Facts and Details

DEFORESTATION AND DESERTIFICATION IN CHINA

Deforestation in Yunnan Currently around 14 percent of China is covered by forests. Most of these are in the northern, southern and mountainous central parts of the country. There are some tropical rain forests in Yunnan Province in southern China and in other provinces along the southern coast.

Illegal logging and slash and burn agricultures consume up to 5,000 square kilometers of virgin forest every year. In northern and central China forest cover has been reduced by half in the last two decades. The mountains in southwest China have suffered serious deforestation, logging, hunting and collection of plants and animals for traditional medicines.

The last remaining large stands of forest are in northeast Manchuria. Even these are being cut down at an alarming rate to be "made into chopsticks, toothpicks and Ping Pong paddles." Most of China's rain forests along southern coast are threatened although a few areas are protected.

The furniture industry in China gobbles up large amounts of Chinese timber as well as illegally-logged tropical rain forest timber from Indonesia and other places. The use of disposable chopsticks uses up 1.3 million cubic meters of timber a year according to China’s environment ministry.

Between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s China went from being a country that imported much of its wood products to one of the world’s leading exporters of furniture, plywood and flooring. China is also a leading consumer of paper. While many paper products are made with recycled paper China still has built a number of new pulp mills and in the future they will need trees to keep them going.

Chinese demand for wood is consuming foorests around the globe. The rain forest of the Congo and Cameroon in central Africa, the Amazon basin and the islands of Indonesia are all being heavily logged to supply China’s growing demand for wood and its rapidly-growing furniture industry.

See Timber, Paper, Economics

Affects of Deforestation in China

More deforestation in Yunnan Clear cutting and overgrazing have turned large areas of Qinghai province into a desert. Large tracts of forest also being cut down in Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces have threatened the home of the giant panda.

Logging and resulting erosion in the Yangtze River basin and along other rivers are believed to have caused devastating floods, landslides and mudslides that have killed thousands of people, washed away roads and caused billions of dollars in damage

Deforestation is blamed for the 4 percent decline in rainfall, 15 percent in the dry season, in the Xishuangbanna area of Yunnan, where 50 percent of local forest have been deforested

Deforestation in Tibet

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese logged the forested areas of Tibet very intensively. The film Cutting Down Tibet, made secretly by a Tibetan, shows huge logging camps in southern Tibet and trucks loaded with trees10 feet in diameter.

Deforestation has turned once clear streams muddy brown. An increase in the number of livestock animals and a rising demand for fuel is threatening to strip the valleys of vegetation. Run-off from denuded mountain slopes is believed to have been a factor in excessive flooding of the Yangtze River in 1998.

Deforestation has been slowed since the 1998 Yangtze flood. Logging has been banned in Omda, Markam and Gonjo counties in Tibet in part to prevent erosion from filling in the Three Gorges Dam reservoir on the Yangtze. Large reforestation projects are being carried out.

Combating of Deforestation in China

China has banned logging in natural forests, earmarked $10 billion for reforestation projects and plans to spend $1 billion a year over 30 year to expand protected areas.

To reduce consumption of wood China has imposed a five percent tax on wooden flooring and even chopsticks.

The Min River valley, near panda habitats in Sichuan, is focus of ant-logging efforts. Lumber jacks are being trained as tree planters, logging is banned in some areas of Sichuan and Hubei provinces.

Reforestation in China

The government has planted millions of trees since the 1970s and turned large swaths of for formally barren land into forests. The effort was undertaken mainly to control floods and erosion but also has the added effect of combating global warming by soaking up nearly half a billion ton of carbon dioxide a year.

The planting in the north has been done in one-mile wide strips and the survival rate of the millions of acres reforested has been 70 percent. Another belt of trees has been planted in southwest China as a protective measure against typhoons.

Tree-planting is considered a civic duty that must be performed by every person in China. The amount of land covered by forest in China has increased from 9 percent in 1949 to around 13 percent today.

After the Yangtze floods in 1998, a logging ban was imposed in natural growth forests and massive reforestation project was launched on the Yangtze watershed. Terraces on slopes steeper than 25 degrees are to be planted with grasses, bushes and trees. Huge tracts of farmlands are to be converted back to wetlands, pastures, forests and lakes.

Some of the reforestation work is done by sapling hole diggers who, for a days work, are “paid four or five packets of instant noodles which they consume dry because no water is available. In some cases holes are dug and terraces are built but no saplings are planted. When asked why one villager told the Los Angeles Times, “Because our labor is free, but they’d have to pay for the trees. The local officials embezzle the money instead.” When saplings are planted is when a Beijing VIP or television crew shows up.

Erosion and Salinization in China

Logging, overgrazing and poor land use cause erosion which in turn causes lakes and rivers to silt up, arable land to be eaten away, and flooding to increase because vegetation that catches rainwater and slows its flow into rivers is gone.

Soil erosion is common on China's crop land that is not irrigated. The Yellow River--which drains much of Northern China-- derives its name from the 1.6 billion tons of eroded, ocher-colored topsoil that it annually transports to the ocean.

See Floods, See Desertification

Waterlogging and salinization affect 23 percent of the irrigated land in China and significantly reduce production on an estimated 15 percent of China's irrigated land. An estimated 6 million acres of land has been damaged by salt.

Desertification in China

About 28 percent of China is covered by desert and that amount of desert in China is getting larger every year. Deserts are being created faster in China than anywhere else in the world, with old deserts expanding and new deserts being formed. The rate of desertification nationwide is around 900 square miles a year, with an area the size of New Jersey becoming desert every five years. .

Poor land use and overgrazing are causing large areas of grasslands north of Beijing and in Inner Mongolia and Qinghai province to turn into a desert. One man who lived in a village on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau that was being swallowed up by sand told the New York Times, "The pasture here used to be so green and rich. But now the grass is disappearing and the sand is coming.”

In western China the huge Taklimakan and Kumtag deserts are expanding at such a high rate they are expected to merge in the not too distant future. Two deserts in Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province are also in the process of reaching each other and merging. The Gobi grew by 52,400 square kilometers (20,000 square miles), an area half the size of Pennsylvania, between 1994 and 1999, and continues to advance at a rate of two miles a year and is now only 240 kilometers or so from Beijing.

The Chengdu plain, one of China’s primary grain-growing areas, is threatened by sands from the Ruoergai grasslands. The grasslands were a rich grazing areas until a few decades ago when cows and goats began to multiply and overgraze the land.

There is danger that a dust bowl situation could develop. Already wells have dried up and emergency grain supplies have to be brought in to keep people from starving. Many people are being encouraged to move to more hospitable lands.

Dust Storms and Desertification in China

See Weather

Causes of Desertification in China

The main causes of desertification are overgrazing, overplanting , overplowing and raising crops in regions too dry for crops. These problems in turn are result of population pressures on marginal land. The problem is somewhat analogous to what happens in areas that have been deforested. Once an area is degraded people move onto a new area and degrade that while the old area takes decades to recover or never does. Dr. Sing Yuqin of Beijing University told the New York Times, "Once the process gets started it tends to expand exponentially. And the people are pushed into a poverty trap from which it's hard to escape."

One of the main culprits of the desertification in the Mao era was Mao's plan to raise grain in areas where grain didn't grow well, such as Inner Mongolia. This deprived the land of grass which prevented soil being blown away by the fierce winds that ravage this region.

Some believe that desertification has been caused by climate changes. Scientist in Qinghai have recorded higher temperatures, lower rainfall and stronger winds since the 1950s. Persistent drought robs the soil of moisture and makes it easer for the soil to be picked up and carried away by wind.

Overgrazing, Overplanting and Desertification in China

Desertification in China is caused largely by overgrazing. Huge flocks of sheep and goats strip the land of vegetation. In Xillinggol Prefecture in Inner Mongolia, for example, the livestock population increased from 2 million in 1977 to 18 million in 2000, turning one third of the grassland area to desert. Unless something is done the entire prefecture could be uninhabitable by 2020.

Overgrazing is exacerbated by a sociological phenomena called "the tragedy of the common." People share land but raise animals for themselves and try to enrich themselves by raising as many as they can. This leads to more animals than the land can support. One grassland in Qinghai that can support 3.7 million sheep had 5.5 million sheep in 1997

Animals remove the vegetation and winds finished the job by blowing away the top soil, transforming grasslands into desert. When a herder was asked why he was grazing goats next to a sign that said “Protect vegetation, no grazing,” he said, “The lands are too infertile to grow crops—herding is the only way for us to survive.”

See Livestock

Combating Desertification in China

To combat desertification, the government has encouraged the planting of drought-resistant trees in erosion-prone areas and helped people to obtain technology that helps them collect and store rainwater. In some places farmers are paid to plant trees rather than raise crops. Pines and poplars provide shields from encroaching dunes. On the Loess Plateau erosion has been reduced, with funding from the World Bank, by terracing the landscape.

In what has been described as the world's most ambitious reforestation project, the Chinese are planting a line of trees and shrubs, paralleling the Great Wall of China, to protect farmland in northern China from Gobi Desert sand blown by the fierce Mongolian winds. Stretching from Xinjiang to Heolongjang, this "Green Wall" will eventually cover strip of land 4,000 miles in length.

Using a technique introduced by the Soviets in 1962, the Chinese have made progress slowing down sand dune migration by putting plants inside "small checkerboards" made of straw bales to protect the plants long enough for them to take hold permanently while stabilizing the dunes and stopping sand from blowing. Arranged roughly in one-meter square checkerboards, the grids are pressed into the sand so that the stalks stand four to six inches above the ground. This creates enough of a windbreak to slow surface sand movement so the plants can establish themselves The technique was devised to keep sand from blowing across railroad tracks—at one time a serious problem that blocked tracks and slowed commerce and passenger service.

In places where overgrazing is a problem fences have been put up and herders have been given plots of land to encourage them to take good care of the land. To reduce the number of animals the government is encouraging herders to cut the size of their flocks by 40 percent, relocate and stall-feed their animals. But herders are not so keen on these ideas. Animals have traditionally been a source of wealth and a kind of insurance for hard times.

The Institute of Desert Research in Shapotou, a town on the Yellow River, is facility that is devoted to solving problems related to desertification. Spread out over one square mile, it employs 19 full time researchers who conduct experiments with drought-resistant crops; desert agriculture techniques; the use of plants, shrubs and grasses to stabilize dunes; petroleum-based dune stabilizing sprays; and Israeli-style drip irrigation.

Beijing insists its efforts are paying off, and says that China’s deserts are shrinking at a rate of 1,200 square kilometers a years, compared to increasing a rate of 3,500 square kilometers in the late 1990s. No everyone accepts these figures.

Migration and Resettlement Because of Desretifictaion in China

Desertification is causing millions of rural Chinese to abandon unproductive land in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Provinces and migrate eastward. A study by the Asian Development Bank found 4,000 villages at risk of being swallowed up by drifting sand.

Already a migration on the scale of the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930 is taking place in China. The only problem is that in China there is no California to escape to. Many of those driven off land degreded by desertification have ended up in eastern cities as migrant workers.

In parts of the Ningxia Province, significant rain has not fallen for years and farming is impossible. Tens of thousands of people from villages mostly in poor southern Ningxia have been resettled to 215,000 acres of newly irrigated land near the Yellow River in north central China. The exodus took place between 1998 and 2000 and cost about $325 million. About 70 percent of those affected are Huis. Planners had originally hoped to resettle a million people (20 percent of Ningxia's total population) but there was enough money available to handle that many people.

Image Sources: 1, 2) Nature Products; 3) ESWN, Environmental News; 4) IIASA; 5, 6) FAO; 7) Julie Chao http://juliechao.com/pix-china.html ; 8) Landsberger Posters http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/r; 9) UNCCD

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

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© 2008 Jeffrey Hays