Jasper Knight, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, has called for the government to draw lessons from China's disaster prevention and mitigation practices to better respond to the country's extreme weather events.
The expert made the statement in an interview with China Media Group (CMG) ahead of the International Day of Combating Sand and Dust Storms which fell on Saturday.
In the interview, Knight said that while South Africa has disaster and risk management on place, there remains a lack of support on the ground knowledge, expertise and coordination among government departments, particularly at the municipal level.
"This is a real problem in South Africa where we have management policies in place dealing with disasters and risk, for example, but often that isn't supported on the ground by knowledge and expertise and coordination of different government departments within municipalities. And this is one reason why floods and droughts and big storms and so on give rise to such big impacts upon people and the environment. So here we need to have a coordinated plan in place for gluing together different aspects of scientific knowledge that can then inform policy debate," he said.
In terms of combating desertification, the expert said planting vegetation to build shelter belts is a good positive management step, which can reduce wind speed and also stabilize the land surface, making it less likely for sandstorms and dust storms to take place.
A series of really good positive management steps have been taking place to stabilize the land surface by planting vegetation, and these [the land surfaces with vegetation planted] are known as shelter belts. This is a process to reduce wind speed and to stabilize the land surface and make it less likely that sand storms and dust storms are going to take place, according to the expert.
He highlighted China's success in using the land stabilization technique to combat sand and dust storms.
"In China, this has been done, particularly in the Tarim Basin in northwest China and around the Tibetan Plateau, and this has been done relatively successfully. And this helps protect infrastructure as well as protect agriculture. So here in South Africa, we can learn from the ways in which these management strategies have been put in place elsewhere in the world. And this can also help the land surface become more resilient to withstand climate change in semi-arid areas in the future," he said.
Over the past four decades, China has made strides in combating desertification. In 1978, it launched the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program (TSFP), the world's largest afforestation program, to tackle desertification in northwestern, northern and northeastern parts of the country.
As a result, a total of 480 million mu (32 million hectares) of forests had been planted and preserved by June, and 1.28 billion mu (about 85.3 million hectares) of degraded grasslands had been restored.
South African scholar calls for drawing from China's experience in disaster prevention, control
