China to launch Yangtze cleanup

Chinese officials have earmarked billions of renminbi to increase forest coverage and treat sewage in a campaign to clean up the Yangtze River and Three Gorges reservoir areas, state media reported. According to Jia Zhibang, director of the State Forestry Administration, the condition of the Yangtze River is "still far from what the people are demanding." Jia said that for numerous reasons, the forests along the river’s course have been "seriously degraded" and this has led to repeated natural disasters in the region. While deforestation has been held to be partially responsible for catastrophic floods involving massive loss of life along the Yangtze and elsewhere in the country, China’s waterways are notorious for high levels of pollution. According to a report from Environmental Monitoring of China, a government-linked agency, just two of 18 monitoring stations along the Yangtze graded water quality as "good."