A national emergency response command center will be set up in
Beijing with an investment of hundreds of millions of yuan, the
Shanghai Securities News reported Thursday.
Equipped with eight disaster-monitoring satellites, the command
center will report directly to the country's leaders, the paper
said, citing Feng Qiang, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, who did not reveal when the center would become
operational.
Currently China's disaster management capabilities are
distributed among different government departments, including the
Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry of Water Resources and the
China Meteorological Administration.
Each department is capable of managing a single disaster but
precautionary measures and emergency response are not adequate to
protect lives and property in the absence of a centralized organ to
pool all the information and take command, said Feng.
The United Nations has estimated that losses can be reduced by
30 to 40 percent if adequate precautions are taken, the paper
said.
The report says that meteorological disasters and fallout from
fast economic growth are causing higher economic losses in China,
and the country needs a command center to coordinate efforts in
tackling this type of situation.
"The higher the economic density, the greater the potential
losses", said Feng, citing Hurricane Katrina as an example, which
caused the United States economic losses of 100 to 200 billion U.S.
dollars.
Seventy percent of China's natural disasters are meteorological
disasters - including droughts, rainstorms, floods and tropical
storms - which affect 600 million people every year, with economic
losses amounting to three to six percent of the country's gross
domestic product.
(Xinhua News Agency December 14, 2006)