China's university students are lending a hand in the campaign to clean up the country's highly polluted lakes and other water sources.

 

Forty college students have volunteered to take part in a survey of major tap water resources, including those serving Shanghai.

 

The survey, supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature, will lead to a report that could help guide public efforts to clean up China's water supplies.

 

"We hope to urge the entire society to pay more attention to water sources and drinking water protection," Dermot O'Gorman, a representative of WWF China, said at the launch ceremony at Shanghai's Fudan University on Sunday.

 

The Switzerland-based group, which is also known as the World Wildlife Fund in the US, is an international non-governmental organization that focuses on conservation, research and the protection of the environment.

 

The young volunteers, many of whom are engineering majors, come from 27 Chinese universities. Under the preliminary plan, they will spend their summer vacation investigating 25 sources of drinking water, including Taihu Lake and Dianshan Lake in east China, both of which serve Shanghai.

 

The students will collect water quality data from local government agencies, take their own samples and compare the two.

 

They will photograph and videotape examples of good and bad environmental practices and conduct interviews with government officials to dig out the reasons behind the problems and arrive at possible solutions.

 

The volunteers will submit their findings to the WWF, which will make the results available to government officials and the public through the organization's Website. The students will also be able to use their research to help fulfill their academic requirements.

 

Early last month, an outbreak of blue-green algae choked Taihu Lake and caused the tap water supply to more than 2 million residents of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province to be shut down for two weeks.

 

The lake is in the heart of the Yangtze River Delta region and provides 70 percent of Shanghai's tap-water supply.

 

Authorities said the water crisis was caused mainly by factory and agricultural discharges.

 

Last week, China's environmental chief unveiled a set of strict new rules to tackle worsening lake pollution while criticizing the country's "bumpkin policies" that encourage local officials to turn a blind eye to environmental hazards.

 

(Shanghai Daily July 17, 2007)