China’s campaign to shave off mountaintops and fill in valleys to make way for cities may come at too high a price in the pollution, erosion and flooding unleashed by the unprecedented redistribution of earth, Chinese researchers said yesterday.
Dozens of peaks up to 150m tall have been flattened to fill up valleys and create tens of square kilometers of land over the past decade, but there has been little assessment of the costs and environmental impact of these projects, researchers at Chang’an University said in a commentary published in the journal Nature.
“Land creation by cutting off hilltops and moving massive quantities of dirt is like performing major surgery on Earth’s crust,” the group said.
In addition to causing air and water pollution, erosion, landslides and flooding, the projects have destroyed farmlands and habitat for wild animals and plants, the group said.
While mountaintop removal has been done before in mining in the US, it has never been carried out on the scale underway in China or used to construct urban areas, the researchers said.
One of the authors, Li Peiyue (李培樂), assistant professor of hydrogeology and environmental science, said in an interview that the development of cities must come at a price.
“But we believe the government should be cautious in promoting the projects before proper experiments have shown that they are technological, geological and environmentally feasible,’’ he said.
The first city to expand by bulldozing its mountaintops was Shiyan in Hubei Province in 2007. The transformation caused landslides and flooding, altered watercourses and increased the sediment content in local water sources, the commentary said.
In neighboring Shaanxi Province, Yanan aims to double its area by creating 79km2 of flat ground in a project started in 2012 — in the largest such project attempted on loess, a kind of wind-blown silt.
The project has destroyed farmlands while filling valleys with a kind of earth that may lack firmness and be vulnerable to “geological disasters such as landslides,” Li said.
The authors questioned the cost benefits of landfills, noting that the Yanan project will cost 100 billion yuan (US$16 billion) over 10 years, but that it will take at least that long for the filled-in valleys to become stable enough for building.
Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Washington-based Wilson Center, said the mountain-moving projects could leave China with more deserts and water shortages.
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