Dr. CHEN Zhenlin

Administrator of the China Meteorological Administration

March 23, 2025 marks the 65th World Meteorological Day (WMD), with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) designating this year's theme as “Closing the Early Warning Gap Together”. This theme underscores the pivotal role of meteorology as the first line of defense against disasters and reflects the international meteorological community's shared aspiration for global collaboration in maintaining safety in terms of weather and climate.

Early Warnings for All underpins weather and climate risks prevention and mitigation

2024 has become the hottest year on record. Global warming has amplified climate system instability, triggering frequent and intensified extreme weather events, coupled with compound disasters of strong intensity and widespread impact.

Meteorological early warning systems, which are capable of issuing alerts before disasters strike, can serve as a cost-effective disaster risk mitigation approach with rapid and tangible outcomes for safeguarding lives and property.

In March, 2022, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres launched the Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative, which aims to ensure that everyone on Earth is protected from hazardous weather, water, or climate events through life-saving multi-hazard early warning systems, anticipatory action and resilience efforts by the end of 2027. And the UN launched an Executive Action Plan to implement EW4ALL initiative in November of the same year.

The nineteenth World Meteorological Congress (Cg-19) set the implementation of the Early Warnings for All initiative as the top priority in the WMO's Strategic Plan 2024-2027.

According to UN statistics, early warning systems have contributed to saving lives and reducing economic losses. However, critical gaps persist in the development of such systems across countries, with few countries achieving effective coordination between early warnings and emergency response mechanisms. Vulnerable regions, least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in particular, remain confronted with formidable challenges in enhancing their early warning capabilities.

Global climate risks call for a collective response. At multiple international occasions, Chinese President Xi Jinping has advocated concerted action to respond to global challenges like climate change. As humanity shares a community with a shared future, all countries shall deepen collaboration to build a safer and more climate-resilient world. This requires concerted endeavor to underpin the implementation of the Global Development Initiative (GDI), Global Security Initiative (GSI), and Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), closing the early warning gap together, empowering early warning to serve the interests of people and the world.

Giving full play to the pioneering role of warning in meteorological disaster prevention and mitigation

The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) resolutely implements the spirit of Chinese President Xi Jinping's important instructions on meteorological work, puts people and life first, and strives to step up meteorological disaster monitoring, forecasting, and warning as well as prevention and response capabilities.

Enhancing meteorological science and technology capabilities underpin more timely, accurate and widespread early warning dissemination. China has established the world's largest integrated ground-sea-air-space meteorological observing system, achieving precise monitoring of rapidly changing weather conditions. China has independently developed its own numerical weather prediction (NWP) system. Smart grid forecasting products have delivered seamless and multi-element predictions across all temporal and spatial scales, characterized by minute-scale temporal resolution and kilometer-scale spatial precision.

Nationwide meteorological disaster risk surveys have been completed, enabling the development of a disaster-specific andzoning early warning system, with lead time for severe convection warning reaching 43 minutes. The new-generation National Emergency Early Warning Information Release System disseminates 82 types of warning information to designated emergency responders within 1 minute, achieving 99.1% public coverage.

Enhancing the quality and efficiency of public services enables more prompt early warning response, efficacy and efficiency. China is improving a meteorological disaster prevention and mitigation mechanism featured by Government-led, Risk warning, Elaborate forecast, Sectoral linkage, and All on board, and has established emergency linkage mechanism with meteorological early warning as the trigger and adopted “call and response”when high-level early warning is issued.

Since 2023, meteorological departments have alerted 580,000 party and government leaders and key emergency responders in total with “call and response” mechanism prior to the emergence of severe weather events, delivering timely weather updates and impacts. The progressive meteorological service mechanism has been increasingly improved, enabling meteorological departments to deliver tailored forecasting and warning products according to evolving disaster scenarios, while coordinating responses through level-based, region-specific, and more coordinated collaboration. Early warnings and alerts are delivered in a timely manner to emergency responders, effectively activating disaster prevention and mitigation departments, thus saving more time for disaster preparedness and public evacuation. Public awareness of and responsiveness to meteorological disaster prevention have steadily improved, with meteorological science knowledge reaching 80.81% of the population by 2024.

Providing China's wisdom and plan for practicing EW4ALL initiative

Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the establishment of meteorological early warning service platform and the cooperation in disaster prevention, mitigation and relief, and biodiversity protection on the occasion of the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. In a bid to implement the partnership actions, CMA will proactively shoulder the responsibility of global solidarity in international meteorological governance.

CMA hosts 26 global and regional centres of WMO. FENGYUN meteorological satellite data services now cover 133 countries and regions, achieving an 80% global service satisfaction rate. Under the regular global operational mechanisms for global forecasting and the seamless global forecasting framework, China has independently developed systems for global and regional NWP models, as well as WMO Pilot Project to Enhance the Capability of Meteorological Disaster Risk Reduction in RAII (Asia) (GMAS-A). These advancements have also enabled preliminary capabilities to deliver refined public meteorological services to the whole world.

To implement EW4ALL initiative, China has rolled out a series of plans like China's Action on Early Warning for Climate Change Adaptation. These initiatives underscore China's unwavering commitment to global efforts in this regard, highlighting its robust action and leadership in fostering international collaboration.

CMA has signed cooperative agreements with relevant departments from over 30 countries and international organizations, established regional joint prevention and response mechanisms for major severe weather events with neighboring countries, and promoted mutual assistance among countries through South-South Cooperation projects, to share China's early warning practice with Global South countries, deepen the inter-connectivity of meteorological infrastructure and the sharing of working experience and mechanisms, and strengthen people-to-people bonds with Belt and Road partner countries.

So far, China's self-developed“cloud-based”early warning system has been applied in countries including Pakistan, Ethiopia, and the Solomon Islands. Moving forward, CMA will further explore leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to empower early warning initiatives. In addition, CMA is planning to lift off 3 geostationary meteorological satellites which will provide Africa with round-the-clock and high-precision meteorological disaster monitoring services, and shield more people in multiple countries from the adverse impacts of weather events.

Ensuring universal access to meteorological early warning systems is not only a shared vision of the international community but also an important mission of China's meteorological departments. CMA will continuously enhance the meteorological science and technology and improve public services, and deliver more robust scientific, institutional and governance support to achieve the goals of EW4ALL initiative, and contribute more wisdom and plans to building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Editor: LIU Shuqiao