BEIJING, November 2 (RIA Novosti) - The number of lakes in China has declined by more than 1,000 in half a century as the result of industrial exploitation, the Global Times newspaper said on Tuesday, citing experts.

Twenty lakes a year disappear from the territory of the world's most populous nation.

More than 1,400 environmental experts and scholars from over 40 countries are discussing challenges facing the world's lakes at the 13th World Lake Conference, which opened on Monday in China's central Hubei Province.

Zhang Yongchun, an expert from the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, was quoted by the paper as saying China had lost 9,570 square kilometers of water area, and 51.6 billion cubic meters of water-storage volume, in the past 50 years.

There are more than 2,300 lakes larger than 1 square kilometer in China, the paper said, but many of them are shrinking rapidly.

"This is the result of human activities, such as reclaiming lakes for farmland, over-drilling, and diverting river routes recklessly," Yu Hui, a professor from the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, told the Global Times.

The paper said China's central Hubei province, once known as "the province of a thousand lakes," now has only a third of the water area it had in the 1950s.

The pollution of drinking water, which is becoming worse as a result of the country's rapid growth, is another problem facing China.

According to the paper, the Chinese government has invested 14.5 million yuan (over $2.1 million) in a five-year cleanup program, but experts claim it is not a matter of funding, but rather finding a way to stop factories from discharging pollutants.