TAIPEI - Tarim River, China’s longest inland waterway, is suffering the most severe drought since 1993. The revived green corridor along the Tarim River is drying up, again. In order to alleviate the drought, Xinjiang is making an emergency transfer of water into the Tarim River.

Xinhua News Agency quoted the Tarim River Basin Management Bureau announcement that the water transfer is from Bositeng Lake. This will be done in two steps. The first step is the water flow into Taitema Lake which is at the end of the Tarim River. This is a journey of 56 days. The second step is scheduled to start this fall. The two steps combined are expected to release 250 million cubic meters of water from Bosten Lake, which should flow downstream into the Tarim River.

This is the seventh emergency water transfer into the Tarim River in the past five years. It is reported that the flow of the Tarim River was dramatically reduced last year. This created the lowest flow record since 1993. The situation severely affects water usage for the downstream green corridor area in the ecosystem.

Since spring of this year, the Tarim River Basin has encountered the most severe drought in the past 11 years. There was no flow through the middle stream at one point in time. The Big West Lake Reservoir on the Tarim River dried up for the first time since 1995. The water used for spring seeding had to be transferred from other sources.

To date, the Tarim River water emergency transfer has increased the flow downstream. In recent years, a total of 1.764 billion cubic meters of water have been transferred into the Tarim River through six transfers. This has ended the historical three decades long drought downstream.

The Tarim River is China’s largest inland river which covers southern Xinjiang. The river basin is 1,200,000 square kilometer (61 percent of the total area of Xinjiang), with a population of 8,257,000 (47 percent of the total population of Xinjiang). The Tarim River basin is important to China’s cotton manufacturing and petrochemical bases. There has been no rain there and it is too dry.

The ecosystem of the Tarim River is extremely weak. The river has been drying up for a long time due to climate changes, irresponsible development and poor use of the water and soil resources. Lakes dry up, forests die, and the land becomes a desert. All this has lead to the expansion of the Takli Makan Desert and the Gurbantunggut Desert in the downstream area. This situation is threatening the ecosystem of whole western territory of China. In recent years, China has invested 10.74 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion) to save the Tarim River, but this drought has posed a serious challenge to the accomplishment of controlling this river.