Pilot program helps clean river
Print Edition
Cao Guanwu, like others in Xiongcun village in east China, used to dump household garbage into a local river, an important drinking water source for millions of people in downstream Zhejiang Province.
He stopped this environmentally unfriendly habit last year and started putting rubbish at the gate of his house, to be taken away to a garbage transfer station by collectors.
This change has helped clean the 359-kilometer-long Xin’an River, which originates in Huangshan City, Anhui Province. The river flows near the village and into booming eastern coastal Zhejiang. Two thirds of the river is located in Anhui.
“To prevent residents from throwing rubbish into the river, three collectors in the village are in charge of collecting garbage every day,” said Yu Hongyun, deputy head of Xiongcun township government.
The improvement is attributed to an environmental compensation program launched in November 2011 by the country’s finance and environmental protection ministries.
Under the program, a compensation fund of 500 million yuan (US$81.2 million) was set up for protecting water quality of the Xin’an River. The pot of money included 300 million yuan from the central budget and 100 million yuan each from Anhui and Zhejiang.
If water quality in Anhui reaches the agreed basic standards, including the limits for chemicals like ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorus in water, Zhejiang gives its 100 million yuan to Anhui.
If the water quality in Anhui fails to meet standards, Anhui compensates Zhejiang 100 million yuan.
“Monitoring results for 2012 showed the water quality of the river in Anhui was better than the basic standards. Zhejiang gave Anhui 100 million yuan,” said He Wenying, head of the environmental monitoring station of Huangshan City, the river’s source.
China has many trans-provincial rivers. Pollution of the upper reaches affects residents in lower reaches. Good water quality in the upper reaches benefits people downstream.
This year has witnessed incidents including the discovery of thousands of pig corpses floating from Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province to Shanghai, as well as a leakage of aniline in Shanxi Province that affected drinking water in neighboring Hebei Province.
Urbanization and industrialization make it tough to protect rivers. Lawmakers and experts have called for such compensation programs to help.
Over the past few years, Huangshan City authorities have taken many measures to treat pollution, including garbage collection in villages on the river, treatment of agricultural pollution and urban sewage, cancellation of fishing farms on the river and upgrading industries. From 2006 to 2010, Huangshan closed more than 150 polluting plants and completed 65 industrial waste treatment projects, said Lu Haining, deputy head of the Huangshan Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.
In the past three years, the city has rejected more than 140 investment projects from outside, Lu added. The city has no plants for iron or steel, building materials or printing, dyeing or paper-making.
“The aim is to protect the river,” said the official.
In Jiekou village, Shexian County of Huangshan, Wang Wenjin’s fishing farms with an area of 10,000 square meters were dismantled within several months after the program started.
The government gave him 200,000 yuan in compensation. “We all understand the policy is to protect the Xin’an River. We cannot raise fish anymore in the river. But I do not know what I will live on in the future.”
In Wang’s village, 95 households face the same problem.
“After two years of treatment, water quality in the Xin’an River has improved a lot. But residents in the upper reaches who sacrificed their own interests to protect the ecological environment have not gotten substantial returns,” said Gu Jiawen, a senior political advisor in Huangshan.
The city has invested more than 7 billion yuan in environmental protection projects in the past three years and plans to pour 40 billion yuan from 2011 to 2015 into protecting the river.
“Compared with the huge investments, 500 million yuan is not much and could not even pay for the current environmental protection projects,” said Lu. “The amount of the compensation fund should be increased annually. Otherwise, it cannot be called compensation.”
After decades of rapid economic growth, pollution in the air, water and soil is a major problem in China.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection said this year that the quality of the country’s water resources is far from good. The quality of underground water was ranked “poor” or “relatively poor” in 57.3 percent of the 4,929 monitoring points in 198 cities around the country, while about 30 percent of water monitoring points in major rivers indicated poor quality.
Only sharing interests and jointly shouldering responsibilities can the compensation problem be solved, according to He Shaoling, an engineer with the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research.
Substantial compensation should be given to those who sacrifice their own interests for the environment, the expert said. Improvements should be made to the pilot scheme in order to promote it across the country for the protection of rivers, He added.
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