China's Appalling Environmental Health (Yale Environment 360 Report)

LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images

Workers clean algae at drinking-water intake pipes for Wuxi city on Lake Taihu.

21 JUL 2011: REPORT

On Lake Taihu, China Moves  To Battle Massive Algae Blooms

For two decades, the once-scenic Lake Taihu in eastern China has been choked with devastating algae blooms that have threatened drinking water for millions. Now, in a move that could provide lessons for other huge lakes worldwide, China is taking steps to restore Taihu’s ecological balance.

by richard stone


Haze hangs over Taihu on an early summer day. The northern edge of China’s third largest freshwater lake by now should be choked with green slime. Instead, recent downpours have disrupted algal growth. Like a cancer patient in remission, Taihu is enjoying a brief respite from its illness, a flashback to a time before industrial effluents, agricultural runoff, and sewage knocked its ecology out of balance.

This blush of health won’t last. Once temperatures climb here in eastern China’s muggy Jiangsu Province, a nasty blue-green alga will bloom. The cyanobacterium, Microcystis aeruginosa, produces toxins that can damage the liver, intestines, and nervous system. In May 2007, a massiveMicrocystis bloom overwhelmed a waterworks that supplies Wuxi city on Taihu’s northern shore, leaving more than 2 million people without drinking water for a week. 


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