City is thirsty

last updated 8 January 2015

Beijing

China will begin constructing the world’s largest water-diversion project, to pump water from the lush south to the parched north, the government announced this week. About half of China’s 1.3 billion people are concentrated in the dry lands around Beijing, and they need water. Over the next eight years, the government will build three enormous aqueducts to carry 48 billion tons of the Yangtze’s flow northward every year. The project is expected to be even more expensive than the $24 billion Three Gorges Dam.