Cities fail to improve water quality

China is making progress in battling the smog that can shroud its big cities, but in some areas, especially in northeastern China, water pollution is still severe.

Seventy-three cities failed to reach water quality targets in the first quarter of 2018, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said on Thursday.

Six of the 10 cities where the problems are most severe are in northeastern China. They include Tieling, Jilin and Siping.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, said it is the first time the ministry has released a list of the cities that have failed to meet water quality standards, and that will prompt the governments of the listed cities to attach more importance water protection.

A lack of environmental protection awareness is one of the major reasons for the bad water quality in some cities, Ma said.

The northeastern region’s lackluster economic development also means it has less to invest in environmental protection, he added. However, in regions along the Yangtze River Economic Belt, water quality improved during the first four months of 2018.

More than 72 percent of water in the region was rated Grade III or higher, and only 3.5 percent was Grade V, said Liu Zhiquan, head of the ministry’s environmental monitoring department.

China grades its water in five categories. Grade III and above is deemed safe for direct human contact, while grades IV and V can only be used in industry and agriculture. to

An automatic monitoring network, consisting of 943 automatic monitoring stations, to check surface water quality in the Yangtze belt, will be built by the end of July, Liu said.

The stations will collect water quality data every four hours, and it will be published and shared online among different regions along the rivers, he said.

Another monitoring network will be built to collect data from more than 8,000 major sewage outlets along the Yangtze River.

The data will be shared online with local environmental protection departments to better curb pollution.

The Yangtze River Economic Belt consists of nine provinces and two municipalities that cover roughly a fifth of China’s land mass and are home to more than 600 million people.