China has seen a significant drop of casualties from workplace accidents and natural disasters in recent years, and efforts will be beefed up in major high-risk sectors such as the chemical industry to further improve the situation, according to a senior emergency management official.

After a continuous decline of both the number of workplace accidents and their casualties for 16 consecutive years, "the annual death toll of workplace accidents in the country plummeted from a peak of almost 140,000 in 2002 to 34,000 last year," Sun Huashan, vice-minister of emergency management, said at a news conference organized by the State Council Information Office on Wednesday.

The country also experienced a great drop in casualties from natural disasters. On average, about 7,200 people were killed or left missing in disasters annually in the initial years after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.

Last year, fewer than 1,000 people succumbed to natural disasters, he added.

He also said, however, that the country still faces challenges in further enhancing safety in the coal mine sector, and the safety control situation remains grim in the country's chemical industry.

Since 1949, among workplace accidents that claimed more than 30 lives, 40 percent occurred in the coal mine sector. With increasingly bigger government investment to strengthen management, the country has established a national team of more than 3,000 members focusing on coal mine safety administration and has enacted a series of laws and regulations.

"Marked progress has been made" in improving the situation, Sun said.

A lot of small coal mines with inadequate safety conditions have been shut down. The number of coal mines across the country dropped from more than 30,000 in 1999 to 5,700 last year despite the fact that coal output shot up from about 1.2 billion to almost 3.7 billion metric tons during that period, he noted.

The annual death toll declined to only 333 last year from a peak during the period of 8,000, he added.

"The safety situation in the coal mine sector has been stable with a trend toward good, but there are still many factors that could result in disasters," Sun said without elaborating on those factors."The situation is still fragile."

While the coal mine industry is showing promise, major accidents in the country's giant chemical sector have been trending upward, he said.

Two major accidents occurred in the sector in 2017 and another two in 2018, claiming 63 lives in total. This year, three major accidents occurred from January to August, leaving 103 dead, Sun said.

He said 80 percent of companies in the country's chemical sector are medium-and small-sized firms with outdated equipment and inadequate safety control capabilities.

According to the ministry, there are now more than 210,000 chemical companies across the country. The output value of the sector stood at 14.8 trillion yuan ($2.1 trillion) last year, amounting to 13.8 percent of the country's GDP.

The ministry will continue to dispatch experts to guide companies in the sector to address their challenges in safety management and roll out special law enforcement campaigns to remove safety hazards, he said.