All over town you see many old blue trucks driving around with huge trees on the back. These trees are destined to be planted somewhere in a public park or next to a highway. Camphor trees are the most common and you also see a lot of beautiful Chinese maples with their beautiful burgundy leaves. It is amazing to see how they transplant these huge trees. Normally the trees are planted and then supported with a bamboo structure around it. Every morning big trucks filled with water (think fire engine) come around and hose the new trees down in order to settle them and get them growing. This also creates many jobs. All throughout the day hundreds of people can be seen tending trees, pruning shrubs, cutting grass and busying themselves with gardening on a big scale.
In global news, reporting in general, is not about China and its great environmental record. I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much China is involved in the fight against climate change and alternative sources of energy. China itself is feeling the effect of climate change. Beijing in the north sits with a big problem on its doorstep - the Gobi desert. Due to global climate change, the Gobi is encroaching on Beijing at an alarming pace, something like 2 miles per year in all directions. This spring Beijing has been hit by severe sand storms. There are even sand storm forecasts on television.
On the topic of deforestation I read this article in the China Daily about China's reforestation efforts:
China will spend 60 billion yuan (8.77 billion US dollars) annually on its greening, or tree-planting, campaigns in an effort to have 20 percent of the country's land covered by forests by 2010, an official said on Wednesday.
Jia Zhibang, head of the State Forestry Administration, said 16.66 million hectares of trees must be planted in the next two years in order to increase the forest coverage rate to 20 percent, from 18.21 percent at present.
That means in two years they want to plant enough trees to cover a size more than the Western Cape (or for a different perspective - almost as large as the UK)! If you plant a thousand trees on a hectare (that's covering 10% per hectare) that means it's 16.6 billion trees! That's surely a huge amount of carbon credits! It also means it equals twelve trees for each person in China or almost three trees for every human being on the planet! Thanks China!
Over a 20-year lifecycle, the right species in the right conditions can absorb over 40,000 tonnes of CO2 per square kilometer. So a plantation of 100 square kilometers can absorb 4 million tonnes of CO2 over 20 years. That’s equivalent to taking 50,000 cars or more off the road during that time (based on annual emissions of 3 to 4 tonnes for the average car and its usage). China's tree planting efforts therefore relate to 166,000 square kilometres of forest to be planted, thus the total amount of CO2 that will be removed over twenty years equals 664,000,000,000 (664 billion) tonnes of CO2. In car terms that is "removing" 8300,000,000 (8.3 billion) cars from the roads, equal to 1.5 cars per person on planet earth over the next 20 years!
The article went on by saying that in 2008:
A total of 540 million people joined forestation efforts in the past year, planting 2.31 billion trees in mountains, city parks, on campuses and along highways and railways.
China is the third largest country in the world in terms of area, with 9.6 million square kilometers of land territory behind Russia and Canada.
The country's top legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC), passed a resolution in 1981 to make it the duty of all citizens above the age of 11 to plant trees annually. Tree-planting activities are usually carried out in March and April, the spring time for most part of the country.
This was described by former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore as "the largest tree-planting program the world has ever seen," during international climate talks in Poland in December.
Happy tree planting, your biggest ally is China!
1 comment:
China has just started using biologically cloned humanoid drones in its factories and military to counter population aging from one child policy. This biocloning began in the early 1990s to produce star athletes but was aggressivley advanced. The clones are grown in the wombs of slave women from allied African dictators. and have been known to appear on American soil as illegal workers. Given their blatant disregard for American safey in products they sell, because they don't care if we stay alive after we enrich them, it is worrisome that these clones have not been adequately tested for potential disease transmission. Why aren't anti-American professors who were hawking phoney Japanese "quality" complaining about their fellow reds in China?
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