Ministry of Water Resources Launches Three-Year Action Plan for Integrated Monitoring and Sensing System for Rivers, Lakes, and Reservoirs

To thoroughly implement President Xi Jinping’s water governance philosophy of “prioritizing water conservation, achieving spatial balance, adopting systematic approaches, and leveraging both government and market forces,” as well as his important directives on water management, and to advance the construction of digital twin water conservancy projects, the Ministry of Water Resources recently issued the Three-Year Action Plan for the Construction of an Integrated Monitoring and Sensing System for Rivers, Lakes, and Reservoirs (2025–2027).

The action plan adheres to the principles of demand-driven development, application-oriented goals, digital empowerment, and capacity enhancement. Key tasks include conducting a nationwide baseline survey of rivers and lakes, improving the data foundation for river and lake management, developing and applying intelligent river and lake models, implementing regular intelligent satellite remote sensing monitoring, conducting follow-up reviews of remote sensing image patches of river, lake, and reservoir features, real-time video surveillance, periodic drone inspections, and intelligent supervision of sand mining in river channels. These measures aim to establish an integrated monitoring and sensing system for rivers, lakes, and reservoirs that covers the entire process from front-end sensing to platform integration and information application. The system will enable comprehensive, multi-feature, high-frequency, high-precision, and long-term dynamic monitoring of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.

By 2027, the goal is to establish a monitoring and sensing network primarily based on satellite remote sensing, supplemented by video surveillance and drones, that integrates the entire chain of monitoring, analysis, early warning, and response. This will achieve full-process online management of issues such as the “four chaos” (illegal occupation, mining, dumping, and construction) in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, obstacles to river flood discharge, and encroachment on reservoir storage capacity, covering the entire workflow from detection and analysis to early warning notifications and feedback on resolution.