On 26 April 2022, the Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) released the 14th Five-Year Plan for the Standardization of Emergency Management. This document points out the direction of standardization work in the three areas under MEM’s jurisdiction, namely production safety, firefighting, and disaster reduction with comprehensive emergency management.
At a macro level, the document proposes that within the next five years China will establish and improve an emergency management standard system featuring “complete structure, clear hierarchy, and mandatory standards playing a lead role with supplementation by voluntary standards.” It also states that in order to optimize their standards system, MEM will facilitate the conversion of mature local and association standards with high applicability to national and sector standards.
At implementation level, the document determines the key technical areas in production safety, firefighting, disaster reduction with comprehensive emergency management. It also highlights how projects that would affect the sector strategically and those related to the digital and intelligent transformation of the sector will be prioritized.
In addition, the document proposes to accelerate the construction of the MEM standards information platform, facilitate its exchange with the national standards information platform, and realize the whole-process information management of MEM’s standardization. This would be an applaudable step forward, helping address the problem of lacking openness of standardization in the emergency management sector.
Since its establishment in 2018, MEM has launched 225 standard projects, 170 of which have been finished and released to date. As of March 2022, the ministry is managing 1,080 currently effective standards, including 500 national standards and 580 sector standards.
