Aihua Long
China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research

 As located in the hinterland of Eurasian continent, Xinjiang is far away from the water vapor source, dry climate and complicated terrain make water resource scarce, significant differences of water resource distributions among regions, frail eco-environment, and stinging water demand rivalrousness between economical system and ecological system. From 1990s, the agriculture scale has been keeping increasing, more and more water has been utilized, and ecological problems, such as discontinuous flows, Lakes atrophy, desertification are becoming worse. What happened on earth and how it changed about the eco-environment? How much virtual water had been consumed by the increasing agriculture and human beings? What did these changes and evolutions mean, and how can we avoid? Perhaps the indicators of ecological footprint (EF) and water footprint (WF) could tell us something true. Based on the theories and methods of ecological and water footprint, we calculated the ecological occupations and ‘real’ water consumptions in Xinjiang, and analyzed their evolutions from 1995 to 2008 and their policy implications.
The results showed that, the total EF and EF per capita are 8840×104hm2 and 4.23 hm2/cap, which in 1995 are 3797×104hm2 and 2.29 hm2/cap, respectively, in the past 14 years, the total populations in Xinjiang has increased 1.28 times, while the EF has increased to 2.33 times, and the EF per capita 1.81 times, all these indicated that the unsustainable economic growth has been destroying the frail eco-environment. At the same time, the total WF（in the view of yield in Xinjiang）in 2008 has increased to 316×108m3 from 260×108m3 in 1995; the WF per capita has kept relatively stable, ranging from 1483 m3 to 1717 m3, but the WF per capita in the view of consumption by local residents had little change, which has kept about 740 m3; And these means half of WF has been ‘exporting’ outside Xinjiang, 150×108m3 in total and 826 m3 per capita every year. To get a high economic growth, more and more lands and water are used, but agricultural economy features and pattern has continuously destroyed the eco-environment quickly, and water has been kept transporting outside, the ecological rucksack and EF deficit would keep rising in Xinjiang. Something should be done to avoid the evolution, maybe we cannot lay our hope on technology progress, changes our production and consumption structures are the real sustainable way to try.