A beautiful view of Changbai Island Wetland Park in Jilin city, Northeast China’s Jilin Province on October 28, 2025. Photo: IC

China's first national standard for evaluating "happy rivers and lakes" to improve the management of small- and medium-sized rivers and lakes and enable rivers to benefit the people nationwide has been formulated and released by China's Ministry of Water Resources and will take effect on May 1, 2026, chinanews.com reported on Thursday. 

The standard transforms the abstract concept of "well-being" into quantifiable and actionable indicators for the first time. It establishes a five-category primary indicator system covering stability, health, beauty, culture, and development, which is further broken down into 14 secondary indicators, including flood control compliance rate, drainage compliance rate, total water use, and dual control of water use intensity, China Central Television (CCTV) reported. 

Through specifying rules for calculating the river and lake well-being index, forming evaluation results, and preparing evaluation reports, the standard will provide a clear and reliable measurement for "happy rivers and lakes" protection and management efforts across different regions, CCTV reported. 

The newly released evaluation standard for "happy rivers and lakes" focuses on small- and medium-sized rivers with a basin area of less than 3,000 square kilometers. These rivers account for more than 90 percent of all rivers across China and are distributed throughout both urban and rural areas. They serve not only as vital "lifelines" for farmland irrigation and for supplying water to urban and rural areas but also as beautiful "scenery" for residents' leisure and rural ecological landscapes, according to the report. 

Zhang Boju, a board member of the Beijing-based environmental NGO Friends of Nature, told the Global Times on Thursday that the standard shows that cleanliness is no longer judged solely by technical indicators, but also by how these waters enhance the surrounding environment and contribute to human livability.

In the first half of this year, 89 percent of the monitored surface water sections in China met the country's good water quality standards, an increase of 0.2 percentage points year-on-year, maintaining a steady and positive trend, Xinhua reported.

According to Jiang Huohua, head of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment's department of water ecology and environment, China achieved remarkable results in the water protection campaign in 2024, with 90.4 percent of monitored surface water sections meeting good quality standards, surpassing 90 percent for the first time. 

In addition, water environment management has continued to improve, with black and odorous water bodies essentially eliminated in all prefecture-level cities and above, while the proportion eliminated in county-level cities has exceeded 90 percent, Jiang said.
Moreover, the protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems have been advanced in a systematic manner, and risks to the water environment have been effectively contained. 

Following this part, the Ministry of Water Resources will roll out second and third parts focusing on rivers and lakes with basin areas over 3,000 square kilometers. They will eventually form a comprehensive evaluation system for "happy rivers and lakes" across all rivers and lakes in China, providing strong standardization support for building a beautiful China and promoting high-quality river basin development, as well as advancing China's river and lake protection and governance toward a new stage of high-quality development that benefits both ecology and people's well-being, said the report.