On Existing Problems And Countermeasures To Urban Meteorological Disaster Warning In China

With global climate change and China’s accelerating urbanization, urban meteorological disasters present a multiple, frequent and recurrent trend that constitutes a serious threat to harmonious operation and sustainable development of economic society, as well safety of urban public life and property. As part of the pre-disaster management, disaster warning has the effects of predicting, alerting and mitigating casualty loss, preventing and defusing disaster risks, as well plays a key role in effective prevention and mitigation of negative impacts caused by the disasters. However, in view of current situations of urban meteorological disaster warning in China, there are prominent problems such as deficient monitoring and warning capacity, insufficient risk assessment, scarce capacity of information distribution, poor coordination and linkage, insufficient public perception, etc., which somehow restricts and limits full plays of disaster warning and disaster prevention&mitigation benefits. Causes of these problems are analyzed, which are:(i) weak senses of disaster risks in relevant authorities and the public;(ii) lagged construction of related laws and regulations;(iii) divergent management functions of disaster warning. Therefore, on the basis of referencing experiences from US, UK, Japan and Russia in focusing on constructions of legal environment and institution-building, assessment of disaster risks, coordination of various social forces, the thesis proposes countermeasures and suggestions to address existing problems in urban meteorological disaster warning in China. On one hand, with principles of complying with system and mechanism guarantees, considerations on multi-factors, civic participation, differentiation of social structure, and maximum information acquisition, perfect the system of urban meteorological disaster warning, and integrate consider relations among urban metrological disaster warning and every aspects. On the other hand, comprehensively improve capacity and level of urban meteorological disaster warning and benefits of disaster prevention and damage reducing by improving law and regulation guarantees, strengthening full warning mechanism led by the government, optimizing monitoring network and upgrading early warning capacity, building disaster risk assessment mechanism, and improving target oriented early warning.