Chinese Rivers Could Get Cleaner or Dirtier by 2050, Depending on Food Policy

Researchers in China and the Netherlands have modeled five paths for Chinese food production and projected that the pollutant load reaching the country's rivers could either rise by as much as 63% or fall by as much as 41% by 2050, depending on how fully and how ambitiously the policies behind each path are carried out.

The authors write that tying food production policy to water sustainability requires looking at several pollutants at once, and that such combined assessments are still scarce. Their model follows nutrients, plastics, antibiotics and herbicides together rather than one at a time.

The work appeared Nov. 6, 2026, in Nature Food. It applies a newly integrated model, MARINA-Multi, to 395 sub-basins, or smaller river catchments, and compares what each path would send into the water. The five paths are modeled scenarios, not adopted law: they are assembled from environmental strategies China already has and differ in how far each is put to work.

The paper attributes the fall at the ambitious end mainly to better manure and crop management. Loads rise where the strategies are assumed not to be carried through.

Microplastics are the exception. The authors report that controlling them remains a persistent challenge even in the most optimistic of the five paths, a trade-off they tie to continuing growth of cities.

Qi Zhang and Yanan Li of China Agricultural University are the paper's joint first authors, and Wen Xu, also at China Agricultural University, and Maryna Strokal of Wageningen University and Research supervised the work. The scenario assumptions and the source data behind the projected figures are published with the paper.