The 4th National S&T Conference on Social Development was held in Beijing on July 18th.

Compared with the "tenth five-year" period, the S&T expenditure for national social development was increased significantly in the "eleventh five-year" period, with a series of remarkable achievements as well. The S&T support for solving difficult social problems and hot issues was increased greatly, the mechanism of S&T management system was optimized gradually, and the experimental areas for sustainable development grew rapidly, with totally 116 areas all over the country at present.

In the "twelfth five-year" period, protecting and improving people's livelihood will be high on the agenda. The following six aspects are the focus: firstly, enhancing the innovation of S&T management mechanism; secondly, stepping up the implementation of national major R&D projects; thirdly, accelerating the efforts to put the R&D projects on social development into practice; fourthly, organizing national S&T actions on livelihood; fifthly, promoting the construction of experimental areas for sustainable development; sixthly, encouraging international S&T cooperation in social development.

In the meeting, MOST issued Comments on Speeding up the S&T Development on livelihood and planned to launch national S&T actions on livelihood to promote related work in four priority fields, namely human health, ecological environment, public safety, disaster prevention and mitigation.