Vision turning lucid waters into reality

Ecological park

The ear-shaped lake lies parallel to Cangshan Mountain and 18 streams from the mountain flow into it. Due to the pleasant weather all year round, a constant stream of tourists visit Dali.

On the lake's eastern shoreline, people can view the beautiful scenery of both the lake and the mountain, with dramatic clouds reflected in the water.

From 2011 to 2016, the number of tourists visiting Dali annually increased from about 15 million to 39 million, making the area increasingly crowded and polluted.

The local government said the rapid but disorderly development of the booming tourism industry gave the lake no chance to rest or recover, and the infrastructure needed to protect it, such as sewage treatment facilities, was not in place.

In 2018, the government announced that 1,806 households or homestay hotels needed to be demolished to transform the lakeside into an ecological park.

Meanwhile, all the ongoing construction projects on Erhai Lake's eastern shore were ordered to stop.

The government's actions had an immediate effect on the number of tourists visiting Erhai and Cangshan Mountain, which fell to 19.8 million in 2018, down 3.6 percent from 2016, even though tourist visits to the prefecture rose by 20 percent to 47 million.

Zhang, the innkeeper, said he was positive about his future and Dali's.

"I have restarted my business outside the protection zone," he said. "Everything will be fine and back on track. The water quality of Erhai Lake is becoming better and tourists will be attracted back so that our business will boom again."

China has 2,865 lakes that cover at least 1 sq km, and Zheng Binghui, a water environmentalist at the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, said about one-third of grain production took place in the country's lake basins, along with similar amounts of industrial and overall agricultural production.

"From the 1990s, lakes that had been severely polluted by discharges and disturbed by human activities lost their chemical balance and suffered from aquatic bloom outbreaks, which had a serious impact on drinking water safety and the lake ecosystems," Zheng wrote in Democracy and Science magazine in 2018.

Tech-focused response

Since 1998, the country's top environmental watchdog has been reporting annually on the water quality of China's three most polluted major lakes－Taihu, Dianchi and Chaohu. For more than a decade they were rated below Grade V, the lowest level in the nation's five-tier water quality grading system.

In 2007, the central government launched a technology-focused response to water pollution in the three lakes, as well as Erhai and the Three Gorges Reservoir.

Production processes in key industries such as printing, dyeing and food manufacturing near Taihu Lake, in Jiangsu province, were reviewed to ensure that discharges and emissions met standards. About 405 kilometers of lake shoreline has also been restored as an ecological belt that serves as a buffer zone to protect Taihu from pollution.

In 2016, Taihu Lake became the first of the three major lakes to have no water rated below Grade V and last year more than 90 percent of its water reached Grade II or III, according to an annual report published by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

In Dali, government efforts to curb pollution have also paid off.

For seven months of last year, the water quality of Erhai Lake was Grade II－classified as high－a month longer than in 2017, the local government said.

In the Dianchi Lake Basin in Kunming, capital of Yunnan, industrial enterprises have retreated from the lake area to minimize pollution.

Last year, one-third of the water in Dianchi Lake was rated Grade II, whereas none met that quality standard in 2018.

During a visit to a wetland at the northern end of Dianchi Lake in January this year, President Xi reiterated the importance of ecological civilization and green development.