China's green campaign has been as enthusiastic about environmental campaigns as it has been or has been as controversial.
Every spring, government officials,
teachers, students, and company employees go on tree planting tours. The state
media gathers forest workers for praise. Movie stars become "tree planting
ambassadors". This is a vein of the old communist propaganda campaign.
Workers are uniting to overcome the forces of nature. March 12 is National Tree
Planting Day.
Launched to protect the three regions
flowing into the Gobi Desert, northeast, northeast and northeast, the so-called
Three Northern Shelter Forest Program aims to cover 35 million hectares (87).
Million acres (new trees) to grow. Germany's largest forest in the north of the
country by 2050. Over the next four decades, tree planting became one of the
preferred solutions to climate change in both the private and public sectors.
The fate of China's vast forests serves as an early indication of the potential
benefits of these other projects.
The program was troubled from the start
due to poor planning, unrealistic demands of local party workers, and a poor
understanding of where the jungle could grow successfully.
"We were taught the importance of
planting trees at a very young age," says Sun Jing, director of the Elisha
Foundation, which competes in the desert. "The idea that as many trees as
possible are good is never challenged."
Although the mission was designed’ to last
72 years, local officials wanted quick results, so the majority of the trees
planted were fast-growing poplars that could withstand the region's cold, dry
winters. By the 1990s, large numbers of them began to die, falling prey to
Asian long-horned beetles, which love softwoods, including poplars. The more
plants China planted, the more they exploded.
One of those who witnessed the devastation
was Zhang Jiang, a northern resident who graduated from Inner Mongolia Forest
College. "We didn't expect so many trees to die," Zhang told Hong
Kong Phoenix TV in an interview in 2016, when he headed the Chinese Forestry
Bureau. "Having only one species attracts pests and diseases."
Authorities cut down millions of affected
trees, some of which were converted’ into packing carats to boost China's
international trade. (Because of this, the beetle larvae have been able to stop
rides in Europe and North America, where governments are now spending a fortune
to control inflation.) Meanwhile, the planting process continues - sometimes
differently. Types of species are used’ but not often, if it were easy.
Sometimes twice as many trees were planted’ as the land could sustain, based on
the understanding that 50% could die.
Since 1978, there has been a formal
increase in forest coverage, from 12% to 22%. NASA satellite images confirm
that China is a world leader in vision. Bernhard Schmidt, a professor of
environmental sciences at the University of Zurich and Peking University, says:
"It's better to do monoculture in a degraded place than to do nothing, but
it's definitely better to do it." "The more species there are, the
more the ecosystem functions."
A 2018 co-author's dissertation on science
found that an average of 12 tons of carbon can be stored per hectare in a
single farm, while a biodiversity forest can store 32 tones on a plot of the
same size. Another study shows that China is paying more attention to how much
carbon its trees are absorbing, because estimates are based’ on the number of
trees planted, not the number that remains. Worse still, planting non-native
trees in arid areas. Where most of China's forestry efforts are coming from.
Not only does it have a low survival rate but it can also cause water shortages
and damage to the ecosystem.
China has been more successful with plans
to include trees and green spaces in fast-growing cities. Since 2004, about 170
cities have launched "forest city" campaigns to prevent green urban
areas and pollution. Each city includes an average of 13,000 hectares of parks
or forests. For example, in a new town 130 kilometers (80.8 miles) southwest of
Beijing, more than 100 species of trees have been found’ in a program called
Millennium Forest, endorsed by President Xi Jinping. This fall, 3,600 hectares
will be’ planted. The plan aims to cover 40 percent of China's urban land with
trees and green spaces in seven of the 10 cities by the end of the decade.
Even so, owning one is still beyond the
reach of the average person. In the central city of Chongqing, former Communist
Party leader Bo Xilai launched a large-scale tree-planting campaign to pave
roads that grew entirely with his favorite species, ginkgo trees. The city
spent 1.5 1.5 billion on planting trees in 2010, drying up its reserves and
borrowing from neighboring provinces before removing the odor before an
anti-corruption campaign ended in 2012 against a politically motivated one.
More recent evidence suggests that China
has learned from past failures. New Beijing. The second phase of the Tianjin
Sand Store Source Control Project has demanded that 85% of the dedicated land
be handed over’ to "natural forests", a method of weeding declining
land and allowing plants to grow naturally. But I have to come back. Critics,
however, have questioned whether such an approach could be successful in areas
where there is already a lot of dust or nutrient deficiencies.
Officials also acknowledge the importance
of involving local communities. Many former tree planting projects have failed
due to neglect. The Al Shan Foundation has developed a program that pays
farmers to install 100 million Haloxylons in Alexa in Inner Mongolia. Small,
hard desert trees grow on farmer-owned land, which can then grow on trees and
cultivate a parasitic plant called herba cistanche, which is used’ in
traditional Chinese medicine. If at least 65% survive, farmers are paid’ to
grow the trees after three years.
"If you talk to farmers about climate
change, they won't understand. But if the project has economic benefits and a
better environment, it's much easier for them to get on board. "There's
been criticism, but my experience living in Alexa and talking to the local
villagers is improving the environment, so planting trees is better than
deserting the land."
Despite all the obstacles, China sees its forestry
efforts as a success, a "nature-based solution" that has become
popular in government rhetoric. But the country's long and expensive planting
program shows that deforestation is a complex and delicate task. It varies
according to local conditions, and will provide economic and social benefits to
those who have to take care of the trees for generations.
Beijing, meanwhile, has said it plans to
export tree-planting programs to other countries, including more than 130
nations, under the "Belt and Road" initiative. According to the
government-affiliated China Green Foundation, three "green economic
belts" will be created’ by 2030 that connect China to Central and West
Asian countries, including Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Turkey. Tree of
choice for the program: Poplar.
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