Five years on, China's Yellow River turns the tide – in water, wings and livelihoods

At first light on the boardwalks of the Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve, Wu Lixin, a senior engineer at the Dawenliu management station, records how this season's oriental storks are faring.

When Wu started working there 37 years ago, the landscape was mostly barren saline-alkaline flats, and migrating birds stopped only briefly before moving on. Today, his patrol zone is one of the world's most concentrated breeding areas for the oriental stork, and each spring and autumn, hundreds of thousands of migratory birds rest and refuel in the delta's wetlands.

What Wu has watched with his own eyes is the story of the entire Yellow River Basin over the past five years in miniature.

An ecosystem rebuilt from headwaters to sea

In October 2021, China released a national outline for the ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin. What followed was not a single sand-control or flood-control project, but a basin-wide restoration effort built on one principle: treating mountains, rivers, forests, farmland, lakes, grasslands and deserts as one interdependent system.

On the Loess Plateau, the river's main source of sediment, the results are measurable. By the end of 2025, a cumulative 290,500 square kilometers of eroded land had been brought under initial control, raising the soil conservation rate to 69.75% – 28 percentage points higher than in 1990 – while plateau vegetation cover has climbed from 34% to 63%. In north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region's Ten Kongdui area, where seasonal tributaries once flushed some 27 million tonnes of sediment into the Yellow River each year, layered treatment has cut that to about 4 million tonnes.

The river itself is responding. The main stream has maintained Grade II water quality – suitable for drinking after treatment – for four consecutive years, and 47 rivers and lakes across the basin have joined the Ministry of Water Resources' "mother river rejuvenation" campaign. The Jinci Spring in Shanxi Province, dry for nearly 30 years, now flows year-round. Meanwhile, the Wenquan River in Fuping, Shaanxi Province, ran dry for four decades before water returned. In the delta, more than 300,000 mu (about 20,000 hectares) of wetland have been restored, and bird species in the reserve have grown from 187 at its founding to 376, making it a key staging post on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.

Conservation that pays

Along the river's middle and lower reaches, the ecological turnaround is rewriting household economics.

In Huoji Village, Xiji County in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, drip irrigation on more than 2,000 mu of vegetable fields has cut irrigation costs by 40% – and incomes have followed. Farming households that once earned just over 30,000 yuan (about $4,477) a year from rain-fed crops now bring in nearly 100,000. In Kayang Village, Qinghai Province's Huangzhong, terracing once-degraded sloping farmland turned fields that lost their water, soil and fertilizer into fields that hold them, and per capita annual income rose from under 3,000 yuan to 18,000.

Basin-wide, water consumed per 10,000 yuan of GDP in the nine provinces and regions along the river was 33% lower in 2025 than in 2019, with industrial water intensity down 35%, even as output grew.

Even land once written off as worthless is producing. In Yongji, Shanxi, saline flats along the river now grow Pacific white shrimp. In Helan County, Ningxia, farmers are raising large yellow croaker – a marine fish – in saline-alkaline ponds. Meanwhile, in Jungar Banner, Inner Mongolia, rice-fish farming draws eco-tourists.

The water supply remains guaranteed. In the 2025-2026 regulation year, unified dispatch delivered more than 11 billion cubic meters of water to riverside farmlands during the irrigation peak, while ecological replenishment continued to Ulansuhai Lake and groundwater-depleted areas of northern China. Across the basin, 289 rivers and lakes now carry the provincial "happy rivers and lakes" designation.

Engineering a durable peace with a restless river

For more than half a century, the central challenge of the Yellow River has been sediment – too much of it, carried by too little water. The answer has evolved into a system of coordinated water-and-sediment regulation, cross-regional coordination and digital monitoring.

Sustained flushing operations have cut the lower riverbed by an average of 3.1 meters, lifting the main channel's minimum flow capacity from less than 1,800 cubic meters per second in 2002 to around 5,000 today, reversing a millennia-old trend of the riverbed rising above the surrounding floodplain. The Guxian water conservancy project, now under construction, will operate in tandem with the Xiaolangdi Reservoir to reinforce the system, while a "Digital Twin Yellow River" runs virtual replicas of key river sections, with flood forecasting refined to the hourly level.

Back in the delta, the birds that once stopped only briefly on their way north now stay to nest. For the people along China's second-longest river, that is what five years of change looks like – counted one nest, one harvest, one flowing spring at a time.

(Cover image: The First Bend of the Yellow River is seen in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Sichuan Province. /VCG)

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