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Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have emerged as a critical component within underwater distributed perception applications. Due to the external factors, including ocean currents and undulating seabed topography, the UWSNs topology that changes dynamically over time cannot ensure optimal service performance. This paper proposes a balancing energy consumption and localization through coverage (BECLC), which adjusts the position of drifting underwater nodes through improved virtual forces, and achieves improvements in node energy consumption as well as localization accuracy. Firstly, the UWSNs coverage problem is modeled as a virtual force problem involving underwater nodes, underwater relay nodes, and obstacles, which can guide densely or sparsely dispersed underwater nodes to suitable locations under the action of joint virtual forces. Next, considering that the underwater relay node needs to consume more energy in the process of forwarding more data, the non-uniform deployment combined with hierarchy routing is proposed to reduce the coverage holes caused by node energy exhaustion. Finally, with regards to the drifted coordinates and noisy ranging of uncertain measurements, the theoretical localization performance of underwater target is evaluated with use of Cramer-rao lower bound as a benchmark. The experimental results show that proposed method not only enhances the coverage rates, but also prolongs the network surviving time and improves the localization accuracy in UWSNs.