Beijing: For years, spring was known as the sandstorm season in Beijing, when dust and sand whipped up from the Gobi desert in the north by high winds enveloped the city, blotting out sunlight and forcing people to stay indoors. But in recent times, the menace has receded with an afforestation project started in 1978 beginning to produce results.
A Great Green Wall has been built under the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, a project to create strips of forests in north, northwest and northeast China to curb desert expansion and control sandstorm. Today, it is the largest man-made forest on earth.
Besides breaking wind and halting the encroaching desert, the afforestation campaign has also created another intangible benefit—carbon sequestration. By reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the forests have contributed to the global battle against climate change.
The afforestation drive is one of the pillars based on which President Xi Jinping made the commitment at the General Debate of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly on September 22 that China would peak its carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
To lend further support to the pledge, a key meeting of the Communist Party of China Central Committee in October laid down several new goals for sustainable development. The vision for 2035 includes promoting greener production methods and a green lifestyle in all sectors of society.
The sequestration effect of carbon sinks in northeast and southwest China has been underestimated due to rapid afforestation, according to an article published in the British science magazine Nature on October 28. It notes that between 2010 and 2016, land biosphere carbon sinks in China absorbed about 45 percent of the country’s estimated carbon dioxide emissions from domestic human activities during that period.
Carbon sinks are natural systems, mostly forests, water bodies and the soil, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it. Rapid afforestation in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces in northeast China, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces in the southwest and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in the south has enlarged the country’s carbon absorbing capacity.
The article states that taken together, these areas account for over 35 percent of China’s entire land carbon sinks.
Though China is currently the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, it has also led the world in both the area and speed of afforestation. From 2000 to 2018, the global forest area decreased by 170,000 square km, while China’s forest area increased by 450,000 square km.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the result of excess emissions of greenhouse gases unabsorbed by terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Though the ecosystems contribute greatly to carbon neutrality, there is still uncertainty regarding how to quantitatively evaluate it.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
