Environmental toll from land ‘surgery’ mounting
June 12, 2014 Category Environment, Pollution
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, researchers warned. Dozens of peaks up to 150 meters 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 the 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. Mountaintop removal has never been carried out on the scale underway in China or used to construct urban areas, the researchers said. The first city to expand by bulldozing its mountaintops was Shiyan, Hubei province, in 2007. The transformation caused landslides and flooding, altered watercourses and increased the sediment content in local water sources. In neighboring Shaanxi province, Yanan aims to double its area by creating 79 square kilometers of flat ground in a project started in 2012. The authors of the study questioned the cost benefits of landfills, noting that the Yanan project will cost CNY100 billion over 10 years, but that it will take at least that long for the filled-in valleys to become stable enough for building, the China Daily reports.
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