In a newly-amended plan to tackle water pollution in the Three Gorges area, the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) has encouraged the public and private sector to hold government accountable for water pollution: “Citizens, corporations and other organizations shall turn to the court for compensation if being threatened by water pollution,” the SEPA document said. “Government officials in charge (of environmental management) will be denounced and punished if serious environmental damage happened due to administrative flaws or they try to interfere with enforcement of environmental departments.”

Previously, government officials responsible for water pollution faced only disciplinary action but a new law effective June 1, 2008 allows for fines against the heads of polluting enterprises for up to half their annual income.

The report by SEPA warns that water quality in the Three Gorges reservoir, which stretches more than 600 kilometres west from the dam to Chongqing city, is likely to get worse when the water rises from 156 metres to its final height of 175 metres next year.

Based on a 2005 sampling of chemical oxygen demand or COD (an indicator of pollutants in the water), SEPA claims that water quality has declined in several Yangtze tributaries flowing into the reservoir, while quality in the reservoir remains acceptable for “drinking, aquatic breeding, fishing, and swimming.”

Targets to reduce COD in the project area by 25 percent between 2001 and 2005 have not been met, the agency said. Although several big wastewater plants have been built and polluting factories closed or
equipped with remediation facilities, some of these facilities have not been running at full capacity.

SEPA’s revised plan calls for 460 new pollution-control projects worth an investment of more than US$3 billion over the next three years.

Meanwhile, China’s Three Gorges Project Corporation, the dam operator, announced its own environmental remediation projects earlier this year, including several wastewater treatment facilities and a special processing ground for handling toxic algae outbreaks in the reservoir.

A study released by the Yangtze Water Resources Protection Bureau last year, found the incidence of algae outbreaks had risen steadily in the reservoir in recent years. [Read an interview with the director of the Yangtze Water Resources Protection Bureau.]

Since construction of the US$25 billion dam got underway in 1994, Xinhua reports that the government has constructed more than 70 sewage disposal and waste treatment plants, closed or relocated 1500 factories and resettled 70,000 people from disaster-prone areas along the Three Gorges reservoir.

At a forum in Wuhan last year, senior officials and experts admitted the Three Gorges dam had caused or aggravated a litany of environmental problems, including landslides and water pollution.

Water pollution clean-up has become an urgent priority for the central government following a number of major chemical spills and algae outbreaks that have contaminated the country’s rivers and lakes, leaving millions of people without safe water for days and weeks at a time.

In his address to the National People’s Congress this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stressed the need for pollution control in the Three Gorges area and elsewhere in China.