China plans to spend 2 billion to build "groundwater monitoring project"

The Ministry of Environmental Protection has recently accepted the "National Groundwater Monitoring Project" EIA report. According to the “Environmental Impact Report for Construction Projects” (short form of the report) of the project, the total investment of the project is more than 2 billion yuan. The hydrology bureau of the Ministry of Water Resources and the China Geological and Environmental Monitoring Institute are responsible for the construction. The control area is 3.5 million square kilometers to form a layout. More scientific and reasonable national groundwater monitoring station network.

The long-term lack of scientific planning and rational allocation of groundwater development and utilization in China has resulted in serious over-exploitation of groundwater in some areas. This has caused the continuous decline of groundwater levels, dry springs, shrinking of wetlands, desertification of land, and groundwater pollution.

In recent years, groundwater pollution in China has also become increasingly prominent. The "2012 China Environmental Status Bulletin" shows that nearly 60% of the 198 prefecture-level administrative regions in China have poor or very poor groundwater quality. According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the major over-target indicators for groundwater are iron, manganese, fluoride, “trinitrogen” (nitrite nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, and ammonia nitrogen), total hardness, total dissolved solids, sulfates, and chlorides. There is heavy (class) metal over-standard phenomenon.

The brief report introduced that the construction scope of the project is for 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps across the country (excluding Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao), including the seven major river basins and 16 key monitoring areas in the country.