Troubles in Shanghai - The Yangtze River

The city of Shanghai sits at the delta of the Yangtze River and depends on it for its water. The Yangtze is in trouble -- from CNN Science & Space:

Yangtze river 'cancerous' with pollution
China's longest river is "cancerous" with pollution and rapidly dying, threatening drinking water supplies in 186 cities along its banks, state media said on Tuesday.

Chinese environmental experts fear worsening pollution could kill the Yangtze river within five years, Xinhua news agency said, calling for an urgent clean-up.

"Many officials think the pollution is nothing for the Yangtze," Xinhua quoted Yuan Aiguo, a professor with the China University of Geosciences, as saying.

"But the pollution is actually very serious," it added, warning that experts considered it "cancerous"."

Industrial waste and sewage, agricultural pollution and shipping discharges were to blame for the river's declining health, experts said.

The river, the third longest in the world after the Nile and the Amazon, runs from remote far west Qinghai and Tibet through 186 cities including Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanjing and empties into the sea at Shanghai.

It absorbed more than 40 percent of the country's waste water, 80 percent of it untreated, said Lu Jianjian, from East China Normal University.

"As the river is the only source of drinking water in Shanghai, it has been a great challenge for Shanghai to get clean water," Xinhua quoted him as saying.

The article also talks a bit about Chinese cleanup campaigns, the lack of potable water for 300 Million People and the fact that:

Most of the Yellow River, the second-longest in China and the cradle of early Chinese civilization, is so polluted it is not safe for drinking or swimming, Xinhua news agency said in May last year.

And it is not just water -- China burns a lot of coal for heating and power and the plants are not as environmentally nice as the ones in the USA. Air pollution is a major problem especially in the north. The increased desertification is causing massive sand-storms the dust of which cross the Pacific and show up here. But yet, they are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol...