About 800 experts and scholars from 70 countries and regions will gather in Beijing next week to seek an effective solution to control water loss and soil erosion in a bid to rehabilitate the world's ecosystem.
They will attend the 12th International Soil Conservation Conference scheduled to be held in Beijing from Monday to May 31, the first such event to be hosted by China, an official announced Thursday.
The biennial event has been treated as "an Olympic gathering of the world's elite working for controlling water loss and soil erosion as it will fully reflect regional and worldwide achievements in the field," said the official.
Liu Zhen, director of the conference's organizing committee, said the meeting will focus on "the protection of global water and soil resources and their sustainability."
Experts and scholars will also discuss measures to tackle six other issues plaguing the world's water and soil conservation, including the exploitation of rivers' valleys, the monitoring and assessment of water and soil conservation, related policies and actions and the control of extending desertification.
To date, more than 700 thesis have been submitted to the organizing committee.
Land degradation has affected 65 percent of the world's land due to soil erosion, land salinization and desertification, Jiao said.
From 1957 to 1990, farmland destroyed by land degradation in the world was equivalent to the total cultivated lands of Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands, statistics indicated.
Soil erosion has plagued about 12 percent of Europe's land mass (115 million hectares), with 4 percent of the continent's land (42 million hectares) suffering from wind erosion.
In North America, land degradation, caused mainly by eroded soil, has affected some 95 million hectares of land.
And in Africa, land degradation since 1950 has affected 500 million hectares of land - more than 65 percent of its farmland.
To date, damage resulting from water and wind erosion, and land salinization, has reportedly cost South Asia US$5.4 billion, US$1.8 billion and US$1.5 billion respectively.
International communities have attached great importance to the problem, which has led to environmental deterioration, regional poverty and lagging economies in many areas.
(China Daily May 24, 2002)
