Eight decades of sustained efforts to harness and protect the Yellow River have greatly strengthened flood control, supported economic and social development, and brought historic improvements to the river basin's environment, officials said on Friday.
The achievements have ended the river's centuries-old pattern of frequent dike breaches and course changes, while large-scale soil erosion control has helped turn vast areas of the Loess Plateau from yellow to green, they told a news conference held by the State Council Information Office.
Wang Baoen, vice-minister of water resources, said the Ministry of Water Resources and provincial-level authorities across the basin have carried out extensive protection and governance programs under the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.
"Over the past 80 years, China has made remarkable achievements in the protection and governance of the Yellow River," he said.
A basin-wide system for flood control, rainfall, water and sediment monitoring, forecasting and disaster prevention has largely taken shape, significantly improving the river's overall flood-control capacity, Wang said.
The river has also played an important role in sustaining regional development despite its limited water resources. With only 2 percent of China's total water resources, it meets the water needs of 12 percent of the country's population and 17 percent of its farmland, while supporting 14 percent of the national GDP.
More than 54,000 projects for water resources management have been built across the basin, while water diversion projects have eased shortages in water-stressed regions. Unified water allocation has also ended the drying up of the river's lower reaches, which have now recorded uninterrupted flow for 27 consecutive years.
Wang said continued efforts to conserve water, restore aquatic ecosystems and improve the water environment have put the basin on a path of ecological conservation and high-quality development. The water quality of the river's main stream has remained at Grade II, the second-best level in China's five-tier system for surface water, for nearly four years.
The Yellow River was historically known as both China's "mother river" and a source of devastating floods. In the more than 2,540 years before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, it suffered 1,593 recorded dike breaches and 26 major course changes, according to Chen Dongming, head of the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, Ministry of Water Resources.
Over the past eight decades, the total length of embankments along the river's main stream has reached 3,000 kilometers. The basin now has 2,768 reservoirs, including 40 major reservoirs, as well as more than 10,000 hydrological, water-level and rainfall monitoring stations.
"Over the past 80 years, we have successfully withstood 12 major floods in which peak flows at the Huayuankou hydrological station exceeded 10,000 cubic meters per second," Chen said. "The embankments on both sides of the lower Yellow River remained intact, and the history of frequent dike breaches and course changes has gone forever."
Ecological restoration on the Loess Plateau has, meanwhile, helped address sediment, one of the most persistent challenges in governing the river.
Yao Wenguang, director-general of the ministry's department of flood and drought disaster prevention, said about 290,500 square kilometers of eroded land in the basin have been treated.
More than 60,000 sediment-retaining dams have been built, helping prevent 24.7 billion metric tons of sediment from entering the river. Annual sediment inflows have fallen by more than 80 percent, while soil erosion control has generated 2.43 trillion yuan ($363 billion) in economic benefits.
