Kaiyang fortifies water management in Wujiang River basin

The upper Wujiang River basin is home to a concentrated phosphorus chemical industry, where industrial development overlaps with the demands of watershed ecological protection, placing long-term pressure on Kaiyang's water environment governance.

To address traditional shortcomings in water management, Kaiyang has advanced the construction of a smart water environment monitoring system, investing over 12 million yuan ($1.76 million) to deploy 27 sets of automatic water quality monitoring equipment at 13 key polluting enterprises across its jurisdiction.

The monitoring system operates 24/7 year-round, capturing core pollution indicators such as chemical oxygen demand (COD) and total phosphorus levels in real time, with monitoring data transmitted immediately to the county-level ecological environment monitoring platform.

Coupled with comprehensive high-definition video surveillance equipment, the platform automatically triggers early warnings whenever water quality anomalies appear at discharge outlets, enabling the early detection of, and rapid response to pollution incidents – shifting away from the lagging regulatory model of manual inspections.

In terms of digital ledger management, Kaiyang has established exclusive electronic archives for every discharge outlet. Each archive comprehensively records the outlet's geographic coordinates, drainage characteristics, responsible enterprise, historical water quality monitoring data, and on-site photographic documentation, achieving full traceability and verifiability of pollution sources from origin to endpoint.

Every discharge outlet is paired with a dedicated QR code – law enforcement officers can scan the code on site to access complete archives for inspection, while residents who discover environmental issues such as illegal sewage discharge can also scan the code to report problems with one click.