THE LOCAL AUTHORITIES in Dali, Southwest China's Yunnan province, should be aware that any leniency they show the illegal restaurants and guesthouses around Erhai Lake will lead to various forms of waste being discharged into the nation's seventh largest freshwater lake. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

The Dali government recently issued a notice to all the eateries and guesthouses in the core area of the Erhai Lake Nature Reserve that they should suspend operations before April 10 for environmental protection inspections.

Although many people applauded the government's notice as being humane, because it extended the deadline beyond the national holiday for Tomb Sweeping Day this year, a golden period for the tourism industry, it is in fact a notice that shows no consideration to the lake, whose environment and ecology are already on the brink of collapse.

Statistics show the catering businesses besieging the lake, about 90 percent of which are operating illegally, and have been for a long time, are the main source of pollution in the lake, whose self-cleaning capacity pales in comparison to the pollutants it is forced to swallow.

The burst of blue-green algae in January, a sign of the eutrophication of the lake, already rang the alarm that if the government continues to overlook the negative environmental influences of the tourism-related industries, the lake will become a pool of smelly water again, as it was about 20 years ago, when industry and the overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in the drainage basin area were the main polluters.

The lake's worrisome condition entails emergency measures. Local authorities must cleanse the lakeside catering facilities thoroughly. Instead of, as many require, paying for the business owners' losses because of the suspension of operations, the authorities have every reason to demand environmental compensation from them according to a professional environmental evaluation, and hold the officials responsible accountable, as it is their dereliction of duty that has led to the polluting of the lake.