NGO reports improve water quality in Chinese province, study finds
- Volunteers monitored waterways in Jiangsu over 15 months, sending the results to three levels of government
- Researchers say it led to an average 19 per cent reduction in the concentration of pollutants
Water quality in a province of eastern China was found to improve when it was monitored by volunteers from an NGO that passed the results to authorities, according to a new study.
The NGO sent reports on the waterways in Jiangsu – where there is no regular, centralised water quality monitoring – to three levels of government.
It led to an average 19 per cent reduction in the concentration of pollutants in those waterways, researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California, Santa Barbara found.
“By monitoring water quality and sharing the information with multiple levels of government, non-governmental groups may signal to local governments that resource status is observable and oversight is likely,” the researchers said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week.
“Monitoring can improve resource management when it provides information that makes local resource managers accountable to higher authorities.”
In China, where about 70 per cent of rivers and lakes are unsafe for human use, water pollution causes more than 100,000 deaths and economic losses of US$1.5 trillion each year, the paper said.
