Watershed: A New Era of Water Governance in China-Policy Brief

China’s leadership recognizes that managing the country’s water resources effectively is critical to achieving sustainable economic growth. Existing legislation, institutions, and policy have helped to ease water scarcity, have begun to address serious water quality problems, and have greatly reduced the risk of flooding. But overuse and pollution of limited water supplies continue to threaten China’s strategic development priorities. To achieve these priorities in this new water governance strategy, China needs to strengthen and better integrate water management at both national and regional scales, provide more water for environmental uses, expand the use of market mechanisms to drive more sustainable water use, and adopt transformational approaches to combat water pollution. Together, these measures provide a strategy for a new era of water governance that will enable China to move to a higher quality, more environmentally conscious economic structure. Meanwhile, the proposed water management approaches can provide useful experience and duplicable models for other countries in tackling the challenges of water sustainability in the 21st century.