□Li Meiyan
Water comes from the Xijiang River to moisturize the Greater Bay Area. After more than four years of construction, the Pearl River Delta Water Resources Allocation Project (hereinafter referred to as the "Pearl River Delta Water Resources Allocation Project") officially opened to water on all lines on January 30. The project marks Guangdong’s realization of “water from the west to the east”, completely changing the single water supply pattern of Nansha, Shenzhen and Dongguan in Guangzhou, and providing emergency backup water sources for Hong Kong, Panyu in Guangzhou, Shunde in Foshan and other places.
Many people may be wondering. As a coastal province, Guangdong has a well-developed water system and abundant rainfall. It does not seem to be short of water. Why is it investing heavily in "West Water and East Water"? However, if we take a closer look at the water conditions in Guangdong, it is not difficult to find that Guangdong has long faced the problem of serious uneven spatial and temporal distribution of water resources, and the contradiction in the total supply of water resources still exists. Take the Pearl River Delta as an example. On one side is the Dongjiang River Basin with a highly concentrated population and economy. The water resources development and utilization rate is close to the internationally recognized warning line of 40%. On the other side is the Xijiang River system with a total water resource nearly 10 times that of the Dongjiang River. The development and utilization rate is Only 1.3%. Optimizing the allocation of water resources in the east and west has become an urgent problem to be solved for the high-quality development of the Pearl River Delta and even the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
The Pearl River Delta water resources allocation project planned against this background focuses on building a modern water network system, effectively promoting the balanced allocation of water resources, better meeting the people's high-quality water needs, effectively ensuring the needs of economic and social development, and ensuring Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. It is an important project to build the Greater Bay Area and benefit the people of the Greater Bay Area.
From the map, the total length of the Pearl River Delta Water Resources Allocation Project is 113.2 kilometers, running from west to east through Foshan Shunde, Guangzhou Nansha and the Pearl River Estuary Lion Ocean, and then directly to Dongguan and Shenzhen, like a hidden dragon traversing the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. . The annual water supply of the rushing Xijiang River reaches 1.708 billion cubic meters, establishing a dual water source guarantee system and injecting new impetus into the new round of take-off of the core urban agglomeration of the Greater Bay Area: citizens no longer need to worry about domestic water use, agricultural production and crops "Thirst quenched", water for industrial development is more secure. One set of forecasts is encouraging: after the project is connected to the water supply, it will benefit more than 32 million people and support GDP water demand of about 1.7 trillion yuan. Not only that, the squeezed ecological water use in the Dongjiang River Basin will also be returned, and the local ecological environment will also be effectively restored, further ensuring the water supply and ecological security of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
It is worth mentioning that, unlike the traditional open channel water transmission method, the Pearl River Delta Water Resources Allocation Project adopts a "limit-challenging" construction difficulty and builds water pipelines in underground spaces with a depth of 40 to 60 meters across the entire line. Behind the "challenging the limit", the permanent land acquisition for this project is only 2,600 acres, saving nearly 20,000 acres of land resources, and reserving valuable surface and shallow underground space for the future development of the Greater Bay Area.
The Pearl River Delta water resources allocation project is part of Guangdong’s “five vertical and five horizontal” water resources allocation backbone network. This backbone network is to solve the problem of uneven spatial and temporal distribution of water resources in Guangdong. Today, major water conservancy projects such as the water resources allocation in the Pearl River Delta, the water resources allocation in the Beibu Gulf of Guangdong, and the optimal allocation of water resources in eastern Guangdong are steadily advancing. A series of inter-regional water transmission channels pass through the mountains and ridges, and Guangdong "generally" constructs the spatial and temporal distribution of water resources. The new pattern will comprehensively improve water security capabilities and bring more lasting vitality to the high-quality development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. (Yangcheng Evening News)