By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Several buses regularly arrive and leave each week at the Chinese university where I taught on sabbatical in 2012. This is an agricultural and forestry university, one of just two in China’s 42 top “Double First Class” universities—similar to U.S. land-grant universities, but twice as big. Their forestry school is world renowned. These buses were carrying forestry students with their backpacks out to field stations for on-the-job experience, including China’s many long-term projects that have reforested massive areas over the last four decades.
China has faced a major challenge of desert expansion from the Gobi Desert and arid regions in the north and west for centuries. In 1978, China began their Three-North Shelter Forest Program to reduce Gobi dust and push back the desert. As is common in Asian cultures, they take the long view and will complete this massive forested protection line 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) long by 2050.
China's Natural Forest Conservation Program, formed in 1998, imposed a logging ban to protect against erosion and rapid runoff. A recent study of ten years of satellite data found a significant recovery of many Chinese forests.
Early reforesting efforts also relied on China’s army to plant trees to restore mountainside forests. More recently, China’s major successful push to eliminate extreme poverty retired many rural elderly to more modern facilities in towns. This released much marginal mountainous land that needed restoration. Thus, farmers are both the major builders and beneficiaries of returning farmland to forest and grassland. In the last half decade, 41 million farmers nationwide—primarily in poorer rural provinces—participated in returning farmland to forests. Over 155 million farmers benefited with their economic income increasing significantly.
A summary published on the China News Network on September 4, 2019 provides official totals of China's conversion of farmland to forest and grassland in the past 20 years. A total of 33.88 million hectares (83.7 million acres) of farmland has been returned to forest and grassland. This breaks down into 13.27 million hectares (ha) of farmland returned to forest and grassland, 17.53 million ha of barren mountains and wasteland newly forested, and 3.07 million ha of forests planted in sparse mountainsides.
China’s State Forestry and Grassland Administration calculates the total value of ecological benefits from returning farmland to forest or grassland every year in terms of water and soil conservation, wind and sand fixation, carbon fixation and oxygen release at 1.38 trillion RMB (about US$21.5 billion). From 2011 to 2016, the average annual reduction of rocky desertification area in China was 3.45 percent.
There is an important distinction between: 1) planting trees where they have never been in recent times, 2) planting commercial trees (orchards or other plantations), and 3) planting back natural trees that were formerly present. These vary in the extent they serve to increase carbon dioxide absorption. The third strategy is of most help in maintaining or restoring the animals and full ecosystem. Since China is a major manufacturer of wood furniture, their big success in reforesting has forced them to buy wood from other countries, thus contributing (but in a much smaller way) to some deforestation in distant countries.
Non-governmental projects have been well underway as well. “Ant Forest” is a tree-planting program via the Alipay app, a heavily-used smartphone method of paying for purchases in Asia. Users earn points that have helped over 600 million users plant more than 326 million trees since 2016.
The “China Green Foundation” goal is to create three belts of poplar trees by 2030. These would stretch from northwest China to central and west Asian countries including Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Iran and Turkey. At the Second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing held in 2019, Imran Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, called for Chinese participation in a drive to plant ten billion trees in the next five years, to build on the Billion Tree Tsunami project which he states has seen five billion trees planted over five years in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. This will enlarge the forested area in Pakistan by one percent.
An extensive look at China’s efforts to make its Belt and Road Initiative more environmentally friendly, and the pluses and minuses of China’s actions relative to coal, wind, solar and hydropower, has just been detailed in the latest issue of the journal Science in “A Greener Path” by Dennis Normille.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.