River Health and Environmental Flow in China
Publications and resourcesThe River Health and Environmental Flow Project aimed to improve China’s national approaches to water resource management in the areas of river health and environmental flow assessment and implementation. The project is the largest under the Australia China Environment Development Partnership, a five-year program jointly undertaken by the Australian and Chinese Governments, and funded by AusAID.
The project was undertaken in conjunction with the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources and Ministry of Environmental Protection. Several of their agencies were also involved, including the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, the Pearl River Water Resources Commission, the General Institute for Water Resources and Hydropower Planning and Design, and the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Science. Pilot projects were undertaken in the lower Yellow River, Gui River (Pearl River) and Taizi River (Liao River).
The project focused on two key areas of river management:
River health assessment: these provide information on current river condition, likely causes of poor health, and threats to river function. Importantly, they are designed to support more targeted management actions. The project trialled indicators of river health related to hydrology, water quality, physical form, riparian vegetation, and various instream biota, such as fish, macroinvertebrates, and algae.
Environmental flows assessment and implementation: environmental flows are the amount of water that is kept in a river to maintain or achieve a particular environmental condition. The project developed and applied an asset-based, holistic environmental flows methodology.
Detailed river health and environmental flow assessments were completed in three rivers: the Gui River (in the Pearl River basin), the Taizi River (in the Liao River basin) and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Based on this work, river health report cards were prepared for the pilot sites. The results of these studies were used to develop national recommendations, including draft guidelines for river health assessment and a national environmental flows framework.
The project developed a method for assessing river health based on changes to hydrology. A software tool – FlowHealth – can be used to automatically undertake the assessment and will be available for download soon.
Significant training activities were also carried out to improve the capacity of Chinese water managers in the fields of river health and environmental flow assessment. This included workshops, field-based training in river health sampling, placements by Chinese team members in Australian universities, and study tours to Australia.
The IWC has drawn on water experts from its four world-class member universities – the University of Queensland, Monash University, the University of Western Australia and Griffith University – and partners the Queensland Government, as well as various independent experts. The project has help to build long-term partnerships between these organisations and their Chinese counterparts and to contribute to the ongoing water policy dialogue between China and Australia.
