Study On The Relationship Between Economic Growth And Lake Environment In Erhai Basin

With the rapid development of our economy, resources and environment pollution problem has gradually become the focus of attention, and the scarcity of resource and the importance of the environment is getting more and more attention. Now, the importance of water resources is more and more prominent. China has a large number of fresh water resource, which ranks the world’s top three, but due to the vast land and the large population, the amount of water resource per mu and per capita is few, which is far behind other countries. In such circumstances, during the development of economy is accelerated in our country, at the same time we have no enough attention to the importance of environmental protection and economical use of resources. The situation is more and more grim.Erhai basin is located in Yunnan province. And Erhai is the second largest freshwater lake in Yunnan province. The development of its economy depends mostly on agriculture, industry and tourism. So in this process, it will consume even more water resources pollution. With the rapid development of the economy for nearly twenty years, the water quality of Erhai lake is deteriorating. The local government has taken some measures to control pollution. Then, in the process of economic development, what happened to its lake environment? And how does the water pollution affect the economy? This research addresses these problems.Through the analysis of data from year1997to2010, it is found that the water environment of Erhai gradually deteriorated firstly and improved during recent years. That is to say, the water pollution Kuznets curve of Erhai is inverted U-shaped and Erhai has passed the peak of the curve. Meanwhile, the primary concern of wastewater discharge has shifted from industrial to domestic. Further co-integration analysis reveals the estimate of economic loss due to water pollution. The last section proposes several solutions to mitigate the water environment deterioration while maintain the fast economic growth.