China's progress in flood prevention and control significant

China has made significant progress in reducing the adverse impacts from floods over the past decade, thanks to increasingly strengthened flood control systems in different river basins, said Liu Weiping, vice-minister of water resources.

"Ensuring the safety of people's lives and property has always been the top priority of the ministry," he said in a news conference organized by the State Council Information Office on Thursday.

To better protect people's lives and property, the ministry has accelerated the construction of reservoirs, dikes and flood detention basins in different river basins to enhance flood control capability, he said.

The ministry, for instance, managed to increase the capacity of the country's reservoirs by 163.2 billion cubic meters, he continued.

He said the ministry has also taken a series of measures to intensify forecasting and early warning as well as to improve plans for emergency response.

Thanks to these efforts, the country has successfully controlled a series of severe floods in its major river basins, including the basins of the Yangtze, Yellow and Huaihe rivers.

The average proportion of loss caused by floods in the country's GDP in the past decade went down to 0.24 percent from 0.51 percent in the previous decade, he said.

He said the ministry's efforts to promote projects for water resources management have contributed a lot to food and water supply security.

Since 2014, the ministry has managed to add 10 million hectares of farmland under highly water-efficient irrigation, he said. The irrigation rate of the country's farmland has now reached 55 percent.

"This has provided strong support to ensure bumper harvest," he said.

To date, 90 percent of the country's rural residents have been covered by tap water. "We have brought about a historic resolution to rural residents' difficulty to get drinking water, which has plagued many rural areas for generations," he said.