Northeast Asian countries join forces to tackle sandstorms

[senorpepr]

BEIJING, (AFP) - China, Mongolia, Japan, and the two Koreas have vowed to tackle annual dust and sandstorms together as deserts continue their march across the region.

Every year from March to May strong cold winds from Siberia blow up huge volumes of yellow dust from the Gobi desert in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and north China, sending it as far as the Korean peninsula and Japan.

The storms, which hit capitals like Beijing and Seoul, can be so severe that they disrupt air flights and force schools to cancel classes while clinics are often crowded with people complaining of eye and respiratory illnesses.

At an inaugural meeting in Beijing this week, environmental officials from across Northeast Asia pledged to find effective solutions to the menace.

"Dust and sandstorm (DSS) has become a severe environmental problem facing Northeast Asia. We need collaboration," Zhu Guangyao, vice director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration, was cited as saying by the Xinhua news agency.

A monitoring and forecasting system was a priority, he said.

"We should share the information to build a network covering the whole Northeast Asia," said Zhu.

Park Young Woo, from South Korea (news - web sites)'s Ministry of Environment, said a monitoring and forecasting system shared by China and South Korea was under construction while Japanese officials said Sino-Japanese research was also ongoing.

But Zhu said more needed to be done and that the deserts had to be transformed.

Chinese statistics show that dust storms have got worse in recent years due to continuous droughts in northwest China and Mongolia. In 2000, the storms hit 12 times, surging to 32 in 2001.

Alarm bells started ringing last year when Chinese environmentalists found almost a third of the country's land mass is now desert, largely due to human economic activity, such as livestock overgrazing.