On Wednesday Zhu Guangyao, vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration of China explained that almost 1,000 of the country's lakes had disappeared over the last 50 years which was an average of 20 annually.

 

 

Zhu revealed the figure at the 11th International Living Lakes Conference being held on Wednesday and Thursday in Nanchang, capital of east China's Jiangxi Province.

 

He said 75 percent of China's 20,000 natural lakes and thousands of artificial stretches of water suffered from algae pollution caused by waste water containing nitrogen, phosphorus and other harmful substances.

 

In central China's Hubei Province known as the "Paradise of Lakes" 217 lakes each with an area larger than one square kilometer have disappeared since the 1950s when 522 large stretches of water were scattered around the province.

 

The total area of Hubei's natural lakes has shrunk to 2,438 square kilometers which is 34 percent less than 50 years ago.

 

China has 361,100 square kilometers of lakes and 90,000 square kilometers of wetlands. Freshwater storage stands at 226 billion cubic meters.

 

The major cause of the shrinkage was industrial farming activities, Zhu said. The overuse of water and pollution had destroyed water and ecological systems in lake and wetland areas.

 

The government had set up 160 wetland protection zones and invested heavily in measures to prevent pollution, Zhu said, but called for further efforts by domestic and international organizations.

 

 

(Xinhua News Agency November 2, 2006)