China, Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia have agreed to join forces to tackle the threat sandstorms pose to northeast Asia because of desertification, the Chinese media said Tuesday.
The four Asian countries will team up to monitor the atmosphere and land restoration, China’s top desertification official Liu Tuo said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
“We will launch the plan once we get financial support,” he told Xinhua at an ongoing conference in Beijing.
“Sandstorms will only be effectively handled with international cooperation,” Liu said, according to Xinhua.
Sandstorms have hit China 17 times since early this year, with 12 of them crossing international borders, the official said.
Zhu Lieke, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration, said the Chinese government had made it a priority to seek international cooperation to combating sandstorms.
Despite the more frequent sandstorms, the Chinese government has insisted that it will intensify its efforts to clean the air and prepare for the 2008 Olympics by planting broad belts of trees around the city.
Desertification is a worrying trend for China, which has around 1.74 million square kilometers (696,000 square miles) of desertified land, or 18 percent of its total land area.
