Water pollution incidents and their influencing factors in China during the past 20 years

The Missing Piece of the Puzzle: How Different Water-related Public Concerns Contribute to Water Governance in China

Public participation is crucial to improving the performance of water governance systems, especially in a governance model dominated by a top-down hierarchical structure. Public concerns, as a vital form of public participation, have been acknowledged as an essential component in contributing to water governance. However, few studies explore the varying effects of diverse public concerns in leading to different water governance outcomes. This study addresses this gap by exploring the direct and indirect effects of water-related public concerns on water pollution control and governments' pollution mitigating actions, using citizens' water-related posts crawled from China's social media. Results show that public water-related concerns contribute to water governance both through its direct effects on reducing water pollution and indirect effects by promoting policy actions. Specifically, the concerns related to water pollution hazards, water pollution monitoring, prevention products, and water pollution control measures have more positive impacts on water pollution reduction compared to other types of concern. Meanwhile, public concerns demonstrate stronger effects in triggering economic-related and infrastructure-related water pollution mitigation actions. This study provides nuanced insights to understand the role of public participation in improving water governance, the findings of which are insightful to enhance accountability of water governance systems through a bottom-up approach.

Enhancing water security: Statistical measurement and spatiotemporal analysis

Water security is essential for ensuring energy security, sustainable development, and human survival. However, due to a series of challenges, including rising water demand, environmental pollution, and water resource shortages, the global water security situation remains concerning and poses a threat to global sustainable development. To assess water security in China, this study uses data from 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2021. A comprehensive evaluation method was applied to determine the level of water resource security in China. The Dagum Gini coefficient, Moran index, and spatial model were used to clarify regional differentiation characteristics and the driving factors. The results indicate that while China's water resource security is relatively low, it has shown steady improvement in recent years. Significant regional disparities exist in water resource security across China, with notable spatial characteristics, and socio-economic factors are the primary causes of these differences. Based on the above research, we put forward policy recommendations from the aspects of water resources management, public participation and inter-regional water resources cooperation, to provide reference for water resources security in developing countries.

Development and application of a multi-centre cloud platform architecture for water environment management

To promote the intelligent and accurate management of river basins, especially large basins which involve many catchments, it is highly required to develop a useful platform to effectively coordinate arithmetic resources and data, and simultaneously help to make decisions based on the real-time calculation. In this study, a multi-centre cloud platform architecture called 3L4C was constructed, which includes a Cloud-edge-terminal Layer (3L), data centre, model centre, control centre, and customer-service centre (4C). Data fusion technology and an air-land-water coupled model were constructed. Based on HTML5, JavaScript, and Java, an integrated water environment management platform was created and applied to the Three Gorges Reservoir Basin, China. The platform was tested and successfully used for automatic water quality prediction, water environment pollution analysis and control, early warning of abnormal water quality, and emergency water pollution incident evaluation. This platform quickly and accurately forecasts and perfectly displays past, present and future state of the water environment, and offers beneficial support for management decisions in various water environment departments.

Hidden risks: Simulated leakage of domestic sewage to secondary water supply systems poses serious microbiological risks

There are continuous reports about the pollution of the secondary water supply systems (SWSSs), among which domestic sewage leakage is the most serious. In this study, a pilot experiment lasting 70 days was conducted to explore the changes in physicochemical water quality and the microbial profiles in SWSSs polluted by different doses of domestic sewage through qPCR and high-throughput sequencing methods. The results showed that when domestic sewage entered the simulated water storage tank, a large amount of organic matter brought by domestic sewage quickly consumed chlorine disinfectants. High pollution levels (pollution index ≥ 1/1000) were accompanied by significant increases in turbidity and ammonia nitrogen concentration (p < 0.05) and by abnormal changes in sensory properties. Although different microbial community structures were found only at high pollution levels, qPCR results showed that the abundance of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene and some pathogenic gene markers in the polluted tank increased with the pollution level, and the specific gene marker of pathogens could be detected even at imperceptible pollution levels. In particular, the high detection frequency and abundance of Escherichia coli and Enterococcus faecails in polluted tank water samples demonstrated that they can be used for early warning. Moreover, it seems that the microorganisms that came with the domestic sewage lost their cultivability soon after entering SWSSs but could recover their activities during stagnation. In addition, the biofilm biomass in the polluted tank with high pollution levels increased faster at the initial stage, while after a longer contact time, it tended to remain at the same level as the control tank. This study emphasized the high microbial risk introduced by sewage water leakage even at imperceptible levels and could provide scientific suggestions for early warning and prevention of pollution to SWSSs.

A Study on the Impact of Organizing Environmental Awareness and Education on the Performance of Environmental Governance in China

The advancement of technology and economic development has raised the standard of living and at the same time brought a greater burden to the environment. Environmental governance has become a common concern around the world, and although China's environmental governance has achieved some success, it is still a long way from the ultimate goal. This paper empirically analyzes the impact of environmental publicity and education on environmental governance performance, using public participation as a mediator. The results show that: the direct effect of environmental publicity and education on environmental governance performance is not significant; environmental publicity and education have a significant positive effect on public participation; public participation significantly contributes to environmental governance performance; public participation shows a good mediating effect between environmental publicity and education and environmental governance performance. The government should adopt diversified environmental protection publicity and education in future environmental governance, and vigorously promote public participation in environmental governance so that the goal of environmental governance can be fundamentally accomplished by all people.