Lady lakes vanish into the blues

The world is obsessed with efforts to strike a deal in Copenhagen next month to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. But unfortunately the 13th World Lake Conference in China's central city of Wuhan, which is part of the same save-the-environment campaign, has largely gone ignored. This is not to say we should miss the wood for the trees. But without the trees, there can be no wood.

And it seems knocking on wood cannot get us out of the woods of environmental uncertainty. As if all the vanishing forests, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, rising seas and retreating glaciers were not enough, China has now woken up to the startling revelation of losing more than 1,000 lakes in just 50 years. Zhang Yongchun, an expert from Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, said that in absolute terms, China has lost 9,570 sq km of its water area, and 51.6 billion cu m of its water-storage capacity.

What's worse, on average 20 lakes are still disappearing in the country every year and water in more than 80 percent of the lakes in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River has reportedly become unfit for human consumption because of algae outbreaks.