Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Public Acceptance
Water industry is an important basic industry that affects every aspects of our lives. To introduce bio-process into original method, we need the approval of public and government. Those two different groups needs different information to accept our project. On this page, we summarize the efforts and thoughts relating to public acceptance and government approval.
Contents
Public Acceptance
What does public concern about a project like ours? Even though we didn't conduct any surveys, from our publicity experience the main concerns is safety and necessity. In this section, we focus on expanding the necessity research by graphing the data of water shortage in China.
Publicity in Science Technology Museum
On August 8, our team went to Shanghai Science and Technology Museum to reveal our idea to the public. IGEM teams invited to participate in the publicity activity included FDU, TJU, ZJU, SJTLU, NYU Shanghai, SJTU Software and our team.
We introduced iGEM, synthetic biology and our project. We tried to make our publicity popular and easy to understand in consideration of audiences’ biological knowledge level.
Figure 6.5.1 The Publicity Activity in Shanghai Science and Technology Museum
Communicating with a team member from FDU.
Figure 6.5.2 The Publicity Activity in Shanghai Science and Technology Museum
The post of our team
The publicity works, yet, not as good as we expected. When we summarize this activities, the main mistake we think we make is missing the why. Thus, the audience cannot connect to what we do. Based on that, we summarize the water shortage report of China.
Water shortage report
Generally speaking, China is now facing severe water problem, which is mainly about the lack of clean fresh water.There's great amount of data relating to Chinese water shortage problem, however they are cold chart that is hard to understand for the public. Our report wanted to make the data becomes maps so that it is simple to read. Also, the maps will help identify the most severe water shortage area in China.
Figure 6.5.3 2013 Per Capita Water Resources in China
Data resource: National Bureau of Statistics of China
Figure 6.5.4 2013 Per Capita Water Consumption in China
Data resource: National Bureau of Statistics of China
Although China’s total water resource is temporarily abundant, whose quantity is about 2.8 trillion cubic meters, ranking the forth in the world. Water resources per capita equals to only one quarter of the world’s average (Li, S, 2009). From figure 6.5.3 and 6.5.4, water problem is the especially serious in Northwest China and North China.
Reasons of water shortage in China
China’s water problem results from multiple reasons. The reasons can be divided in two parts, uncontrollable reasons and controllable reasons.
Uncontrollable reasons, including hydro-geological condition, rainfall capacity, and demand growth caused by population growth, are difficult to be changed by human beings.
Some areas are located in arid or semi-arid region, such as Northwest China, so annual total rainfall is very little. Especially in Sinkiang, annual total rainfall in 2013 is only 303. 6 billion cubic meters (Department of Water Resources of Sinkiang, 2014). What’s more, awful hydro-geological condition makes surface and shallow subsurface of some area lack water storage space. Even though water resources is abundant in flood season because of heavy rainfall in a short time, most of water will go rushing out in the form of flood. Therefore, water resources shortage won’t be alleviated after flood season (Tan, H, 2013).
Demand growth caused by population growth is also a reason of more and more serious water resources shortage. Although the population of China is under effective control, positive natural population growth rate means that the population is growing continuously. If we suppose China’s total water resources is almost invariant, per capita water resource is less and less.
Compared with uncontrollable reasons, controllable part should be paid more attention to, because we can solve the problem through our efforts.
Controllable part covers water pollution, waste of water and underwater over-exploitation.
Figure 6.5.5 2001 Percentage of Heavy-polluted water in China
Heavy-polluted water includes water of class IV, V and under class V according to
Environmental Quality Standard for Surface Water (GB3838-2002).
Data resource: The Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China
We can clearly see the situation of the water pollution in China in 2001 in the following figure. The percentage of heavy-polluted water in total water resources is over 75% in Ningsia, Shantung, Shanxi, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Shanghai and Tientsin. In China, the percentage of heavy-polluted rivers is about 31.4%, and the percentage of heavy-polluted lakes is about 68.1%.Much water is too contaminated to be used or drunk, which causes quality-induced water shortage.
