Sun Aug 31 00:15:00 UTC 2025: Here’s a news article summarizing the provided text, focusing on the core findings and its potential relevance to India:

**The Hindu: China Faces Widespread River Flow Decline, Study Finds Parallels for India**

**NEW DELHI, August 31, 2025** – A comprehensive new study published in *Science Advances* has revealed a significant decline in water flow at over 70% of hydrological monitoring stations across China. The analysis, conducted by scientists at China’s Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, examined data from 1,046 stations between 1956 and 2016, identifying the major drivers of these declines as changes in land use and vegetation cover, climate change-induced variability, and water abstraction, diversion, and regulation.

While the study points to land use changes as the primary cause, it also emphasizes the nearly equal contribution of climate change and natural climate variability. The researchers caution that continued declines could lead to water crises in northern China, impacting ecosystems, socioeconomics, and agriculture.

The findings have implications beyond China’s borders. The study highlights that the changes mirror tropical hydrological situations like in India, which has also reported fluctuations in river-flow patterns. The Central Water Commission maintains 901 hydro-meteorological stations across all the major river basins.

The Ministry of Water Resources had said in March that the annual average flow data maintained by the CWC, for the last 20 years for major/important rivers, “did not indicate any significant decline in water availability.” However, the per capita annual water availability in the country has progressively dropped due to increasing population, urbanization, and better lifestyles of residents, it added. The implications of the Chinese study are causing concern among Indian water resource experts, prompting calls for increased monitoring and proactive management of India’s own river systems, urging greater cooperation between climate and hydrology sciences to improve the accuracy of mid- and long-term national streamflow projections.

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