China s Water Resources Management | 2021
Water Quality Management
Abstract
The chapter investigates water quality management, and attention will be placed on recent policy initiatives under the discourse of ecological civilization, such as the River (Lake) Chief System and the Water Pollution Trading Scheme. Good progress has been made in water quality control through conventional regulatory programs, i.e., the Environment Impact Assessment, the Three Synchronizations, and the Pollution Discharge Fee System. The pollution of water bodies has continued to be serious. The River (Lake) Chief System is a manifestation for addressing serious water pollution with a top-down nature. Water pollution trading has been introduced for reducing loads of pollutants discharged into freshwater bodies. The case of the blue-green algae incident in Tai Lake in 2007 became a wake-up call regarding water quality management.