Strengthening Core Public Health Capacity Based on the Implementation of the International Health Regulations (IHR) (2005): Chinese Lessons

As an international legal instrument, the International Health Regulations (IHR) is internationally binding in 196 countries, especially in all the member states of the World Health Organization (WHO). The IHR aims to prevent, protect against, control, and respond to the international spread of disease and aims to cut out unnecessary interruptions to traffic and trade. To meet IHR requirements, countries need to improve capacity construction by developing, strengthening, and maintaining core response capacities for public health risk and Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). In addition, all the related core capacity requirements should be met before June 15, 2012. If not, then the deadline can be extended until 2016 upon request by countries. China has promoted the implementation of the IHR comprehensively, continuingly strengthening the core public health capacity and advancing in core public health emergency capacity building, points of entry capacity building, as well as risk prevention and control of biological events (infectious diseases, zoonotic diseases, and food safety), radiological, nuclear, and chemical events, and other catastrophic events. With significant progress in core capacity building, China has dealt with many public health emergencies successfully, ensuring that its core public health capacity has met the IHR requirements, which was reported to WHO in June 2014. This article describes the steps, measures, and related experiences in the implementation of IHR in China

Compound drought constrains gross primary productivity in Chinese grasslands

Water constraints disturb and damage the growth and development of grassland vegetation mainly through both atmospheric and soil pathways. In the background of rapid climate change in the future, the impacts of water constraints on grasslands are expected to further deepen. However, current studies lack reports exploring the frequency, intensity, and area of land-atmospheric compound drought on carbon indicators in grassland ecosystems. In this study, we analyze the response of China grasslands to dual terrestrial-atmospheric water constraint events using ISIMIP gross primary productivity (GPP) data to reveal the carbon cycle-climate feedback relationships over the Chinese grassland. We found that the occurrence probability of compound drought events (i.e. land-atmospheric water constraint) was 3–4 times higher than that of random drought events, and the frequency, intensity, and affected area of compound droughts were significantly higher than that of single droughts. Compound droughts caused a decline of up to 20.27% in GPP of grassland ecosystems in China, while the decline of single atmospheric drought or soil drought was only 12.34% and 14.32%. Which is because vapor pressure deficit and soil moisture are a set of strongly coupled bivariate variables, and the continued strengthening of the land-atmospheric feedback causes a higher probability of occurrence of compound drought events and an increased impact on ecosystem GPP

Early Evidence That Soil Dryness Causes Widespread Decline in Grassland Productivity in China

The burning of fossil fuels by humans emits large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and strongly affects the Earth’s carbon balance, with grassland ecosystems changing from weak carbon sinks that were previously close to equilibrium to core carbon sinks. Chinese grasslands are located in typical arid–semi-arid and semi-arid climatic regions, and drought events in the soil and atmosphere can have strong and irreversible consequences on the function and structure of Chinese grassland ecosystems. Based on this, we investigated the response of the gross primary production (GPP) of Chinese grasslands to land–atmosphere moisture constraints, using GPP data simulated through four terrestrial ecosystem models and introduced copula functions and Bayesian equations. The main results were as follows: (1) Soil moisture trends were not significant, and changes were dominated by interannual variability. The detrended warm-season SM correlated with GPP at 0.48 and 0.63 for the historical and future periods, respectively; thus, soil moisture is the critical water stress that regulates interannual variability in Chinese grassland GPP. (2) The positive correlation between shallow SM (0–50 cm) and GPP was higher (r = 0.62). Shallow-soil moisture is the main soil layer that constrains GPP, and the soil moisture decrease in shallow layers is much more likely to cause GPP decline in Chinese grasslands than that in deep-soil water. (3) The probability of GPP decline in Chinese grasslands caused by drought in shallow soils of 0–20 and 20–50 cm is 32.49% and 27.64%, respectively, which is much higher than the probability of GPP decline in deeper soils. In particular, soil drought was more detrimental to grassland GPP in Xinjiang and the Loess Plateau. (4) The probability of soil drought causing GPP decline was higher than that of atmospheric drought during the historical period (1.78–8.19%), but the probability of an atmospheric drought-induced GPP deficit increases significantly in the future and becomes a key factor inhibiting GPP accumulation in some regions (e.g., the Loess Plateau). Our study highlighted the response of grassland ecosystems after the occurrence of soil drought, especially for the shallow-soil-water indicator, which provides important theoretical references for grassland drought disaster emergency prevention and policy formulation