CCTV News: Recently, the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Natural Resources organized relevant provinces and relevant technical units to complete a new round of national groundwater over-exploitation zone demarcation work after three years, comprehensively demarcated the national groundwater over-exploitation zone, found out the current situation of groundwater over-exploitation in the country, analyzed the changes over the past 10 years, and reflected the achievements of the national groundwater over-exploitation control work in recent years.
This demarcation work makes full use of the monitoring data of 34,929 monitoring wells of the water conservancy department and natural resources department, and fully mobilizes more than 200 units and more than 2,000 technicians. The country has designated a total of 267,600 square kilometers of groundwater over-exploitation areas in the plain area, of which the shallow groundwater over-exploitation areas are 144,300 square kilometers, mainly distributed in the northern and southern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, the Tuha Basin, the Huanghuai Region, the Hexi Corridor, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Plain, the Xiliao River Basin, the Ordos Platform, the Fenwei Valley, the Sanjiang Plain, etc.; the deep-stack pressure-bearing water over-exploitation areas are 132,700 square kilometers (the overlapping area of depth and shallow layers is about 9,400 square kilometers), mainly distributed in the Huanghuai Region, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Plain, the lower reaches of the Liaohe River Plain, etc.
Compared with the results of the national groundwater overexploitation zone demarcation in 2015, the comprehensive groundwater overexploitation management has made positive progress in recent years. Overall, the area of groundwater over-exploitation areas across the country has generally decreased, and the amount and degree of over-exploitation have been significantly reduced. First, the number of overexploitation areas has decreased, and the number of provinces with overexploitation has decreased from 21 to 18. Second, the area of over-exploitation has decreased, and the total area of this groundwater over-exploitation area has decreased by 19,500 square kilometers compared with the previous round, a decrease of 6.8%. Third, the over-exploitation volume has dropped significantly, and the over-exploitation volume of groundwater this time decreased by 5.03 billion cubic meters compared with the previous round, a decrease of 31.9%. Fourth, the degree of overexploitation has been significantly reduced, and the area of severe overexploitation areas has decreased by 88,300 square kilometers compared with the previous round, a decrease of 51%.
