It is said that water is the source of life. In ancient times, our ancestors lived by water. Now that we have various channels for water transportation, we have got rid of the restriction of living along the river, but whether it is the water used by the people in daily life. It is still the agricultural and industrial water needed for various production. The water resources needed in this process are not a little bit. It is absolutely impossible without sufficient water.

As we all know, although 70% of the earth's area is ocean, the water in the ocean cannot be desalinated on a large scale according to the existing technology. And what we humans need is just fresh water resources, the proportion of which is very small compared with the ocean. Apart from polar glaciers, the sources of these freshwater resources often depend on mountains, rivers and lakes on land. The two most famous rivers in China are the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, which span most of China from west to east.

The annual runoffs of these two rivers in China are not small. Together with the large and small tributaries and lakes, China’s water resources are logically adequate, but in fact, China’s overall water resources are unevenly distributed in time and space. of.

In the southern region, the area of arable land is relatively small, accounting for only 36% of China's. Correspondingly, its water resources account for 81%. In contrast, the northern region is fertile black land and owns more than half of China. However, water resources are only 14% of the cultivated land area of China. This gap creates uneven spatial distribution of water resources between the north and the south.

Because of the lack of water, the people in the north usually dig wells to obtain groundwater. This method of water intake not only fails to guarantee the quality of the water, but also harms health, but also causes the ground to sink as a whole after the groundwater is drained. In the southern region, due to climate reasons and frequent precipitation in summer, a large amount of water resources are more likely to cause floods. However, in the summer in the north, there is concern about drought affecting the growth of crops. Such uneven distribution of water resources over time will severely restrict the balanced development of the north and south in the long run.

Therefore, after a long period of investigation, the state decided to start the South-to-North Water Diversion Project to alleviate the uneven distribution of water resources. The project officially started in 2002, with an estimated investment of 300 billion yuan. The project is divided into three lines: the east line, the middle line and the west line, covering more than ten provinces and cities including Shandong, Hebei, Henan, etc. The purpose is to allow people in the north to drink clean water, and the south is less affected by floods. .

Among them, the eastern route was the earliest to be completed, but the amount of water mobilization involved was not large. The central and western routes were the most important.

On December 12, 2014, the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project was officially opened. The entire middle route project took 11 years to construct. After completion, it will mainly provide water to residents of Beijing, Tianjin, Henan and Hebei. Several tens of billions of cubic meters of water have been transported.

The West Line has been delayed?

The state's plan for the western route requires water transfer from the Sichuan region located in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River to the upper reaches of the Yellow River, mainly to solve the water shortage problem in the northwestern regions of Qinghai, Gansu and other places. Once the western route project is completed, it can benefit hundreds of millions of nearby residents. The western route is expected to transfer 17 billion cubic meters of water. There is no need to worry about the water shortage of the Yellow River until 2050.

However, it is much more difficult to build the western line project than the eastern line and the middle line, because the western line is not a plain, but an endless plateau and mountain peaks. The height difference during the period is no less than that of the Sichuan-Tibet Railway. Moreover, the Sichuan region is also the main position of my country's hydropower generation. Water transfer will also affect the efficiency of hydropower generation to a certain extent, and the coordination between these areas is also very difficult.

In addition to technical and construction difficulty considerations, the mobilization of such a large flow of rivers will undeniably have an impact on the ecology of the water area. More importantly, the construction of the western route involves the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and the Yangtze River originates from the Himalayas, with glaciers and snow water, and a single ecological environment. Once the construction process has caused irreparable damage to the ecological environment, such results may be irreparable.

The last point to consider is the financial support. The originally estimated 300 billion yuan has long been overspend. Such a super-benefiting project takes a long time and has a large amount of work. The amount of capital required for the western route is compared with the eastern route and the The middle line is even bigger.

Combining these factors, the west route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project has not yet started, but this has always been in the national plan. In November 2020, the government meeting again emphasized the "South-to-North Water Diversion" project, and discussed the western route. It is planned to start the preliminary work such as the planning and program demonstration of the western route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. The convening of this meeting also means that the start of the last route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project will soon be put on the agenda for the benefit of the people along the route. I believe that in the future, when the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is completed, this will be another infrastructure miracle in China. Editor/He Yuting