It was learned from the Ministry of Environmental Protection yesterday that the Ministry has recently accepted the environmental impact assessment report for the "National Groundwater Monitoring Project."

According to the project's Environmental Impact Report Form for Construction Projects (Simplified Report), the project involves a total investment of more than 2 billion yuan. It will be constructed under the responsibility of the Hydrological Bureau of the Ministry of Water Resources and the China Institute of Geo-Environmental Monitoring, covering a control area of 3.5 million square kilometers, in order to form a national groundwater monitoring station network with a relatively scientific and rational layout.

For a long time, China's groundwater development and utilization has lacked scientific planning and rational allocation. In some areas, groundwater is seriously overexploited, causing increasingly severe ecological and environmental problems such as continuous declines in groundwater levels, drying up of springs, shrinking of wetlands, desertification, and groundwater pollution.

In recent years, groundwater pollution in China has also become increasingly prominent. The 2012 Report on the State of China's Environment shows that among 198 prefecture-level administrative regions nationwide, nearly 60 percent have relatively poor or extremely poor groundwater quality. According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the main indicators exceeding standards in groundwater are iron, manganese, fluoride, "three nitrogens" (nitrite nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, and ammonia nitrogen), total hardness, total dissolved solids, sulfate, chloride, and others, with excessive heavy metals (or metalloids) found at some monitoring points.

The simplified report states that the project's construction scope covers 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government) nationwide (excluding Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao) as well as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, including the country's seven major river basins and 16 key monitoring areas.

The project also includes groundwater balance experimental sites. A groundwater balance experimental site is a field test site established according to the law of conservation of mass to study the quantitative relationships among groundwater recharge, runoff, discharge, and storage, as well as the connections and transformations between groundwater and atmospheric precipitation and surface water. It is also infrastructure for obtaining hydrogeological parameters and studying changes in various groundwater balance elements.

The two balance experimental sites are the Zhengzhou Balance Experimental Site in Henan and the Urumqi-Changji Balance Experimental Site in Xinjiang. They represent the pore groundwater type in the semi-humid and semi-arid climate zone of China's central plains and the pore groundwater type in the arid climate zone of China's northwest inland basins, respectively.