The experts from State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters (SFCDRH) and Ministry of Water Resources urge the whole society to pay attention to the two threatening factors for China's water resources: scarcity and pollution...

The scarcity problem is primarily in north China. Here the water resource makes for 19% of the country's total while in the valleys of the Yellow and Huaihe rivers it is only 7.7% of the country's total.

Despite the scarcity, the water use efficiency is very low in China. In agriculture, the water use for producing one unit of food is 2-2.5 times that in developed countries. In industry, the water efficiency is 75% lower than the developed countries; the water use for producing each unit of GDP is 15-100 times that in the developed countries.

The water quality monitoring and inspection were done recently to 100,000 kilometers of the river sections of the 700 large and medium-sized rivers. The results reflect that half of the inspected sections are polluted, and 10% are severely polluted. Seven major Chinese rivers are all polluted to various degrees, and over 90% of the urban water resources are polluted. About 700 million people are drinking the water containing more bacteria coli than the standard allows, and 170 million people are drinking the water which is organically polluted, and 300 million urban residents are facing the problem of water pollution.