China says progress made on water pollution, but battle remains

China has made progress tackling water pollution, but it is still struggling to impose unified standards, especially in poorer, water scarce regions, a government researcher said on Thursday.

China has been slowly cleaning up its water after years of indiscriminate dumping of industrial and household waste, overmining and the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers.

With water scarcity seen as a potential growth bottleneck, the government is also desperate to make polluted rivers and lakes clean enough to support agriculture and manufacturing, but it still has a long way to go.

“Though overall national water quality is getting better, the pollution load far exceeds environmental capacity and the capacity of the water treatment industry in some regions,” said Wen Yuli, a researcher at the China Academy for Environmental Planning, a think tank in the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Speaking at a forum on the sidelines of the Aquatech expo in Shanghai, Wen said about nine per cent of China’s groundwater remains “below grade V”, which means it has “lost function” and is unfit even for industry and irrigation.

While China is working to bring it down to five per cent by 2020, some regions still lacked an adequate “safeguard capability”, he said.