexican and Chinese neighborhoods, thus only reinforcing negative stereotypes about Mexicans and Chinese as “dirty and diseased.”29
Hong Kong’s lack of infrastructure and susceptibility to water quality problems, combined with periodic droughts, underlined the vulnerability of much of its population. The 1902 drought, for example, witnessed 460 cholera deaths traceable to contaminated water. The government was forced to shut down wells, even though this reduction of the available water created its own health-related impacts. An even more severe drought in 1929 forced the colonial government to ask mainland China to bring in water tankers to head off a wholesale calamity.30 But it was the 1963–1964 drought that forever changed the dynamic of how Hong Kong would seek to meet its water supply needs.
Prior to the 1960s, the Hong Kong government had actively explored a range of local supply strategies, some of which were considered among the most innovative at the time. These included identifying locations for catchment basins, which led to the construction of two major reservoir systems to create some baseline water storage. One of these, Plover Cove, identified as a “reservoir in the sea,” was recognized for its innovative design. The construction of Hong Kong’s dual water system for seawater to be used for toilet flushing provided another important breakthrough that dated back to the 1950s. Not only has the seawater supply program been successful in reducing the need for freshwater resources for the city’s residents, but it has been continually expanded to parts of Hong Kong not easily accessed. By 2015, the seawater toilet-flushing systems reached 85 percent of the city’s residents and represented 27 percent of residential water use, with plans to extend it to 90 percent by the end of the decade.31
More than earlier periods, the 1963–1964 drought shifted Hong Kong toward far greater dependence on imported water, notably in the form of water transfers from the Dongjiang River and Pearl River Basin in mainland China. The 1963-64 drought also produced some of the most dramatic impacts in Hong Kong’s history. Only forty-one inches of rain fell during that period (the contrast with Los Angeles is again striking). This shortfall was further exacerbated by increased water consumption in the two years before the drought. In September 1963, reservoirs were only 51 percent filled, just as drought conditions began to worsen. More draconian measures were instituted, including limiting public use to four hours of water every four days and even forbidding the customary use of wet towels in restaurants. Economic impacts were severe: a number of businesses were forced to shut down, and agricultural production suffered. The only businesses to flourish were the manufacturers of water buckets. Drought-related health impacts were also substantial, including incidences of cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever.32
The immediate problems were relieved when Typhoon Viola hit Hong Kong on May 28, 1964, and brought eight inches of much-needed rain.33 But the rain didn’t eliminate the concern about Hong Kong’s water supply. Plans were already under way to redirect Hong Kong’s attention to the mainland—specifically, toward opportunities for water transfers from Guangdong. Beginning in the late 1950s, a series of agreements were developed between Hong Kong and the Chinese government to construct new storage and conveyance facilities that included the transfer of Dongjiang water to Hong Kong, as well as to expand the water supply areas in Guangdong. First conceived during the Great Leap Forward period in the late 1950s through the construction of the Shenzhen Reservoir, these agreements had the strong backing of the top Chinese government leadership, including Zhou Enlai, the official most directly focused on China–Hong Kong relationships. The first agreement, signed by the Hong Kong colonial authorities and the Chinese government in November 1960, provided for an annual supply of five billion gallons of water. This arrangement was interrupted by the 1963–1964 drought, but once drought conditions improved, it was reinitiated, expanded, and formally launched in March 1965 when the Shenzhen Reservoir connected to the Dongjiang. Hong Kong then began to receive a steady supply of imported water that not only helped meet emergency needs but presumably provided a reliable supply for future development and population growth. Meanwhile, China benefitted politically and economically from its expanding ties to Hong Kong, including Hong Kong’s own role in fostering and financing Guangdong’s economic development and subsequent rapid urbanization. While those benefits were less apparent with the first agreement in 1965, political benefits were notable, since Hong Kong offered an important foreign relations window for China in the midst of a turbulent period, at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution and amid the heightened Sino-Soviet conflict.34
In 1980, with the establishment of the Special Economic Zones (SEZ), including Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s role was further magnified due to its roles in trade and goods movement, its investments in Guangdong’s export industries, the shift of its own export-oriented manufacturing to the mainland, and its market-oriented system, which provided a link for China’s later entry into the capitalist world economy. The handover by the British of Hong Kong in 1997 only reinforced the intricate relationship between Hong Kong and Guangdong, including their water supply agreements, which were periodically updated.
For more than three decades, Hong Kong not only had a reliable supply, but could even save some of the Dongjiang waters in its own reservoirs. That arrangement, however, also created a problem of overcapacity—that is, too much water storage, causing water to spill over the reservoir banks during particularly wet periods. Hong Kong’s water use patterns also began to change—residential use increased but industrial use was reduced, as the low-wage export-oriented industries shifted from Hong Kong to Guangdong. The problem of having too much water was also compounded by the type of financing used for the expansion of various water projects, since Hong Kong’s share of the payments was in the form of an interest-free loan based on prepaid water purchase fees. On a number of occasions in the 1980s and 1990s when Hong Kong sought to decrease the amount of water it received from Guangdong, the Chinese provincial government refused. Even when a more flexible water supply agreement was established in 2006, the water deliveries to Hong Kong initially outstripped sales, resulting in the payment for seven years of water supply for only six years of its allotment.35
Still, the arrangement for Hong Kong has been viewed as enormously beneficial in addressing its historic lack of local water and unpredictable weather. How much water Hong Kong uses on a per capita basis remains a concern, given the fears about future reliability. That concern has been heightened by continuing population growth, including the large influx of tourists as well as overnight visitors from the mainland, which, in turn, adds to the increase in water use.36 In addition, the explosion of industrial development in Guangdong, including some of the most polluting (and water-intensive) industries, and the rapid-fire urbanization in places like Shenzhen stimulated by the SEZ programs have raised a new set of concerns about the sufficiency of the water supply for Guangdong. This issue has been intensified by the water quality problems in the Dongjiang watershed and throughout the Pearl River Basin as well as the increasing industrial and residential demand for water despite the lower per capita use compared to Hong Kong. Hong Kong water officials remain concerned that any revised set of agreements could potentially reduce their future supply and increase uncertainty about water reliability.
Today, Hong Kong finds itself subject to a “one country, two water supply needs” system that underlines its complex relationship with China. The search for future reliability has become a political question about where and how Hong Kong might seek its water independence and find a new balance between supply and demand.
Water Quality
Los Angeles
Unlike its long-standing struggle with air quality, Los Angeles, up until the late 1970s, had not needed to confront the endemic problems with water quality that plagued other United States regions which primarily relied on their rivers and other surface waters for drinking water and other domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses. Polluted surface waters in the United States had long been a visible byproduct of industrial activity, agricultural practices, and urban development with its untreated runoff and wastes. From the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, numerous polluted waterways, from a dying Lake Erie to the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, became visual representations of the surface water contamination that impacted more than 90 percent of all US watersheds. The federal Clean Water Act of 1972, which focused on such surface water pollution, contained language about making waters drinkable, swimmable, and navigable. Its ambitious objective was to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.”37
Water quality problems related to drinking water sources, however, were not considered a significant problem at the time of the passage of the Clean Water Act, including in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles River channel was certainly recognized as polluted—filled with debris and unregulated discharges. One memorable image from a science fiction film of the 1950s called Them had giant irradiated ants coming out of the storm drains that fed into the LA River. But by the 1970s the LA River had come to be seen as a flood-control channel, not a viable water source related to the city’s water needs, as it once had been. Similarly, growing environmental concern about ocean pollution, heightened by a major oil spill in 1969 in the Santa Barbara Channel about ninety miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, was not linked to concern about the management of the city’s or region’s water supply. Some water quality problems were associated with Los Angeles’s imported water sources, including high salinity levels in the Colorado River water (producing a “hard” or more alkaline water) and taste and odor complaints about the water from Northern California stored in local reservoirs.38 Still, the local groundwater sources in Los Angeles were considered exempt from the various water quality problems of surface waters. Even if agricultural chemicals or industrial effluent leached into the ground, it was assumed that groundwater basins provided a natural filtration capacity to eliminate any major water quality concern.
That assumption was undermined when new revelations of polluted groundwater began to appear in the mid and late 1970s across the United States. In Los Angeles, the first indication that parts of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel groundwater basins might be contaminated was the discovery in December 1979 that discharges by Aerojet had contaminated several wells in the San Gabriel Valley. The contamination had created a major pollution problem within a regional groundwater basin that provided as much as 85 percent of the water for more than a million people. Additional discoveries of contaminated wells in the early 1980s took more wells out of production, with fears that the contamination would spread as the groundwater plume moved from one area of the basin to the next. The connection between water quality and water supply also quickly became apparent, as several parts of the region, including the City of Los Angeles, found themselves needing to increase their imported water sources through the Metropolitan system, further reducing the regional reliance on local water sources.39
The second major water quality issue that emerged in Southern California during the 1970s and 1980s (as well as in other parts of the United States) was related to the treatment process used for drinking water. For much of the twentieth century, treatment of drinking water sources used chlorination to eliminate possible microbiological contaminants. Chlorination was seen as a major public health breakthrough, reducing or eliminating various diseases, such as cholera, caused by contaminated water. But in the early 1970s, researchers began to identify a new class of contaminants that resulted directly from the chlorination process itself when treating water with organic matter from both natural and human sources. The disinfection byproducts that formed as a result of the treatment process included potential carcinogens such as trihalomethanes (or THMs). Because chlorination was ubiquitous among water agencies in the United States, news of the research results led to explosive media coverage and a rapid legislative response. This included passage of the 1974 federal Safe Drinking Water Act which focused on drinking water quality.40
For Southern California, the problem of disinfection byproducts was particularly noteworthy since its imported water from Northern California contained a high degree of organic matter, the precursors for the formation of disinfection byproducts. For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Metropolitan sought to downplay this water quality concern, even as new water quality regulations at the federal level identified Southern California’s drinking water quality as not always in compliance with its standard for THMs and other byproducts. Metropolitan’s response only exacerbated growing public concern about water quality, including at the tap, and fueled a major jump in the sale of bottled water and water filter systems. It was even revealed that as many as two-thirds of the staff of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drank bottled water or used a filtered water system. With the subsequent strengthening of the federal regulations on disinfection byproducts, Metropolitan transitioned to new treatment strategies to comply with the federal regulations.41
The groundwater and drinking water treatment problems, and the defensive response of the water agencies regarding those issues, revealed a deeper problem with the mission of the water agencies. Both Metropolitan and the City of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power had long considered their core focus to be providing an adequate water supply to accommodate existing and especially future demands, with the expectation that demand would expand, whether for residential, agricultural, or industrial uses, as well as for new urban-edge development where water availability was more limited. As water quality issues became increasingly prominent, they forced their way onto policy agendas, along with the recognition that the quality of the water was itself a supply issue.42 Water quality problems in turn have increased the uncertainty and fears about reliability of the water for Southern California. Climate change has further increased that uncertainty, whether from reduced snowpack for the imported water, from increased algae blooms that have caused water quality problems, or from the unpredictability of future supplies.43
Nevertheless, attention to water quality problems has remained more episodic than mission-driven. US media pay more attention to water quality (and air quality) problems in China than to local, regional, or national US water quality issues. Yet for Southern California, groundwater contamination has reduced local water supplies in the region to only 50 percent, and, in some cases, such as the City of Los Angeles, to just barely over 10 percent. Policy concerns have shifted to other core problems with water quality, such as stormwater runoff, though water agencies like LA’s Department of Water and Power and the Metropolitan Water District have only limited jurisdiction over how those issues can best be addressed. The problem of effective and integrated water management then looms large as a central policy consideration, with split jurisdictions and uncertainties about future supplies and water quality in an era of climate change underlying those considerations.
Hong Kong
In 2014, the Hong Kong government stated, in its online summary about drinking water quality, that “Hong Kong enjoys one of the safest water supplies in the world.” Touting its program to monitor water quality—from water sources through treatment and distribution to consumers—the government compared its sampling results to World Health Organization water quality guidelines and concluded, “you can rest assured that the water in your home is safe for consumption.”44 The picture it described of water quality and drinking water safety, though, was incomplete. The Hong Kong government has not had the power either to improve the quality of its major supply of water, the Dongjiang, or to directly address the treatment of its Guangdong waters at their source. Where the government has had more of a direct role is with the water sources on Hong Kong itself, primarily in the New Territories where poor water quality had long been a factor.
In 1986, when the Hong Kong government initiated a water quality monitoring program, it identified local sources that “had become too polluted to support life and were black and foul-smelling.” Conditions over the next two decades improved, due to restrictions placed on livestock farms (primarily poultry and pigs), the relocation of polluting industries from Hong Kong to Guangdong, and the development of more treatment facilities and sewer hookups. Nevertheless, some local quality problems still remained. These included, most notably, moderate to high levels of E. coli in the northwestern New Territories that stemmed from the continuing (albeit reduced) problem of discharges from livestock farms and nonsewered villages in the area, as well as from what the Environmental Protection Department called “the back flushing effect of the more polluted Shenzhen River.”45
The issue of the polluted Shenzhen River is just one aspect of that more challenging issue for Hong Kong: water quality concerns about its imported water from Guangdong. Even more concerning is that despite some important improvements in the Dongjiang watershed, there is nevertheless the potential for future pollution from increased urbanization (and unregulated wastes and lack of treatment facilities) as well as from industrial and agricultural pollution. Existing water quality concerns include such sources as heavy metals, organochlorine pesticide residues, and various persistent organic pollutants such as PCBs that continue to be detected in the Dongjiang. The Hong Kong government has been able to counter some of those problems by contributing to the construction of new sewage treatment plants, by seeking to intercept wastewater flowing into the Shenzhen Reservoir which also supplies Hong Kong, and by diverting the discharge of polluted water away the Dongjiang. The Hong Kong government has also supported new initiatives by the Guangdong authorities to begin more aggressive monitoring and the development of new pollution control and treatment measures throughout the Pearl River Basin.46
One of the ironies of Hong Kong’s dependence on the Dongjiang is that a substantial number—more than half—of the polluting Guangdong industries that discharge into the Dongjiang have been established and financed by Hong Kong investors, including those industries that relocated from Hong Kong to Guangdong. While such a shift in the industrial base from Hong Kong to Guangdong reduced some of the severe local water quality impacts in Hong Kong, it substantially increased the problems for its imported water supply. Hong Kong’s connection to China thus included both the opportunity to expand Hong Kong’s supply and the concern about the quality of that supply.47
The Connection to China
Similar to the experience of Los Angeles and Hong Kong, China’s water issues are historically rooted, development-driven, and a continual concern. “In China,” environmental researcher and advocate Ma Jun has written, “we have probably spent more time dealing with water problems than anywhere else on earth.”48
China has about 20 percent of the world’s population but only 6 percent of the world’s total water resources, an oft-quoted statistic used to describe the country’s water sources and the demands on them. According to a 2009 World Bank analysis, about 400 of China’s 661 cities were short of water, with 180 of those cities experiencing serious shortages.49
Those numbers have only marginally improved since then. Moreover, some aspects of the decline in available water threaten to get worse. This is due to a number of variables: further increases in demand, especially due to industrial and urban growth; continuing major problems with water quality; poor control over industrial and domestic wastewater discharges; nonpoint source pollution, primarily from agricultural runoff; and multiple supply source problems, such as groundwater depletion and river and lake pollution. Climate change has only recently been identified as a major concern through higher evaporation levels, and it has the potential to reinforce the uneven distribution of rainfall and overall water supply.
The spatial distribution of China’s water resources and the differences in the amounts and types of water uses between Southern and Northern China represent a particular predicament that has long plagued the country but has become even more pronounced since the 1980s. While the water basins in the north account for only 12 percent of the mean annual surface runoff and 20 percent of the groundwater, nearly half of China’s population (45 percent) and almost 60 percent of its arable land are located within those watershed areas. This water divide has been a major policy focus among China’s top leadership, several of whom had been trained as engineers and had experience with Soviet-style megaproject approaches. Far greater than Los Angeles’s historical focus on big water projects, China’s dream of moving water through massive transfer projects has remained a priority. Among other efforts, this approach has led to the development of China’s most expansive and environmentally impactful massive water project, the South-North Water Diversion project, which is the largest water transfer project in the world. The expansion of just one of its facilities, the Danjiangkou reservoir, for example, has led to the relocation of 345,000 people, the single largest migration in Chinese history.50
While problems in the north have reached crisis proportions in some areas, problems are also widespread in the south. Throughout the country, lakes, rivers, streams, and essentially all surface waters are challenged, with many sources reaching levels that are categorized as unfit for human consumption or even unfit for any uses. As many as 270 million people have no access to potable water.51
While the safety and availability of water for drinking and other domestic uses represent a huge challenge for China’s expanding urban population, it is a major concern as well for the industrial and agricultural sectors. China’s ability to become the world’s factory for such goods as paper, textiles, chemicals, and semiconductors has created its own challenges with water supply and quality. Several of these industries use water inefficiently, are themselves huge water consumers, and have contributed to major pollution problems. In some cases, an industry that relies on a particular water source will send its discharges back into that same source and contribute to its pollution. In recognition of those problems, Guangdong’s Environmental Protection Bureau has targeted electroplating, textile dyeing, chemical production, tanneries, and poultry farms as the province’s highest polluters, even as they have become a core part of its regional economy.52
Groundwater sources in China are also under stress. As much as 70 percent of China’s overall population and more than 60 percent of urban residents rely on groundwater as a primary drinking water source. And yet in the densely populated North China Plain, a government Land Ministry report identified as much as 70 percent of the water as unfit for human consumption. A combination of a shrinking supply (more groundwater taken out than replenished) and deeper (and more expensive) drilling of China’s groundwater basins has further led to reduced capacity and availability. When combined with the severe problems of groundwater pollution from agricultural, industrial, and wastewater discharges, China’s groundwater becomes as challenged as its polluted lakes and rivers, a less visible but just as serious indicator of the eroding conditions of China’s water supply. By way of example, according to China’s Land Ministry, among 4,778 sites in 203 cities tested for groundwater quality, 43.9 percent had “relatively poor” quality, while another 15.7 percent of the sites tested as “very poor” (that is, unfit for human consumption even after treatment).53
It is not surprising, then, that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s 2014 report to the National People’s Congress, which proposed a “war on pollution,” identified groundwater as well as such surface water sources as the Yellow and Yangtze rivers as needing action to protect drinking water sources. “As China is witnessing rapid development in new industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization, the prevention and treatment of water pollution remain a demanding task for us,” commented a government-issued 2015 Action Plan for Water Pollution Prevention.54
The link between polluted river basins and groundwater resources and possible water-supply shortfalls has been described by the Hong Kong-based NGO China Water Risk as “pollution driving scarcity.”55 As a water supply question, water quality emerges as a key determinant of future as well as present water supply due to what one study calls a “‘quality-adjusted’ supply-demand gap [that in China] is therefore larger than the quantity-only gap because some water is of such low quality that it can no longer be considered supply.”56
For the Chinese authorities, water quality stressors, which also impact water supply, involve the demands for water for domestic and industrial uses for an expanding region (and continuing pressures from rapid urban growth, expanding industrial output, and a large, albeit modestly declining, agricultural base). While environmental regulations have been established and some infrastructure, such as new treatment facilities, has been built, a gap remains between full-scale implementation of those environmental efforts and the continuing and persistent problems with water quality and supply that plague China’s waters. While the central and provincial governments have elevated the response to water problems as a major goal, there are counterpressures from local governments that continue to limit or even ignore enforcement of environmental standards. Lax enforcement is particularly the case with industrial discharges or urban development impacts, due to the role those same industries play in local economic development and the power of urban development interests.57
These pressures for economic growth and urban expansion have also turned water supply and particularly water quality into central environmental and public health concerns. Water quality and soil contamination present enormous challenges to human health, environmental degradation, and economic development, whether for drinking water quality, agricultural production, or industrial activities. A number of water quality episodes in the past several years, such as dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River in Shanghai or the emergence of what have been called “cancer villages,” have been directly associated with contaminated water. Water pollution impacts have even crossed national boundaries, such as the 2005 chemical plant explosions and resulting chemical spill into the Songhua River in northeastern China that caused more than four million people in the city of Harbin to be without water for a week, and threatened dozens of cities and villages in Russia.58 Such episodes have highlighted and intensified the debates about where and how to intervene at the water’s source. A number of local protests have also been held, including in the “cancer villages” across China, which have pitted residents against industrial and urban development interests, with local government officials often allied with those interests.
For each of the causes contributing to the problems of water supply and water quality, tension has emerged between the fundamental structure, goals, and practices associated with urban growth, industrial development, and agricultural practices and the increased recognition of water problems and the growing public pressure (and government policies that have been established) to address it. The challenge is illustrated, for example, by the efforts to create a modernized industrial agriculture, with its huge production and use (or overuse) of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the parallel problem of unregulated discharges. The location of highly polluting industries adjacent to farm land and freshwater sources is another challenge, causing them to then face a double burden of pollution. The rice crop in several major farming areas, for example, has become contaminated from heavy metals such as cadmium from industrial discharges that enter the soil and water.59 The rapid expansion of megacities such as Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Shanghai and the explosion in population in the middle-tier cities has also led to major infrastructure challenges for sewage and wastewater as well as for drinking water treatment. As soon as one set of facilities is built, the system gets stretched as population and urban boundaries are extended, leading to yet more wastewater discharges and pollution problems. China is in fact the top-ranked country in the world in the amount of wastewater discharged, its volume exceeding 68 billion tons, greater than the annual flow of the Yellow River.
While the magnitude of the problem has begun to be recognized and has even been highlighted by the mainland government, the continuing development that extends the water problems and the efforts to address them has led to an impasse on water supply and water quality issues. That tension has created what China’s former Minister of Water Resources, Wang Shucheng, characterized as China’s preeminent challenge: “To fight for every drop of water or die.”60
Strategies for Change
In 1982, in the midst of the referendum campaign over the Peripheral Canal in California, Evan Griffith, then general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, contemplated writing a book about the huge engineering challenges involved in bringing Northern California water to Southern California. Griffith had played an important role in the construction of the California Aqueduct, including tunneling through the Tehachapi Mountains north of urban Southern California. Water agency officials like Griffith had once been lauded for their engineering skills and vision for big water projects, but now large, engineering-driven imported-water projects were increasingly seen as part of the problem, not the solution in addressing Southern California’s water future. Criticisms included the environmental and cost concerns that would play a role in the defeat of the Peripheral Canal project. “I would love to tell my story about tunneling when I retire,” Griffith lamented at the time, “but I don’t know who would be interested in it.”61
Yet Griffin’s lament was not entirely accurate, at least at that moment of time. Despite a shifting terrain, the large transfer and interbasin projects the water engineers had helped to design and construct in Los Angeles, as well as in Hong Kong and China, characterized the approach to water development in those places for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The huge water projects in China, whether the South-North Water Diversion Project or the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, have not only been implemented by water engineers in China but conceived, overseen, and nurtured by several of its top leaders, such as Zhu Ronji, Li Peng, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. In Hong Kong, with its limited options, the role of the Water Supplies Department has primarily focused on securing its own water supply by facilitating projects that import water from China. One of its most significant local engineering feats, the construction of a dual piping system for seawater for toilet flushing, identified a different type of management focus that sought to stretch the notion of available supply. Still, Hong Kong’s reliance on the imported Dongjiang water supply, which would be shared with cities in Guangdong that are experiencing rapid growth and increased water demand, has remained far more pivotal to Hong Kong’s water management framework.62
The limits of the water agency focus on engineering and imported water to best manage the problems of both the supply and quality of the water is increasingly apparent, given the integrated nature of the supply-quality connection and the range of other water issues outside the engineering purview. In Los Angeles, rainwater and stormwater runoff, for example, has been seen as a Public Works or Flood Control District concern and less of a water agency matter, since the paved, urbanized landscape creates problems of runoff and flooded streets, while treatment facilities have been primarily focused on sewage disposal problems. In Hong Kong, responsibility for those issues, though identified by the Water Supplies Department as part of its “total water management” approach, still primarily resides with other agencies, such as the Drainage Services Department, which is focused on flood control and sewerage issues. And in mainland China, rapid urban growth and the parallel need to build new wastewater treatment facilities for urban and nearby agricultural and industrial discharges have created a dual problem of lack of facilities and the local governments’ unwillingness to enforce existing regulations to control wastewater discharges or stormwater runoff.63
Yet an issue like rainwater capture provides a twin benefit of reducing runoff and providing a modest supply source. Similarly, sewage and wastewater, which have been addressed as a treatment concern for sanitation districts and the Public Works agencies, can present an opportunity for water agencies to recycle and thereby stretch existing supplies.64
What the water agencies and other governmental jurisdictions have also been missing is a way to broaden their agenda to consider managing water in its many forms (including the water at its source rather than at its end point). At the same time, water agencies confront the question of their own mission and whether to reposition their approach, such as through an equity or environmental or public health framework. Access to drinking water, for example, involves core equity and public health issues, yet is seen more as a private rather than a public concern. This is symbolized by the rise of the bottled water industry and the growing interest in water privatization in Southern California as well as in Hong Kong and China. While drinking water itself represents just a fraction of the supply demands on a water agency, the cost differential between a private source (a small water bottle) and a public source (at the kitchen tap or drinking water fountains) can be as much as a thousand times, invoking considerations of equity.
When sales of bottled water by both smaller companies and large beverage manufacturers such as Nestle and Coca Cola increased geometrically in Southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, the public water agencies such as the LA DWP and the MWD reacted defensively and minimized the equity issue involved in bottled water sales. Much of the rapid increase in those sales was due to concerns about tap water quality as well as taste considerations. But even as the water agencies began to address those concerns, particularly with new treatment strategies, they still distinguished between their primary public role as water supplier and the private role of other companies—their erstwhile competitors—in the business of selling water. “We can’t—and don’t want to—compete with the private sector,” water agency officials argued about their inability to tackle this equity concern, given the cost of bottled water.
In Hong Kong, the Water Supplies Department has sought to emphasize the safety of tap water, while also seeking to respond to public concerns about the quality of the water imported from Guangdong. Those concerns have produced substantial growth in sales of bottled water in Hong Kong, led by companies like Nestle, Danone, and Coca Cola. One market study estimated that more than 418 million liters of bottled water (including flavored water drinks) were sold in Hong Kong in 2013, or approximately 58 liters per person. The shift toward bottled water coincided with the lack of access to tap water, similar to problems in Los Angeles. “It is easier to find a 7-11 than a water fountain in Hong Kong,” quipped Debra Tan of the China Water Risk research group.65
In China, bottled water sales have paralleled the dramatic population growth of urban centers. From just a single, domestic bottled water plant in 1980 (when concern about water quality was far less pronounced), bottled water sales in China, led by both private companies and local government entities that have entered the bottled water market, has soared in the past two decades. As a result, China catapulted into the second-largest bottled water market, after the United States. The biggest bottled water companies such as Danone and Nestle have gained a foothold in China through purchasing or merging with existing local companies and/or by acquiring a local brand name. In some cases, such as the over-100-year-old state-owned Guangzhou Water Supply Company, the water has been sourced from one of its existing treatment plants, with additional treatment applied to it, and then been marketed as a special “safe and healthy” bottled water product.66
The issue of water privatization further highlights the question of water agency mission, including, as with the bottled water issue, whether water should be treated as a commodity or as a public good. Most water utilities and water agencies in the United States are publicly owned and managed (as opposed to investor-owned electric utilities). Similarly, regional water wholesalers, such as Metropolitan, are also publicly owned and managed. However, some of the activities of the agencies are sourced to private entities. More importantly, the web of relationships involved in water development that include, along with the public water agencies, construction interests, engineering firms, water-oriented law firms, and real estate development interests that are dependent on accessing water supplies, have established what has come to be called a “water industry.” This public-private framework for water management translates into a mission of meeting the needs of particular interests, whether industry, agriculture, or urban development.67
In Hong Kong, the main water agency, the Water Supplies Department, has remained an important government outpost, even as some public services have become outsourced or privatized or are threatened with such changes. Debates about the public versus private role for water services erupted soon after the 1997 integration of Hong Kong into China. The Asian financial crisis of 1998 added to the pressures on the newly formed Hong Kong SAR government to reduce the investment and operational costs of its water supply system by partially or completely privatizing it, whether through outsourcing (contracting for services) or a transition to full privatization of the system. Those efforts were suspended, due in part to the strong civil service–public agency ethic that had developed within the Water Services Department. However, partial contracting, through various public-private partnerships, has taken place, an approach bolstered by the prevailing market orientation and the lauding of the private sector in Hong Kong—an orientation also strongly supported by the mainland.
In China, the advent of market reforms, especially after 1990–1991, led to a shift in water system control from the central government to municipal governments. A modest, though increasing, role has been played by global water companies, such as Suez Environnement, Siemens, Veolia, and Thames Water, which have invested in China’s water infrastructure, including new treatment facilities. In 2002, the Chinese government embarked on a full-fledged shift to privatization and marketization for its water sector, but without any clearly defined regulatory mechanisms. By 2008, private and foreign interests had obtained stakes in 20 percent of China’s public water utilities and 70 percent of the country’s wastewater utilities. Like many other aspects of the economy, water systems, whether owned or managed by the government, or by local or global private companies, or through joint public-private ownership, have come to be defined as commodity-based or profit-making enterprises, identifying water as a commodity rather than a public good.68
The battle over water as a commodity or a public good, the role of private interests (often in conjunction with public bodies) influencing the uses (and abuses) of water for various purposes, and the need for better water management integration have all become important issues of the urban environment, whether in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or mainland China. For change to occur, a new water ethic needs to be developed based on such principles as fair and equitable pricing, greater accountability in decision making, and elevating water quality as a priority for action. Such a water ethic also points to the importance from an urban environment context of establishing a green infrastructure approach and a public or community role in promoting such goals for health, the environment, accountability, and equity. A green infrastructure approach needs to focus on demand as much as on supply. It needs to view the management of the watershed in an integrated manner as opposed to how best to transfer water out of the watershed. It requires a fundamental shift in the mission and modus operandi of the water agencies and policymakers, who need to assume a role of promoting health and the environment as well as contributing to public needs such as greater equity. Such a shift would become part of a broader agenda of “livability” in the urban environment—how we protect, manage, and use our resources and understand that they too have “a life of their own.”69
