CCTV news (news broadcast): The vast Yellow River and the rolling Yangtze River.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has always been concerned about the great rivers of the motherland, and has made a series of important arrangements for the Yangtze River Basin to focus on major protection rather than major development, ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Yangtze River has become the main battlefield for ecological priority and green development. The Yellow River Basin has restored the ecology, and the sand has retreated and the green has entered. The ecological status of the big rivers has undergone historic and fundamental changes.
This is the Yellow River photographed from a satellite perspective. Researchers have monitored for several years and combined big data to restore the ecological conditions along the Yellow River.
It can be clearly seen that in the past ten years, green and sand have retreated, and the widest part of the Yellow River ecological green line has advanced about 150 kilometers.
Looking down at these new additions of green from the air, we capture huge circles.
This is the organic grassland that has been added in the center of Ulanbu and the desert in the past ten years. The windbreak and sand-fixing forest composed of Haloxylon ammonium, arbor and flower sticks protects the growth of pastures. The cow dung increases soil fertility and forms a natural ecological cycle system.
The growing ecological green line has locked more water and soil in the Yellow River Basin, and the amount of sediment discharged into the Yellow River has been reduced by an average of 300 to 500 million tons per year.
In the past ten years, 26,800 square kilometers of soil erosion have been controlled in the Yellow River Basin, which is equivalent to an area of more than four Shanghai cities.
If the Yellow River has done addition in green in the past ten years, then the Yangtze River has done subtraction in pollution control.
Through remote sensing monitoring of water quality, we have restored the water quality of the main stream of the Yangtze River flowing into the sea. The yellower the color, the more serious the pollution.
Here's a photo taken in June 2013, where the heavy yellow is clearly visible; it's the same day, same angle, in 2021, with the yellow faded.
What is the reason for the change?
We analyzed relevant information on the sources of water pollution in the Yangtze River to find answers.
Through the business registration information of enterprises, we calculated that there were more than 20,000 enterprises in the chemical industry along the three kilometers of the Yangtze River basin in 2012.
Extract the geographic information of each enterprise and restore it to this map of the entire Yangtze River Basin.
We selected Chongqing, Hubei, Jiangsu and other provinces and cities with relatively concentrated chemical industry enterprises to observe, and found that in the past ten years, chemical industry enterprises along the 3 kilometers of the river have decreased significantly, and the entire Yangtze River Basin has decreased by more than a quarter.
While the pollution sources in the Yangtze River Basin have been reduced, the urban sewage treatment capacity has also been greatly improved.
We restored the geographic locations of new urban sewage treatment plants in 11 provinces and cities along the Yangtze River since 2012 to this map, and found that the number has nearly doubled in ten years.
In the lower reaches of Wuhu, Anhui, sewage pipelines quickly extend underground, and 95.7% of the collected domestic sewage in the city is discharged after treatment.
When the water flowing into the Yangtze River is clean, the water quality of the entire Yangtze River will naturally improve.
Analyzing the chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen emissions of the major pollutants in the Yangtze River released by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, we found that since 2015, the emissions of these pollutants began to decline rapidly, and until now they are only about 10% of the levels ten years ago.
Today, the high-quality water section of the Yangtze River has exceeded 97%, basically achieving excellent water quality in the entire basin.
Both sides of the river have become a good place for citizens to relax.
The water is clear and the fish are back.
Researchers have tracked and studied the return of fish in the Yangtze River in the past decade, and found fish species such as saury, Yangtze sturgeon and cochineal in many areas of the main stream.
The water is clear and the banks are green, the fish are flying on the shallow bottom, and the mother river, whose ecological status has reversed, is revived, injecting a steady stream of impetus into the sustainable development of the Chinese nation.