LHASA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region has completed its first water-use rights trade, with an agreement signed between Lhozhag County and Konggar County of the region's city of Shannan.
Similar to carbon emissions trading, water-use rights trading allows for the buying and selling of water-use quotas to reallocate water resources through a market-based approach.
A total of 1.81 million cubic meters of water will be transacted between the two counties, with a total transaction value amounting to 181,000 yuan (about 25,341 U.S. dollars).
Last year, three Chinese government departments, including the Ministry of Water Resources, jointly issued a guideline on water-use rights reform, vowing to further improve China's water-use rights system, intensify transaction supervision and establish a unified national water-use trading market by 2025. In November, Xizang issued a plan on the implementation of water-use rights reform.
Dundrup, director of the water and soil conservation monitoring center of Shannan, said that the trading gives full play to the role of the market mechanism in optimizing the allocation of water resources and further improves the optimal allocation and efficient use of water resources in Shannan. ■
