據說在國內, 濕地的消失與禽流感的確散有很大關係, 因為野鳥沒有足夠棲息處, 會跟家禽混在一起, 做成不同的病毒交差.
我們對環境所造的一切, 最終又會回到自己身上, 在現代的治理方法, 永遠把人和社會制度放在首位, 制止禽流感的方法是殺雞, 人鳥分隔...
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報導來自 Guardian
More than four-fifths of the wetlands along northern China's biggest
river system have dried up because of over-development, the state media
reported yesterday in the latest warning of the dire environmental
consequences of the country's economic growth.
Fifty years ago, the
Haihe river and its tributaries formed an ecologically rich area that
included 1,465 square miles of wetlands. But in the years since, the
expanding mega-cities of Beijing and Tianjin have sucked much of it
dry. The Xinhua news agency reported that the wetlands have shrunk to
207 square miles.
Conservation officials blamed the decline on excessive exploitation of
the Haihe - one of China's most polluted waterways - and damming of the
major tributaries.
Last
month, water conservation was identified as a national priority in the
government's five-year plan. Supplies for China's 1.3bn population are
less than a quarter of the world average. The situation is even bleaker
further north, such as on the Liao river delta, in north-east China's
Liaoning province, where farmers regularly harvest the dried-up reed
beds. The near-permanent drought is worsened by the expansion of urban
city populations and the encroachment of desertification.
The
annual water shortage in the basin of the Haihe and two other major
rivers - the Yellow and the Huaihe - is estimated to be more than 15bn
cubic metres at present. By 2010, this shortfall is expected to rise to
28bn cubic metres. With reservoirs drying up, the authorities have
turned to increasingly desperate measures, including cloud-seeding and
ever deeper "mining" of ground water.
So much has been extracted
that the water resources ministry says more than 90 rivers, including
the Yellow, run dry for part of the year and 70% of water supplies are
contaminated.
Compared with the 1950s, 1,000 lakes have disappeared and the nation's wetlands have shrunk by 26%.
The
extent of the dry-up was apparent last spring, when a week-long blaze
destroyed 6,667 hectares of wetland in the giant Zhalung nature
reserve. No one had imagined a fire would be a problem in what
historically was a marshy area.