The water pollution trend of the Yellow River is developing rapidly. The discharge of industrial and domestic wastewater from cities and towns in the basin increased from 210.70 billion tons in 1980 to 410.50 billion tons in 2003, which was equivalent to 10% in the whole country, and the ratio of river pollution to path reached about 10%.
The length of the main tributaries of the Yellow River, which is inferior to Class III water, increased from 40% in 1980s to 60% in the late 1990s, and reached 70% ~ 80% since this century. In 2004, among the 83 key monitoring sections and 27 main tributaries of the Yellow River, 72.3% of the sections were worse than Class III standard of surface water environmental quality, of which 19.3% was Class IV water, 9.6% was Class V water and 43.4% was worse than Class V water. Nearly 70% of urban centralized drinking water sources in the main stream of the Yellow River cannot meet the water quality standards. Serious water pollution threatens the safety of water supply, and some river sections and regions are short of water, resulting in huge economic losses.
(c) inefficient water use in river basins
Due to the serious low water price, the waste and inefficiency of water resources in the Yellow River have not been effectively curbed. From 200 1 to 2004, the Yellow River water supply area took an average of 27 billion cubic meters of water from farmland irrigation and became the main water user of the Yellow River. Due to extensive management, unreasonable planting structure and poor matching of irrigation projects, the irrigation water utilization coefficient is only about 0.4. The reuse rate of industrial water in large and medium-sized cities is only 40% ~ 60%. In 2000, the water consumption per 10,000 yuan GDP in the Yellow River water supply area was 674 cubic meters, which was equivalent to 1.5 ~ 2.0 times of that in the Huaihe River, Haihe River and Liaohe River basins.
(d) The implementation of water resources management and dispatching is still not in place.
The means of water dispatching management are weak. At present, the unified management and dispatching of water resources in the Yellow River mainly depends on administrative means and technical means. Due to the unclear legal responsibility, some provinces (regions) still have the phenomenon of exceeding the target water transfer. Because the distribution of water rights has not yet reached the administrative areas below cities and counties, the original water intake permit management system is not binding, and the water intake permit management in the tributaries of the Yellow River is weak, so it is difficult for some provinces (regions) to completely control the total amount.