China has optimized its capability to prevent or deal with incidents and natural disasters in the past 10 years, which has helped reduce the nation's economic losses and individual injuries, said the Ministry of Emergency Management.

Set up in 2018, the ministry is responsible for guiding provinces and regions in dealing with emergencies and coordinating rescue efforts and supplies for disaster management. It's also responsible for the management and supervision of workplace safety in industries such as manufacturing and mining.

According to the ministry, the number of safety incidents has decreased by 56.8 percent over the past 10 years, with the number of deaths falling by 45.9 percent in 2021 compared with 2012.

The firefighting organizational system has also been improved, as has corresponding legislative work on fire safety.

Chungsai, director of the fire and rescue department of the ministry, said at a news conference on Tuesday in Beijing that the ministry has focused on fire prevention in high-risk areas including high-rise buildings, shopping malls and petrochemical companies, and over 85.2 million fire hazards were eliminated in the past 10 years.

Chungsai said that the nation has 7,969 fire stations and 111,000 fire trucks, up from 5,256 and 47,000 respectively in 2012. About 21 provinces and regions out of 34 in total have aviation fire brigades to fight forest fires.

He added that there are over 100,000 people nationwide registered as fire prevention engineers and nearly 1.4 million skilled workers serving in the fire prevention or firefighting sectors.

"The nation's economy doubled and urban areas grew by 30 percent in the past 10 years, while we still maintained a quite safe landscape on fire safety," he said.

The ministry has worked to prevent or manage natural disasters such as floods and droughts to protect the nation and people's individual safety.

In dealing with the rarely seen high temperatures that swept the nation's southern provinces from July, the ministry enhanced its meteorological, hydraulic and agricultural monitoring of droughts and coordinated firefighting brigades to deliver water to affected people.

Zhou Xuewen, a vice-minister of the ministry, said at the news conference that the nation has quite a high frequency of natural disasters, which can cause large economic losses. So it's important to continuously improve the emergency management system against disasters－from plans and capability to supply support.

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