Southwest China's Yunnan Province plans to spend 8.4 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) to tackle pollution in the Dianchi Lake, the largest freshwater lake on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

The fund will be used to restore the size of the lake by reversing land reclamation, plant more trees around it and set up sewage treatment plants.

The project will also include the removal of nitrogen and phosphorus from the water with biological means such as planting water weed and putting fish into the lake.

The provincial government would draw up environmental standards even stricter than national rules on pollutant discharges and sewage disposal, Governor Qin Guangrong said.

The province has submitted the spending plan to the central government for approval.

The Dianchi Lake has remained heavily polluted despite an expenditure of 4.76 billion yuan to clean it up in the past decade.

With an area of almost 300 square kilometers, the Dianchi, near the provincial capital Kunming, has been diminishing since the 1980s, threatening water supplies to Kunming, with a population of 1.5 million.

"Lack of clean water inflow is the fundamental reason why it is difficult to control pollution in the Dianchi Lake," said He Bin, head of the Yunnan Provincial Academy of Environmental Science, explaining that only eight percent of inflowing water was clean.

This year the lake has suffered from blue green algae bloom, suffocating life in the lake and causing it to stink.

Erhai Lake, also in Yunnan, has been cleaned up after a series of measures, including a fishing ban for six months each year since 2004, and treatment of domestic sewage. 

(Shanghai Daily July 14, 2007)