The project "Managing water scarcity: intelligent tools and cooperative strategies", funded by the European Commission, has aimed at pointing out the potential for increasing water use efficiency in the Yongding River Basin, a sub basin of the Hai River Basin in North East China. It has been implemented over the last 4 years in collaboration with the following partners from China: Foreign Economic Cooperation Office of the Ministry of Environment, Development Research Centre of the Ministry of Water Resources, Tsinghua University and the Tianjin Environmental Protection and Technology Development Centre. this paper presents the main results of this project: the project has studied structural and non structural measures for increasing water use efficiency in 3 sectors (Agriculture, industry and domestic use); Agricultural water use: the project studied the potential and limitations of micro irrigation technologies in the Yongding River Basin, based on case study evaluations. Industrial water use: the project studied the potential for increasing water use efficiency in the most relevant industries in the Yongding River Basin: textile, chemical and power industry. For each industry 1 2 factories were selected and strategies to improve water use efficiency elaborated. Domestic water use: domestic water use is comprised of showers, toilets, washing machines and other uses. In Beijing, the largest water users are showers (34%), followed by toilets (26%) and washing machines (22%). Water saving types are available for each of those and the potential and constraints for mainstreaming the most water saving types have been investigated based on user surveys. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) RWH is considered to have a large potential for the Yongding River Basin, but it has only been applied to a very limited extent. Those studies have shown that water use efficiency can be considerably increased in the Yongding River Basin through implementing water saving technologies in each of the studied sectors. To facilitate their implementation non structural measures such as policy instruments can substantially help. Experiences with such policy instruments have been surveyed and improved policy instruments suggested. Then, those policy instruments have been discussed with various stakeholders in the Yongding River Basin and based on the feedback policy recommendations were elaborated.