This Law is formulated for the purpose of preventing and controlling water pollution, protecting and improving the environment, safeguarding human health, ensuring the effective use of water resources and facilitating the development of socialist modernization.

This report contains English-translated abstracts of important Chinese-language literature concerning global climate change for the years 1995-1998. This body of abstracts includes the topics of adaption, ancient climate change, climate variation, the East Asia monsoon, historical climate change, impacts, modeling, and radiation, and trace gas emission. In addition to the bibliographic citations and abstracts translated into English, this report presents the original citations and abstracts in Chinese. Author and title index are included to assist the reader in locating abstracts of particular interest.