Senior land and resources officials are urging the creation of a cooperation mechanism to better predict and prevent landslides, mud-rock flows and other natural hazards that cost the country millions of yuan a year.
Such natural disasters are often caused by improper human behaviour and are therefore preventable, said Li Lierong, director of the China Institute of Geological Environment Monitoring.
"We need experts to closely monitor and promptly forecast geological hazards," he said at a weekend forum in Beijing.
Geological hazards were not given much attention in China until the 1980s, when the country staged large-scale economic construction, Li said.
The Chinese Government officially assumed "preventing geological hazards" as one of its tasks in 1988.
The Ministry of Land and Resources has established a natural disaster monitoring network in most counties that has successfully warned people of danger. But the country's capacity for handling geological hazards needs to be improved comprehensively, Li said.
He said the Association of Geological Hazards Research under the Geological Society of China will consult experts and comprehensively study geological hazards.
(China Daily January 21, 2002)
