Moving mountains in China poses environmental threats, report says

An environmental report called on China to stop flattening mountains until the effects of the practice can be studied.

“Earth moving on this scale without scientific support is folly,” the report — titled “Environment: Accelerate research on land creation” and published in the scientific journal Nature — said, adding that the process had not been thought through environmentally, economically or technically.

As China’s cities expand as its economy grows, the country has begun running out of land to build on — especially in mountainous areas where one-fifth of the population lives.

“Land creation” is done by cutting off mountaintops and moving the massive quantity of dirt into valleys to create flat ground on which construction can begin. Such projects have been carried out in strip mining, notably in the eastern United States, where residents in the coal hills of West Virginia say the practice is ravaging the environment and their way of life.

In China — where there isn’t cooperation between universities, research institutes, private companies, construction companies and the government — land creation could take water supplies and entire ecosystems with them, according to the report.

Over the past decade, China has carried out land creation projects on a massive, unprecedented scale. Moving mountains in cities such as Chongqing, Shiyan, Yichang, Lanzhou and Yan’an has created tens of square miles of flat land, the researchers said.

Local officials in Yan’an in the central province of Shaanxi — where the city’s flat ground area will be doubled by creating nearly 50 extra square miles in one of the country’s largest-scale land creation projects — said that the sale or leasing of the land would generate billions of renminbi and ease pressure on agricultural land elsewhere.

But critics said the project could be doomed to fail, because its planners did not consider the fact that Yan’an is built on loess, thick million-year-old deposits of wind-blown silt. The report said any structures built on such soft silt could be doomed to structural collapse, and that is just one example of factors the architects of the land creation project did not consider.

In Shiyan, also in Shaanxi province, the flattening of mountains has caused landslides, flooding and altered entire waterways.

The study said that many land creation projects ignore China’s environmental regulations because local economies are prioritized above nature.

In the Lanzhou project, located in Gansu province just west of Shaanxi, the government halted work pending an environmental assessment after air pollution associated with the construction became visible. But work resumed one month later because of the growing expense of waiting. The assessment has yet to be completed, according to the report.

The government is aware of the environmental challenges it faces as the economy grows; Premier Li Keqiang said in March that he is “declaring war” on pollution after the country's smog problem shut down entire cities.

But official action in response to these threats has been less than adequate, according to Elizabeth C. Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. 

“Investment in environmental protection continues to hover around 1.3 percent of gross domestic product, but … roughly half of this money is lost through local corruption or the allocation of environmental funds to non-environmental-related projects,” Economy wrote last year.

“Local officials are rewarded more for investing in infrastructure than for making environmental protection an explicit priority.”

Economy said Chinese citizens have been pushing the government to do more, and have created many nongovernmental environmental  organizations calling for increased transparency from the government on environmental data.

“China is moving mountains. Until we know more about the consequences, we urge governments to seek scientific advice and proceed with caution,” the land creation report’s authors said.