Unified Management of Water Resources and Enhance of Carrying Capacity in Heihe River Basin

There are very keen contradictories of water resources use and highly complexity of local benefit adjustment between the middle and the lower reaches of Heihe River Basin. For constructing a authoritative, high efficient and harmonious management system of the whole basin, the Administrative Bureau of Heihe River Basin has been set up since 1999 to carry out unifying planning, whole basin management and reasonable dispatch of water resources. In the year 2000 and 2001, a quantitative allocation scheme for the whole basin to close whole outlets at the middle reaches and concentrate river water into lower reaches was brought into effect. The practice proved that it could completely be successful to carry out the quantitative allocation of water resources in whole Heihe River Basin as long as mastering the dynamics of water resources in mountain area, implementing withdrawing from cultivated land to forests and grass lands and returning water to the down-streams, and exploiting the potential of basin water resources from water saving of agriculture. Although there still exists a lot of difficulties in putting the beyond-province allocation scheme that was approved by the State Council into effect, the bottle neck obstruct of water resources in the basin could be broken, local economy could be getting growth without increasing the water consumption in the basin, and it could be making the ecological system of the basin into a preferable circle step by step as long as carrying out the following four measures of comprehensive rehabilitation, strengthening management, accelerating water saving and increasing invests of science and technology etc.