National forestry authorities yesterday called for redoubled efforts in afforestation to avert worsening degradation and drought.

With 1,743 square kilometres, over 18 per cent of its land mass, reduced to desert wasteland, China is faced with a daunting task.

"Although the painstaking efforts to improve the ecological environment have begun to pay off with 10 per cent of the country's desertified land brought under control, the whole situation of desertification is still worsening," Zhu Lieke, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration said yesterday.

He was speaking on the occasion of the ninth World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, which seeks to encourage greater public awareness of the need for more measures on sand management.

Zhu said that China aims to basically control the expansion of desertified land by the year 2010 and to realize the sustainable economic development of these areas by 2050.

Statistics show that desertified land in China has reached a staggering 1.743 million square kilometres, 18.2 per cent of the country's total land mass. And the situation is worsening annually at a rate of 3,436 square kilometres.

To try and combat the problem, the country has carried out several large-scale anti-desertification projects, including a decade-long forest shelter-belt project in the northwestern, northern and northeastern regions, and a new afforestation programme to protect the Beijing-Tianjin area from sandstorms.

The two projects are vital to the national desertification-control campaign, since they cover more than 85 per cent of desertified land.

Launched in June 2000, the Beijing-Tianjin area afforestation - the country's major forestry ecological construction scheme which spans five provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities - has to date planted 1.94 million hectares of forest, reclaimed 180,000 hectares of river areas and 68,000 hectares of grassland.

Meteorologists say that apart from natural factors, such as weak cold fronts and frequent spring rainfall, the work of returning the farmland into grassland or forest where sandstorms form, contributed significantly to the absence of sandstorms this year in Beijing.