Chongqing launches action plan on protecting water bodies near residents, including building or upgrading over 15 centralized industrial park wastewater treatment plants

According to Chongqing Daily, the Implementation Plan for the Protection and Treatment of Water Bodies Near Residents was recently issued. It launches five major campaigns against prominent water pollution problems, aiming by 2027 to tackle outstanding water pollution issues and progressively establish and dynamically update problem, task and responsibility lists, and by 2030 to ensure that such water bodies are largely free of abnormal colour, odour and floating matter.

Industrial park water pollution remediation

• Conduct a compliance review and push remediation of centralized wastewater treatment facilities and associated pipe networks;
• Build or upgrade more than 15 centralized wastewater treatment plants serving industrial parks;
• Renew ageing, damaged and stormwater-sewage misconnected pipes;
• Promote one pipe per enterprise, above-ground conveyance and real-time monitoring in chemical parks;
• Build a three-tier prevention and control system for sudden water pollution incidents and develop more than 10 green, low-carbon and finely managed industrial parks.

The other four campaigns

• Urban-rural black and odorous water bodies: mapping pollution sources and adopting tailored treatment plans, with dynamic clearance in county towns by 2027; extending sewer networks from township plants to rural areas by more than 406 km and upgrading more than 200 inefficient facilities.
• Livestock and poultry manure: focusing on environmentally sensitive areas, inspecting and remediating farms above 40 pig-equivalent annual output.
• Rural rivers, lakes and reservoirs: completing 41 priority remediation projects under a inspect-accept-close-out mechanism by 2027.
• Small rural water bodies: surveying ponds and ditches of 50 square metres or more, establishing a treatment list by June 2027 for systematic remediation.

Strengthening control of three sources and one outfall

On industrial pollution prevention, the plan calls for classified supervision of key water-intensive enterprises outside parks, cleaner production retrofits in chemicals, dyeing and printing, and pharmaceuticals, enhanced control of characteristic pollutants and total emission reductions, stronger environmental risk prevention for hazardous and heavy-polluting enterprises, and a strict ban on discharging industrial wastewater through stormwater pipes.

The plan also sets out municipal sewage targets: by 2030, more than 1,500 km of urban sewer pipes built or upgraded, over 700,000 m3 per day of additional municipal treatment capacity, and urban centralized sewage collection stabilised above 87%. Outfall supervision will follow a full-chain survey-monitor-trace-treat-manage system, with a smart water supervision framework centred on river outfalls by 2030.

To strengthen supervision, the plan integrates satellite remote sensing, drones and AI-based monitoring for key water sources, transboundary rivers and karst areas, targeting an integrated space-air-ground monitoring network by 2030.