Growing cities, overuse of fertilizers and factory wastewater have degraded China's water supplies to the extent that half the nation's rivers and lakes are severely polluted. China aims to spend $850 billion to improve filthy water supplies over the next decade, but even such huge outlays may do little to reverse damage caused by decades of pollution and overuse in Beijing's push for rapid economic growth. Photo: Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, June 19, 2009. (Photo by Jianan Yu/Reuters)

A child buys goods from a partially submerged shop in Companiganj of Sylhet district on June 20, 2024. In Sylhet, lashing rain and rivers swollen by flooding upstream in India also swamped heavily populated areas. (Photo by Munir Uz Zaman/AFP Photo)

A masked reveller poses in San Marco Piazza during the Venice Carnival, January 30, 2016. (Photo by Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

Revelers march in the Lower Ninth Ward during a second line parade marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2015 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Claudionor Jose de Deus, wearing a Santa Claus costume, arrives at Santa Rosa community to distribute presents to children, on the shores of the Amazon River in rural Manaus, Brazil, December 19, 2015. Jose de Deus is part of a volunteer group that distributes toys to children from poor neighborhoods and riverside communities that are distant from the city. (Photo by Bruno Kelly/Reuters)

Cars are parked near Place de la Concorde on March 12, 2014 in Paris, France. Inset: World War I, German airplanes at Place de la Concorde in Paris, wrecked by celebrating crowds on the day of the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, November 18, 1918. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The sky looked on fire this morning, as it made the clouds glow red, just before sunrise at Peterborough Rowing Lake, in Nene Park, UK on January 18, 2017. (Photo by Paul Marriott/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

A man paddleboards during a sunrise on the beach in Miami Beach, Florida, on March 23, 2021. (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP Photo)