http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/monitoring/media_reports/newsid_1193000/1193266.stm
BBC News Online: World: Monitoring: Media reports
Tuesday, 27 February, 2001, 20:11 GMT
China on sandstorm alert
The Gobi Desert is creeping south and China's heartlands are being swept by
increasingly regular sandstorms.
Worried by this pattern, the Chinese Government has spent a year working towards
better long-range forecasts of sandstorms.
Chinese TV will broadcast sandstorm forecasts every evening from next month. This is
part of a new national campaign to raise public
awareness of these environmental catastrophes.
The forecasts also serve to help people plan for a couple of days of disruption and
air scarcely fit to breathe.
Sandstorms have become an increasingly regular feature of life in north China, and
beyond.
The Chinese media reported 13 sandstorms in the north last spring.
Sandstorms spread south
But just last week, sand particles from a northern China sandstorm reached as far
south as Taiwan, Taipei's CNA news agency
reported.
China's new monitoring system will trace the earliest signs of sandstorms, thus making
it possible to issue earlier warnings and predict
the path of the storm.
The system will use satellites, radar, sounding balloons and other meteorological
technologies to form a real-time network expected to
identify the areas sandstorms will sweep over, said Li Huang, deputy director of the
China Meteorological Bureau.
Probably not long from now, Beijingers will go outside and catch a camel
Chinese ecologist
Grasslands on the retreat
The storms are a result of 20 years of desertification with the northern grasslands in
retreat.
The Gobi Desert is creeping southwards and the grasslands are being swallowed by sand.
An article in the Chinese Academy of Sciences weekly Kexue Shibao last year reported
the studies of a senior scientist and China
Academy of Sciences Atmospheric Physics Institute researcher Fu Congbin.
Desertification
Fu said in the eastern region of Inner Mongolia, within the past 10 years,
desertification has been enabling the Gobi Desert area to
expand at a rate of 2.4% per year.
In another article in Kexue Shibao, the decline of the grasslands is described with a
poignant lyricism.
"Once there was fragrant grass everywhere, fresh flowers bloomed, and people riding on
camels could see other people riding but
could not see their camels. Now it looks as if the land were suffering from a disease
of the scalp, with vegetation thinly scattered."
Scientists paint a strange future for the Chinese capital if desertification is not
tackled.
Environmentalists have reported that in recent years the desert has arrived at the
northern gateway to Beijing.
At present, the nearest the desert comes to Beijing is 18km. Environmental protection
experts have said that "probably not long from
now, Beijingers will go outside and catch a camel".
BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates
information from radio, television, press, news
agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
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