FRESH AND GREEN: A tea farmer presents a handful of freshly picked tea leaves at the Lushan Yunwu Tea Base in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, on March 18. Tea leaves picked during spring are reputed to have the best flavor (ZHANG HAIYAN)

Low-Carbon Certification

China will build a unified certification system for low-carbon products as part of efforts to boost consumption of environmentally friendly goods, said the country's top economic planner.

An independent third-party agency will assess the carbon footprint of products and services and grant low-carbon certificates to those that have met certain requirements, according to a document issued on March 21 by the National Development and Reform Commission.

The commission will then issue a catalogue of certified products and an identification mark will be printed on the products' packaging, the document said.

The certification scheme is being piloted in the provincial regions of Guangdong, Chongqing and Hubei.

By the end of 2015, China aims to lower its energy consumption per 10,000 yuan ($1,608) of GDP by 16 percent from 2010 and lower its carbon dioxide emissions per 10,000 yuan of GDP by 17 percent.

OD Regulation

To better protect workers' rights, China has revised a regulation on occupational diseases that ensures more efficient diagnostic procedures.

The revised Regulation on Diagnosing and Authenticating Occupational Diseases, released on March 18 by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, allows employees to choose from more health institutions for identifying occupational diseases and simplifies the procedures for official confirmation of diagnoses.

Meanwhile, the regulation stipulates that employers are responsible for presenting evidence on occupational disease-related conflicts with their employees, and local industrial safety watchdogs should assist employees in urging employers to do so.

Some 779,849 cases of occupational diseases had been reported in China by the end of 2011. Last year, the country officially recognized 562 institutions to diagnose such diseases.

The revised regulation will take effect on April 10.

Ethnic Publishing

A book collection on the study of languages of Chinese ethnic minorities has been published to boost the country's linguistic diversity, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) said on March 18.

The three-volume book, the first of its kind, covers research findings introduced since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the academy said.

The work took more than a decade to complete through joint efforts by three generations of linguists, according to the academy.

"The publication has promoted the study of ethnic languages, and also played a good role in protecting endangered languages and boosting the country's linguistic diversity," said Chao Ke, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Scientific Research Management of CASS.

China's 55 ethnic minorities use about 100 spoken languages and dozens of written forms belonging to the Sino-Tibetan, Altaic, Indo-European and Austro-Asiatic language families.

Quake Warning System

The Chengdu Hi-Tech Disaster Mitigation Institute in southwest China's Sichuan Province is now home to the world's largest earthquake warning system, according to head of the institute on March 18.

The system was developed with both domestic and foreign technologies, said Wang Tun, director of the institute.

The system covers an area of 400,000 square km, bigger than the 377,000-square-km warning system in Japan. It is made up of 1,213 monitoring instruments and warning centers in eight provinces including Gansu, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Yunnan.

The system's reaction time once a quake occurs is an average of 7 seconds, while Japan's is an average of 9 seconds, Wang said, adding that it integrates television, computers, mobile phones and microblogs for alerts.