Energy system in the Loess Plateau - A case study of Changes during the rehabilitation period

The problems in the world; poverty, energy and food supply, environmental degradation, they all depend on each other. This is the traditional path of civilization: the need of food and the need of energy drive the society to abuse the environment, which answers with degradation of output, which in turn leads to poverty. The connection between energy consumption, economy and environment is very clear.

The procedure described above have been going on for thousands of years in the Loess Plateau in China, which is said to be the cradle of Chinese civilization due to the Yellow river that passes through the area. The misuse of the land surrounding the river has lead to heavy erosion. This gives high soil content in the water runoff, which leads to an elevation of the riverbed, which leads to flooding.

This problem was tried to be solved by building check-dams, but it did of course not prevent the flooding from happening. At last, in 1994, China received financial support from the World Bank to carry out a Watershed Rehabilitation project. From being a complete desert there is now, 13 years later, green vegetation covering most of the Loess Plateau. The higher productivity from the lands has also led to higher incomes and a great step on the way from poverty to welfare in the rural China.

Now there are many who want to see this kind of rehabilitation in other countries. This far no one has considered the issue about energy supply during the rehabilitation. It turns out that an input of fossil energy is needed, both for mechanical operations and for the residential energy use. There must be insurance for people to have food and energy, even in parts where the soil actually needs to rest from agriculture in order to rehabilitate.

The Loess Plateau in China has lots of coal resources, and policies timing the rehabilitation made it easier for the rural population to have locally produced coal. In the provinces of the Loess Plateau that has advanced most, the coal consumption is going back and being replaced by biomass. The biomass can be trimmings of apple trees that are grown in many places, because wood land stabilizes the soil and prevent erosion. This is one of the effects of the rehabilitation; regained ecosystem-functions enable the use of bioenergy in a more sustainable way, which leads to less dependency of fossil fuels! This is a very important result, because if we allocate fossil resources now into rehabilitation projects around the world, the chances are big that this would help many countries a lot into a future independent on fossil fuels.

Published in: Uppsala University, student project work
Available from: Global Energy Systems