When the desert winds tear up the sands outside his front door, Huang Cuikun says he is choked by dust, visibility falls to a few meters and the crops are ruined. Dust storms hit his village in Gansu Province more often than in the past. The water table is falling. Temperatures rise year by year. Yet Huang says this is an improvement. Three years ago the government relocated him from an area where the river ran dry and the well became so salinated that people who drank from it fell sick.
“Life is easier now,” he says in the new brick home that the authorities have given him. “When we lived in Donghuzhen we had little water and the crops couldn’t grow. Our income was tiny and we were very poor.”
Huang is one of millions of eco-refugees who have been resettled. The government says more than 150 million will have to be moved. Water shortages exacerbated by over-irrigation and climate change are the main cause.
The problem is most severe in the northwest, where desert sands are swallowing up farms, homes and towns. Huang lives in Mingqin, a shrinking oasis area government advisers privately describe as an “ecological disaster area.” The Yellow River is diverted 100km to replenish dried-up reservoirs and aquifers in Minqin, where the population has swollen from 860,000 to 2.3 million over the last 60 years, as water supplies have declined.
It is not enough. The Tengger Desert is encroaching from the southeast and the Badain Jaran Desert from the northwest. Since 1950 the oasis has shrunk by 288km², and annual superdust storms have increased more than fourfold. In Liangzhou district, 240 of the 291 springs have dried up.
“It’s just 2km or 3km from here to the desert,” Huang says. “To survive, we must control the desert.”
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