China's first method of gathering statistics on flood-control efforts will soon be distributed by the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, an official said Saturday.

"This method will provide uniform standards for the headquarters to monitor local governments' flood-control performances and offer valuable references to future water conservancy construction," said director Zhang Xu of the Headquarters' Drought Relief Division.

Over the past decades, the country has invested large sums of money for the construction of dams and reservoirs and in training official in flood control techniques. However, it's very difficult to measure how this has helped prevent floods due to the inability of getting statistics.

Therefore, in most cases, statistics were roughly drawn from estimates, he said.

Since all local governments have established a system to hold their administrative leaders responsible for their flood-control affairs, Zhang believed many of them could expect hard reports on the desk by the year end.

The method has been piloted in six provinces including Henan, Shandong, Hubei and Anhui. It has been slightly modified to take into consideration geographic and economic disparities among regions.

Zhang said that the method would be mainly used to calculate direct economic effect caused by flood-control efforts. Indirect economic effect or effects on society and ecology were excluded.

(Xinhua News Agency July 24, 2004)