[Epoch Times November 23, 2021](Epoch Times reporter Li Jing comprehensive report) The Chinese Communist Party recently issued the “Groundwater Management Regulations”, which has aroused attention from all walks of life on China’s groundwater pollution. Previous official investigations stated that more than 80% of groundwater in mainland China was severely polluted. Experts say that groundwater pollution in the mainland is caused by the wrong policies of the CCP and is a man-made disaster.
On November 22, at a policy briefing held by the New Office of the Communist Party of China, the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Justice introduced the “Regulations on Groundwater Management” that will be implemented on December 1 this year. The Ministry of Water Resources of the Communist Party of China admits that “groundwater is renewed slowly, over-exploited, and pollution problems are difficult to remediate and repair.”
Officials disclosed at the meeting that China’s groundwater resources will be 855.35 billion cubic meters in 2020, and the amount of groundwater resources that do not overlap with surface water will be 119.82 billion cubic meters. The authorities have particularly emphasized the serious problem of overexploitation of groundwater. Currently, 21 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in China have over-exploitation problems, and some areas still exploit deep groundwater.
The total area of over-exploitation of groundwater is 280,000 square kilometers, with an average annual over-exploitation of 15.8 billion cubic meters. The problem of over-exploitation of groundwater in North China is the most serious.
Overexploitation of groundwater leads to the drop of groundwater level, the drying of aquifers, and the depletion of water sources, causing problems such as land subsidence, shrinkage of rivers and lakes, seawater intrusion, and ecological degradation.
Officials also disclosed that the problem of groundwater pollution is also very prominent. Industrial wastewater discharge, agricultural non-point source pollution, and urban domestic sewage lead to groundwater pollution.
Pollution is the main reason that affects the quality of groundwater. According to the Bulletin of the State of the Ecological Environment in China in 2020, of the 10,242 monitoring points that focus on shallow groundwater quality monitoring, the monitoring points of Grade I to III water quality accounted for 22.7%, Grade IV 33.7%, and Grade V 43.6%.
According to the “Monthly Report on Groundwater Dynamics” issued by the Ministry of Water Resources of the Communist Party of China in 2016, 691 category IV water, accounting for 32.9%, and 994 category V water, accounting for 47.3%. In total, more than 80% of groundwater is threatened by pollution, and some areas are polluted by heavy metals and toxic organics.
The arsenic content of groundwater in Guangdong’s “Pearl River Delta” exceeds 15 times the standard
Professor John A. Cherry, a well-known Canadian hydrogeologist who has long been studying groundwater problems in the mainland, visited Hong Kong in 2016. In an interview with Dongwang, he bluntly stated that the groundwater in a wide range of rural areas in mainland China has been contaminated, and even up to 80% of the water sources in some rural areas have problems.
As early as 2012, Cheri, together with Hong Kong and Mainland experts, went to the Pearl River Delta region to extract groundwater for testing and found that the local water contained as much as 161 micrograms of arsenic per liter, which was far more than 15 times the WHO standard. If you drink water with a content of more than 50 micrograms of arsenic per liter for a long time, it will affect the cognitive development of children; if you directly pump for irrigation, it will inevitably affect agricultural production and make crops highly toxic.
Experts reveal the source of groundwater pollution
In 2013, Ma Zhong, dean of the School of Environment at Renmin University of China, led the completion of a survey entitled “Strengthening the supervision of underground pollutant discharge and protecting groundwater.” The investigation revealed that 16 billion tons of industrial wastewater may be secretly discharged underground by enterprises every year.
Regarding groundwater overexploitation and pollution, Dr. Wang Weiluo, a well-known expert in water conservancy and environmental protection ecology, analyzed that the main cause of shallow groundwater pollution is industrial pollution, which is caused by the rapid development of industry at the expense of the environment in order to fill the political achievements of the CCP; while deep groundwater After being over-extracted, the CCP recharged it with sewage, polluting the medium and deep groundwater.
Wang Weiluo said: “Deep and middle groundwater is mainly caused by sewage recharge. Because the middle and deep groundwater is recharged slowly. If you only mine without supplementing, the ground will collapse when the ground is empty. There are some in China. Scientists thought of a way and said that we recharge the groundwater. And because China’s surface water is not clean and polluted, the contaminated surface water is used to recharge it to the groundwater. Water pollution in China is man-made. It is a man-made disaster. I think there is only one source of pollution, which is the pollution of the system.”
Editor in charge: Li Qiong#
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