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SHANGHAI: The central Chinese province of Jiangxi has declared a water supply “red alert” for the first time after the Poyang freshwater lake, the country’s biggest, dwindled to a record low, the Jiangxi government said on Friday (Sep 23).
The Poyang Lake, normally a vital flood outlet for the Yangtze, China’s longest river, has been suffering from drought since June, with water levels at a key monitoring spot falling from 19.43m to 7.1m over the last three months.
The Jiangxi Water Monitoring Centre said Poyang’s water levels would fall even further in coming days, with rainfall still minimal. Precipitation since July is 60 per cent lower than a year earlier, it said.
As many as 267 weather stations across China reported record temperatures in August, and a long dry spell across the Yangtze river basin severely curtailed hydropower output and damaged crop growth ahead of the autumn harvest.
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