Flooding claims 80 per cent of the country's annual losses due to geological disasters, Land and Resources Vice-Minister Shou Jiahua said yesterday.

Ministry statistics show geological disasters, mainly caused by excessive development, kill more than 1,000 people each year and cost millions of yuan in economic losses.

Shou urged related local government departments to review their geological disaster monitoring and warning systems to ensure they will work in times of need.

The ministry has so far investigated roughly one tenth of the country's vast land area and has installed monitoring mechanisms in most of the nearly 400,000 square kilometres marked out as being prone to geological disasters.

The warning system has successfully forecast 1,000 geological disasters in the past five years, saving an estimated 30,000 people and huge assets, according to Shou.

Shou predicts landslides will be a problem in Central China's Hunan Province, Southwest China's Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, Zhejiang and Fujian provinces in the east, Guangdong Province in the south and Northwest China this year.

Shou announced the locations yesterday at the closing session of a three-day National Geological Environment Work Conference, which outlined the ministry's work schedule for the year.

The central government has allocated 23.5 million yuan (US$2.8 million) over the past two years for mine site environmental studies, said Jiang Jianjun, director of the ministry's Geological Environment Department.

"After studying 18 different types of mines in about 16 provincial regions, the ministry expects to produce the country's first technical standards later this year to evaluate the eco-environment at mines," he said.

With a large proportion of the country's State-owned mines running out of resources, the ministry faces a severe challenge to restore the eco-environment of the mines to enable future use, Jiang said.

(China Daily April 21, 2003)