3.1. Fragility of Lijiang’s Groundwater Commons
The existing fragile conditions of the Lijiang groundwater were addressed in this section, which offered a general picture of the story before investigating its dynamic governance process.
According to the 2012 public data of Lijiang water resources, there was 18.49 million m3 groundwater supply over the year, reduced by 44% compared with the previous year. Among all groundwater supply, there were 81% coming from shallow aquifers, only 19% coming from deep aquifers. Sharply increased water use by household and production sectors largely encroached upon water use for ecological preservation and environmental maintenance.
Groundwater is of great importance to Lijiang, especially the basin where the Old Town locates. Densely populated Lijiang basin faces a large water demand. The demand has increased considerably because of the huge number of tourists coming in each year. The total shallow aquifer groundwater reserve of Lijiang municipality was 2.7 billion m3. The basin obtained about 1 billion m3 (2011 data).
The groundwater in Lijiang is mainly exploited in two ways. Most populated regions like the Lijiang basin drill wells. Areas close to springs would use drainages to build concentrated water sources for the region. By 2010, there were 8700 wells extracting groundwater in Lijiang. However, it is believed that the actual number is much larger because many private hostels and restaurants, even car wash facilities in and around Old Town of Lijiang have been illegally drilling wells.
There is a group of water springs in the Black Dragon Pool (helongtan, a pond of 40,000 m2, hereafter as BDP) supplying water continuously to the Old Town of Lijiang, which has also become a famous scenic spot. BDP locates in the northeast of Lijiang basin. Besides the natural middle stream flowing from Black Dragon Pool to the Old Town, two other man-made streams were flowing from BDP to the Old Town respectively in the east and west, built since the Yuan Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. The spring water is supplied from the Jiuzihai recharge basin, which is also a dissolution zone. The groundwater recharging area in Jiuzihai is around 168 km2. When the annual rainfall goes above 1400 mm in Jiuzihai, the water supply for BDP spring discharge is sufficient. BDP springs are mostly abundant in October in normal years, with a maximum recorded annual runoff of 3.75 m3/s. BDP supplies water to about 10,000 people living in the Beimen community, averagely it supplies 14,000 m3/d in normal years.
Another much bigger spring group locate several miles away from BDP—Qingxi Reservoir. It can supply over 22 million m3 water each year, covering over 100,000 people in Lijiang basin. The total reservoir capacity is 1.03 m3, it supplies water to local residents and also recharges water supplies to BDP and Old Town. Qingxi reservoir is located 2.5 km to the north of Lijiang Old Town, in the Qingxi village. It is believed to have a much more stable groundwater supply from the Yulong snow mountain and glaciers. The causal relation between Qingxi groundwater recharge and rainfall is not as evident as BDP. Qingxi reservoir has never completely dried up, which makes it an essential backup for BDP and Old Town water supply. Qingxi springs have an average total outflow runoff of 25.2 million m3, with the maximum runoff of 1.6 m3/s and minimum runoff of 0.35 m3/s.
Over the years’ drought and over-extraction of groundwater in the region, the capacity of those three reservoirs have all been severely influenced, the BDP has already stopped supplying water. The Sanshuhe reservoir has a designed minimum runoff of 56,000 m3 per day, but the actual supply reduced to around 30,000 m3; the Qingxi reservoir has a designed minimum runoff of 60,000 m3 per day, but the actual supply reduced to about 24,000 m3; the Tuanshan reservoir has a designed minimum runoff of 10,000 m3 per day, but it could barely reach this level. Averagely, Lijiang basin requires about 68,000 m3 to 73,000 m3 water per day, but the actual water supply with all reservoirs combined could only reach 60,000 m3. To solve the problem, the Lijiang water supply company started transferring water from other regions, like Baishuihe, to ease the crisis.
BDP is one of the main groundwater sources to supply the urban areas in the Lijiang basin. It provides about 180,000 m3 water each year, supplying water directly to more than 3000 local residents. The elevation of spring group capacity of BDP is 2420 m, gathering water in the beautiful BDP park several hundred meters away from the Elephant Mountain foot. On the other hand, BDP maintains the waterways flowing throughout the Old Town, with an average runoff of 14 million m3 in normal years. The Old Town would be a “dead” city if the water dries up in all canals and channels. So, in a sense, BDP is the water reserve to maintain this heritage site and its local residents, as well as the overwhelming tourists. Ironically, the beautiful sceneries and rich cultures attract more tourists to the city, bringing unprecedented huge pressure to the groundwater conservation in BDP. The tourism boost generated striking growth of hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related service industries. Both the size and speed of growth are beyond expectation and immediately became out of control. A large number of illegal wells were drilled in the region, rapidly overexploited the BDP groundwater reserve. Eventually, a record-long dry up occurred in 2012. BDP springs dried up completely from 21 January 2012, after 956 days, a tiny stream of water came from the springs on 5 September 2014. Very limited spring water did not last long. Only 134 days later, BDP springs were completely dried up again. Old Town of Lijiang, consequently, dried up as well. Lijiang government had to transfer water from Lashi Lake and Baishuihe Lake several miles away. BDP dry up incident also caused other environmental issues. Yuhe canal used to connect water flows from BDP to the Old Town. When BDP pond dried up the Yuhe canal also dried up and caused severe pollution in the canal.
There were recorded histories of spring dry-up in BDP since Qing Dynasty around 1736AC. It occurred about once every 20 years from the late 18th century to early 19th century. Entering the 20th century, the spring dry-up speeded up to once every 5 years. Entering the 21st century, the spring dried up every year. In recent years, the springs in BDP have constantly dried up, along with increasingly dry-up frequency and duration. Lijiang suffered from severe drought since 2009. However, the longest dry-up record of 965 days occurred after a great boost of tourism in the region. Tourism, especially mass tourism, obviously has had a serious impact on Lijiang’s water quality and environment. On the other way around, severe water shortage and environmental degradation have already put great pressure on tourism development. The Lijiang government initiated a Black Dragon Pool Spring Conservation Project, aiming to protect the spring water system in BDP. The project built four groundwater observation wells around the pond, and another three groundwater observation wells in Luogoucun, Baimalongtan, and Xianghelicheng throughout the Lijiang basin. This is to build a dynamic monitoring system on underground water flows of the springs in BDP.
Qingxi Pond also rapidly reduced its water runoff when the BDP was completely arid. Aside Lijiang municipal water supply company extracting water from Qingxi reservoir, there are others extracting water from it too. They are Old Town middle school, municipal vocational school of ethic tribes, Heibaishui forest administration bureau and Senlong spring water company.
The water quality for those two groundwater sources has also degraded over the years. The major pollutant to the water is nitrate in Qingxi Pond, and bacteria in BDP. Mang rural water supply sources are contaminated by bacteria, the rate of unsafe drinking water in the rural area across Lijiang reached 79%.
Another worrying fact is that, not only touristic regions in Lijiang basin experienced a dramatic loss of groundwater, but also the residential areas in the basin were monitored in a quite critical situation. Many families also illegally drilled wells in their backyards or gardens. Lijiang municipal water resource administration office investigated the entire basin, identified four large over-exploited groundwater reserves with a total area of 25.5 km2. Some regions extracted so much groundwater that the water level decreased over 20 m in wells. Yet, the actual over-extracted groundwater volume still has not been identified, because of the lack of monitoring wells and measures in those regions.
Over-capacity extraction of groundwater and further drilling to deeper aquifers forced the geological formation of Lijiang basin changed dramatically. Decades of over-extraction of groundwater has already caused underground subsidence sinking in the region, known as “regional groundwater depression cone”. Such sinking modified the original hydrology and forced groundwater moving toward a vertical direction. Vertical movement of groundwater provides preferential conditions for the rainfalls to be absorbed to the underground but also makes it easier to disseminate pollutants from the surface to underground.
In the past, dynamic monitoring of groundwater reserve was almost absent. The entire municipality had only one well for monitoring, and not built for groundwater, but for monitoring earthquake. The well had a depth of 310 m, monitoring aquifers in depths of 167–310 m. The monitoring well was built in the Old Town of Lijiang, where the most serious extraction of groundwater happened. From 1999 to 2007, the originally water-abundant area rapidly dropped its groundwater level for more than 16 m. In the year of 2007, two hotels (Heibaishui Hotel and Senlong Hotel) alone extracted over 200 m3 groundwater per day. In 2012, Lijiang water resource administration built four groundwater monitoring wells in and around the BDP.
The water demand has been rising fast over the years, worsened by the drought, the water supply in Lijiang is critical. Almost all regions in Lijiang municipality need water supply transferred from far-away reservoirs. From January to June each year, the water supply would decrease because of rainfall shortage. On the other hand, that period of time is the peak season for agricultural irrigation, hence water supply always becomes tight. Tourism boost in Lijiang also radically boosted real estate in the region, partially residential and partially hospitality. The fast speed of urbanization to nearby areas further stressed water supply capacity.
3.2. Institutionalised Governance Process
3.2.1. Identify the SES Systems Key Institution Variables
The main institutional variables must be identified first, to examine the Lijiang groundwater case under the SES system. From the perspective of social-ecological systems integration, Lijiang groundwater management is a complex system involving multiple stakeholders, such as resource ecology, local farmers, tourism businesses, government agencies, and NGOs. To further analyse the interaction between variables in SES systems and their outcomes, it is necessary to combine the specific research scales and research objects to indicate the basic status of these variables in the systems [
32]. In Lijiang’s case, the focus of research scale is primarily local with some reference to the national water governance structure, while the research objects identified as key variables for analysis in this section are institutional structures of groundwater management.
The urban water use in Lijiang basin is managed by the construction department, while the other water use is managed by the water resource administration. There are many different departments involved in the management of water resources, some deal with water source but not water supply, while others manage water supply regardless of drainage and water pollution. Overlapping administration on water resource with unclear responsibilities makes it extremely difficult to conduct scientific planning and effective management. Did not form an authoritative, unified, integrated water resources management system. Lijiang basin is under the jurisdiction of two different local authorities—Old Town District and Yulong Naxi Autonomous County, which made it even more difficult for the management of water resources. Water sources and recharging zones are mainly located in Yulong County, while the water users are concentrated in Old Town. A large amount of irrigation water supply in Yulong County has to compromise for urban water supply in Old Town. The conflicts are getting more prominent.
Accompanied by the continuous expansion of urban construction in scale and thriving development of service industry based on tourism, the problems of monitoring and management of water resources in Lijiang have become increasingly prominent. The monitoring coverage of water resources, especially groundwater is low, and the frequency of monitoring projects does not meet the requirements. The monitoring and analysis capabilities of groundwater and water ecology are relatively weak. The available water monitoring information has a very low level of digitalization, hence difficult to be shared with other stakeholders. Therefore, Lijiang’s overall water resource management and monitoring capabilities need to be further improved.
The regulatory capacity of water management is insufficient. As the main administrator of groundwater in Lijiang, the Lijiang water resource bureau has a water resource management office, but only one staff working in the office. There are water resource monitoring/management teams based in the respective county/district government. Old Town district government, for instance, has a team of 7 staffs working on Old Town area’s water management and monitoring. Currently, the water management work in Lijiang still relies heavily on fiscal transfers from the national government and Yunnan provincial government, with very little support from local government. Few counties are willing to use water-use charge revenue to support management and monitoring expenses, but still very limited.
The “three red lines” (hongxian) have been repeatedly emphasis over the years, namely, redline of water exploitation and use; water use efficiency control; and water use functional regions’ pollution control. However, Lijiang’s water management system has not fully built its resource protection and management mechanisms, such as assessment mechanism for emergency forecasting, monitoring technology and funding system.
3.2.2. Analyse Interactions among These Key Variables under IAD General Framework
The previous section identified key institutional variables in the Lijiang groundwater case, and the next step was to investigate the interactions between these key variables. Establishing as many interactions between variables as possible within social-ecological systems is critical to understanding its complexity. In social-ecological systems, variables interact at different temporal and spatial scales [
33]. The variable interactions change along with the change of time and space and adapt through the feedback mechanisms until reaching the tipping points to substantial, abrupt and persistent regime shifts of the resource systems or its ecosystems [
34,
35]. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework focuses on the action situation and analyses the interactions and their feedback between actors and action situation under various impacts of “external” factors such as biophysical conditions, attributes of community, and rules-in-use [
36,
37]. As in
Figure 5, the IAD framework is an important analytical approach to understand interactions and feedbacks throughout SES systems [
16,
38].
Lijiang municipal government published “Lijiang municipal groundwater management regulation (No. 37 of
Lizhengfa 2006)” in May 2006, under which a management centre at municipality-level was established. This centre aims to regulate water supply, water usage and drainage water processing, pollution control on water resources at a unified platform across the entire municipality. Under the 2006 regulation, some illegally extracted wells were closed up, some others were requested to apply for groundwater extraction licence, the extraction volume was also set with quota. Until August 2017, there were 17,718 wells extracting groundwater in Lijiang basin, recorded by the government. Among those wells, about 1% were deep-aquifer wells. After investigation, the local government closed up 324 wells, 114 wells among which were deep-aquifer wells. Those groundwater wells were recorded with details under different categories for the first time, such as residential, hotel, school, enterprises, etc. The local government aims to build a long-term mechanism for groundwater use. The aim is to assign all qualified groundwater users’ water-use licences and dynamically monitor them in the unified system. It requested that one well must obtain one profile on record with all the details of this particular well. However, the local administration system still obtrudes this groundwater management system. Lijiang basin is under two administrative jurisdictions—Old Town District and Yulong Naxi Autonomous County. This brings conflicts on coordination among different departments. Secondly, water resource management bureau has long been marginalised in the government system. Their implementation capability is much weaker than the “strong members” like fiscal and finance departments. Therefore, this management system calls for joint punishment measures implemented by the water resource administration and other relevant departments altogether, for instance, businesses and commerce administration and urban planning administration. The water management system in Lijiang is illustrated in
Figure 6.
In December 2009, Old Town District Government firstly initiated an emergency action plan to cope with the rapid environmental degradation and ecological hazard. BDP and Qingxi were both included in the emergency action plan as the most crucial groundwater sources in the region. By 2010, the district government even established an action team of groundwater conservation, composed of 18 local administrative agencies including environmental agency, construction and development authority, urban planning bureau, public sanitation bureau, development and reform committee, water supply facilities etc. Lijiang municipality also complied an emergency action plan in 2012, which included groundwater over-extraction risks.
The overlapping administration across different authorities does not only reflect in policymaking and implementation but also groundwater monitoring and information sharing. The groundwater quality and capacity are mainly monitored by three authorities, Lijiang municipal environmental monitoring station, Lijiang disease control centre and Yunnan provincial water resourced administration Lijiang branch. Because those three bureaus belong to different administrative jurisdiction, their monitoring to BDP and Qingxi groundwater resources are not coordinated and the results are not shared among each other. Lijiang water resource administration started monitoring water quality in BDP in 1993, but they only started monitoring in Qingxi reservoir in 2009.
3.2.3. Identify the Outcomes of Interactions
Interactions between key variables also generated corresponding feedback, resulting in different outcomes. The interactions and their feedback mechanisms between actor and action situation can lead to three categories of outcomes—social performance measures, ecological performance measures and externalities to other SES systems [
20,
21]. The identification of multiple outcomes of system interactions can help us exploring successful adaptive management methods. Successful management models can adapt to system changes at different time and space with the support of the feedback mechanisms, which then in turn can strengthen the system’s adaptive capacity [
39].
To solve the overlapping administration problem, Lijiang municipal government established a “river manager” (hezhang) system covering all the riInteractions between key variables also provided corresponding feedback, resulting in different outcomes.Interactions between key variables also provided corresponding feedback, resulting in different outcomes.vers and lakes and canals in the city, and established a matching management mechanism for rivers, lakes, and reservoirs with clear responsibility, coordination, strict supervision, and strong protection. The party secretary of Lijiang municipality serves as the municipal “river manager”, and the mayor serves as the deputy “river manager” at the municipal level. Other rivers and lakes canals are managed by rivers at all levels, including counties (districts), townships (towns, streets), and villages. By the end of 2017, Lijiang has established a system of four-level “river manager” system covering municipality/city, counties (districts), townships (towns, streets) and villages. Those “river managers” are responsible for the protection of the rivers, lakes and reservoirs. The goal is to maintain the water quality compliance rate of important rivers, lakes, and canals in water functional areas of 92% by 2020.
The infrastructure facilities have been completed throughout the Lijiang basin. As early as 2013, the entire water supply system has covered the Lijiang basin. The DN100 pipelines are over 143 km, connecting the Lijiang airport, Yulong Naxi Autonomous County to the south; connecting Shuhe ancient town to the north; connecting cultural industrial park to the east and Baihua villages in the west.
In 2010, Lijiang water resource administration applied specific funding of 3.1 million Yuan from the National Environmental Administration for water conservation in Lijiang, among which 0.8 million Yuan was used on BDP and Qingxi groundwater conservation.
There have been four major institutional changes after the groundwater crisis occurred. First is to set up the public hearing system for water resources management. There were 59 construction projects carried out public hearing between 2011–2015, the 12th Five-Year-Plan. Another five projects public hearing have been conducted since the 13th Five-Year-Plan. The second institutional change is the implementation of the water extraction permit system. Up to the end of 2017, there were totally 2060 Water Users Associations (WUAs) established, which registered and issued 49,302 sets of water extraction rights certificates. The third change is to implement the system of paying for the use of water resources. Lijiang’s water resource fee levy has increased from 1.85 million Yuan in 2010 to 5.9 million Yuan in 2016 (excluding the Jinsha River cascade hydropower station water resource fees). The last institutional arrangement is to formalise the strict protection of groundwater resources. The organization was put in place to promote the construction of groundwater monitoring wells to dynamically record water level and water quality. The BDP groundwater monitoring wells are completed. The government set up strict enforcement of illegal extraction of groundwater resources, by means of investigation through communities, promotion of groundwater protection awareness, and joint legal enforcement on illegal extractions. Until the end of 2017, the total number of 37,000 promotion awareness materials have been distributed throughout the communities. The enforcement team thoroughly investigated and registered 17,718 groundwater wells, among which 356 groundwater wells have been sealed, including 135 deep wells and 221 shallow wells. Around 78% of deep aquifer groundwater wells have been closed up.
Faced with the increasingly severe water crisis in Lijiang basin, Lijiang started to promote the water-saving goal of “promoting the sustainable use of water resources, improving the water environment, and managing urban water-saving regulation” since 2012. According to the public government reports, 15 four-star/five-star hotels out of 17 in Lijiang have successfully established provincial-standard water-saving facilities by 2014. The coverage rates of water-saving facilitated enterprises and residential communities in Lijiang City have reached 26.55% and 18.82%, respectively. InterContinental Lijiang Hefu Hotel, for instance, has established a well-functioning internal water recycling system, with a current daily processing capacity of 180 m3. Together with the collected rainwater, it can meet the needs of the hotel’s landscaped circulation and vegetation water use. The actual water consumption of the hotel in 2014 was 76,000 m3, far below the average water consumption in the industry. However, the majority of illegal wells locates in a much smaller family-run guesthouse, hostels and inns, which are in a grey zone of administration. Almost all surrounding villages, beside Lijiang Old Town, started family guesthouses either by local villagers or rented to outside developers. Those small guesthouses extract groundwater illegally to reduce their operation cost. The size of the guesthouses may range from 10 rooms to 100 rooms, mostly occupied during peak season. Over recent years, the situation got worse and drilling shallow wells would not meet the demand of those guesthouses, also because the shallow aquifer groundwater is polluted with the uncontrolled discharge of sewage water and waste, many guesthouses chose to drill deep to extract clean groundwater.
Since 2013, the administration centre of Lijiang municipal government has effectively saved water resources by adopting measures such as the construction of recycled water reuse projects and small-scale rainwater collection pools. The reclaimed water reuse system can produce 60 m3 of recycled water per day. There are 12 small rainwater collection pools saving nearly 1000 m3 water per year. In addition to other water-saving measures, the annual water consumption of the administrative centre has dropped to 37,000 m3, which is 15,000 m3 less than expected. Yet again, it is always easier to regulate registered buildings and houses for water recycling, such as the administration centre. It is much harder to regulate small businesses, especially the ones opened in villages. Car wash is a typical example. There are many villages located within the Lijiang basin, close to the world heritage site. The collectively-owned land in those villages cannot be trade privately. Therefore, many villages would use those land to build car wash businesses or restaurants. Those car wash shops extract large amount of groundwater for their daily use. This has been repeatedly reported to local government. However, local authorities, especially water resource administration have not solved this problem effectively.
Extended water pollution from surface water to groundwater is another big concern [
40]. Lijiang built its very first sewage water treatment plant in 2000. Tourism boost started from the 1990s have discharged uncontrolled sewage water to rivers, canals throughout the Lijiang basin before 2000. Since 1997, Lijiang Old Town has initiated sewage treatment plants and sewage pipe network construction projects. The first sewage treatment plant was built by the end of 2000, with a daily processing capacity of 20,000 tons. There were 63 km network of sewage pipeline laid by December 2003, covering main streets, but still at a very low coverage rate of less than half throughout the Old Town. A large portion of sewage is still not included in the sewage pipeline. A large amount of sewage is discharged into the nearby water body, which intensified the water pollution.
3.2.4. Compared with the Design Principles of Adaptive Management
The comparison between the analysis of the Lijiang groundwater case and the design principles of effectively managed commons would allow us to better explore the main issues that may have contributed to this particular case. The long-enduring institutions of successfully-managed commons share certain similarities that are then abstracted into the so-called Design Principles [
41,
42], as summarised in
Figure 7.
A thorough investigation of groundwater reserve is crucial to prevent a similar tragedy of Lijiang. The basis of good management is a clear understanding of the resource. Lijiang had not investigated its groundwater capacity and condition before it was pushed into the overenthusiastic tourism development. As the result, both boundaries of users and resources were implicit, which caused a tremendous challenge to the recognition of rights in the groundwater management system.
Lijiang’s groundwater management broke apart between administrative governance and local communities’ participation. Collective-choice arrangements that traditionally embedded in Naxi culture in the local community was destroyed by mass tourism development, without supplying any alternative arrangements. The strong impulse of profit-seeking blinded people’s eyes over their own precious resource, while the local authorities tried very hard to control with legal and administrative rules rather than reviving the local tradition and culture that respect the nature with great awe. Both parts of groundwater management are equally important, but bridging those two is even more important.
Lijiang basin, centred with the UNESCO world heritage site is the most famous tourist destination, which has brought tremendous wealth to local residents in a rather short period of time. On the other hand, the villagers living in nearby mountainous areas such as Jiuzihai basin are still trapped in a low level of economic and social development. However, their livelihood is essential to maintain the water source for the groundwater supply of Old Town. Therefore, there should have been a sustainable support scheme to transfer tourism benefits to those poor village communities and to encourage them to apply environmentally-friendly development approach in those water source areas, as described in principle 4.
Although Lijiang basin consumes a large amount of water as the political and economic centre, agricultural water supply for irrigation is still the largest water consumer in Lijiang. Therefore, the conflict of water shortage between agricultural water use and other water use remains an essential problem. The conflict is particularly prominent between irrigation water demand in the Baisha township in the north of Lijiang basin and urban water supply of Lijiang city, as well as large Old Town landscape water demand. Especially during the dry seasons, the adjustment of Baisha irrigation water use could have an evident impact on urban water supply in the city. Therefore, measures such as adjusting agricultural structure and reasonable compensation for farmers if irrigation water has to be reduced may need to be considered to ease the conflicts.
On the other hand, regulating mass tourism in Lijiang will be the key to long-term sustainable development. Yulong snow mountain, for instance, is the foundation of groundwater reserve in the region. If the temperature increases by 1.6 degrees by 2050, the Yulong glacier area would shrink to about 22% of its current size. Given the fact that global warming has already affected its glacier, tourists should be restricted to help to conserve the glaciers. There is a golf course built very close to the glaciers at the elevation of 3100 m in Ganhaizi. Its maintenance requires a large amount of water use and chemical insecticides, which can be a threat to the snow mountain and its glaciers. Prohibiting touristic activities in BDP and Qingxi reservoir can be of great importance too. Water source contamination is also a big concern for Lijiang’s groundwater conservation.