THE total area of lakes in North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region dropped dramatically by 30.3 percent in the past 30 years mainly due to human activities, according to a survey report published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Economic Information reported yesterday.

    The survey was conducted by a research group, headed by Fang Jingyun, an academic with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with the combined research methods of remote sensing image interpretation and field surveys.

    The lake area has dropped rapidly from 4,160 square kilometers in 1987 to 2,901 square kilometers in 2010, according to the report.

    The report said that about 145 lakes covering an area of more than 1 square kilometer have disappeared as of 2010, accounting for 34 percent of the total number of 427 in 1978.

    In the short term, the expansion and contraction of the lake area is a combined result of climate change and human activities, while some lakes have been affected greatly due to human activities, said Sun Biao, research associate with Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, who has conducted water environment monitoring for 10 years.

    The survey found that irrigation is the main reason for nearly 80 percent of the shrinking lake area in the agricultural and pastoral area in Inner Mongolia, while coal exploitation is the reason for 64.6 percent of the contracted lake area in the pastoral area.

    The disappearance of lakes is not unique in Inner Mongolia.

    More than half of the 50 plus lakes have contracted or disappeared since the 1980s in Nanchang, East China’s Jiangxi province, said the offical microblog account of Water Resources Bureau of Jiangxi Province on June 18, 2014.

    Also, Central China’s Hubei Province was once dubbed as “the province of a thousand lakes,” as it had 1,332 lakes each covering an area of 0.07 square kilometers in the 1950s, among which there were 322 lakes each covering an area of 3.33 square kilometers, youth.cn reported in September, 2012.

    According to the report from youth.cn, the number of lakes covering an area of 0.07 square kilometers was reduced to 574, about a 56.9 percent drop since the 1950s, or about 15 lakes disappearing yearly, because of activities such as reclaiming farmland from lakes, real estate property development and rubbish dumping.

    More than 200 lakes covering an area of 10 plus square kilometers contracted in China, and nearly 1,000 natural lakes disappeared due to reclamation, said the Economic Information newspaper citing statistics.(China Daily)