Niel Thevs: Water Allocation in the Tarim Basin under Water Scarcity, Xinjiang, China - Decision Structures and Adaptations on the Local Level

The Tarim River, 1321 km long, is the longest inland river of China and the main water source of the Tarim Basin. The Tarim Basin, which is equivalent to the southern part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, covers an area of 1.02 Mio km² and is inhabited by 8.26 Mio people, not including the population of the state farms under the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Song 2000, Zhang 2006).

Due to the extremely arid climate in the Tarim Basin, all agriculture in the Tarim Basin and along the Tarim River depends on irrigation (Hoppe 1992). The natural vegetation thus covers its water demand from the groundwater (Gries et al. 2003). The groundwater in turn, is recharged by the rivers of the Tarim Basin (Hou et al. 2007). Concluding, one must state that in the Tarim Basin all ecosystems, whether man-made or natural, directly or indirectly depend on the river water as their major water source. This situation also applies for the arid lowlands in the Aral Sea Basin in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Thus, man-made ecosystems compete
for river water with the natural ecosystems (Figure 1). During the 1950ties until the 1970ties, the area under irrigation was steadily enlarged, resulting in increasing water demands for irrigation (Hoppe 1992, Giese et al. 1998). Thus, during the 1970ties the lower reaches of the Tarim River as well as the Lake Lopnor fell completely dry, resulting in severe degradations of the riparian ecosystems (Song et al. 2000, Giese et al. 2005). Within the Tarim River Regulation Scheme, flood pulses were diverted into the lower reaches of the Tarim River after
2002 (Zhu et al. 2006).

But, during 2007, 2008, and 2009, the entire Tarim River ceased to carry water during spring and early summer, i.e. during the planting and irrigation season, posing great pressure on the water resource administration as well as on individual water users, i.e. farmers.

Therefore, this paper firstly describes the hydrology of the Tarim River, land use and natural ecosystems along the Tarim River, as well as the water administration in the Tarim Basin and the the water allocation under the Tarim River Regulation Scheme. Secondly, the adaptation towards water allocation and water scarcity on farm level is
investigated.