Ecological Environment Protection in Chinese Rural Hydropower Development Practices: A Review

This paper reviews the ecological environment protection measures of Chinese rural hydropower development schemes. China’s rapid economic growth is making great energy demands and developing rural hydropower currently provides 30.4 GW annually. There is a conflict of interest between hydropower development and ecological and environmental protection. Potential problems include changes in hydrological condition, eutrophication, downstream nutrient reduction, sediment deposition, aquatic ecosystem alteration, and ecological water demand variation. Since most of the rural hydropower resources are located in ecologically fragile regions, it is significantly more important that ecological environment protection is being considered. As exploitation of rural hydropower has developed in China, ecological environment protection schemes had to adapt to changing boundary conditions. Due to improvements in environmental protection management, various environmental impact assessment methods have been applied including fuzzy analysis hierarchy process, ecological scheduling, pressure-state-response, and ecological environment evaluation index. The latter index can both qualitatively and quantitatively analyze ecological environment impacts and has become the most frequently used tool in the evaluation of rural hydropower exploitation. To rebalance the interests regarding energy generation and environmental protection, countermeasures originating from different aspects such as engineering design optimization, management improvement, and ecological restoration were recommended to promote ecological environment protection. The review concludes that by taking ecological environment protection into consideration in the whole rural hydropower plan, adopting ecological scheduling to guarantee river ecological water demand and implementing ecological restoration in watershed management are the most effective approaches in furthering sustainable development of rural hydropower.