As the saying goes, it's never too late to mend the fence after a sheep is lost. To view the increasingly worsening drought in more than a century in Southwest China through this mindset, we need to do much more than quench the immediate thirst of millions of local residents.

We need to look at how local economic developments in the past decade have impacted the local ecology, especially if the developments have played a part in causing the drought.

In the past decade, more and more hectares of native forestland have been razed to make room for plants such as rubber and eucalyptus trees, which have brought benefits to the local economy. However, these substitute forests are harmful to the ecology. Instead of conserving underground water, these trees absorb, negatively impacting the local ecology.