Aerial photo taken on Aug 23, 2021 shows the scenery of Saihanba forest farm in North China's Hebei province. [Photo/Xinhua]
China ranks first globally in the land area of planted forests and
forest coverage growth, contributing one-fourth of the world's new
forest area in the past decade.
The secret behind the rapid growth of China's green landscape lies in
its large-scale greening campaign, including conserving existing
ecosystems, adding new forests, grasslands and wetlands, and fighting
desertification.
According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, the
accumulative afforestation area reached 64 million hectares over the
past 10 years, while 11 million hectares of grassland were improved and
more than 800,000 hectares of wetlands were added or restored.
From the tree planting programs to the world's largest artificial
plantation, the Saihanba mechanized forest farm, China has been striving
to build a "Green Great Wall" to protect the ecological environment.
China designated March 12 as National Tree Planting Day in 1979, and
Chinese citizens have voluntarily planted approximately 78.1 billion
trees across the country between 1982 and 2021, according to official
data.
The COVID-19 epidemic did not keep cities from planting trees. Some
instructed volunteers to keep "a safe distance" when planting trees,
while others assembled small groups of volunteers to plant trees on
behalf of hundreds of public-spirited residents.
Besides the offline planting activities, the country's internet-based
greening campaign known as Ant Forest allows residents to adopt trees
by making contributions online or garnering enough credits by performing
low-carbon activities like taking public transportation, in exchange
for a real tree being nurtured in their names.
By the end of May, more than 550 million people had participated in
the project to plant over 200 million trees, reducing via low-carbon
activities the equivalent of 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide
emissions.
In recent years, China has also built a protected-area system with
national parks as the mainstay, supplemented by nature reserves and
nature parks.
Saihanba in northern China was once an imperial hunting ground and
degraded into an area of barren wilderness. Thanks to consistent efforts
by three generations of Saihanba foresters, it has now become a
national forest park and nature reserve, with a total forest landscape
of nearly 77,000 hectares.
In addition, the restoration of mangrove wetlands in the coastal area
of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, provides a carbon sink and ensures
that the total area of mangroves will gradually expand, reversing the
trend of ecological degradation of the mangrove wetland system. Carbon
sinks are things such as plants, oceans or soil that absorb more carbon
from the atmosphere than they release.
China's efforts to expand its forest area and improve forest quality
have increased the ecosystem's carbon sink, contributing to achieving
the country's target of peaking CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieving
carbon neutrality before 2060.
China is expected to continue to blaze an eco-friendly trail for the
world's green development, with the aim of increasing the forest cover
to 26 percent by 2035 and becoming a leading country in forestry by
2050.
Xinhua
