China Locks in Degraded Grassland, Desert Rim to Rein in Sandstorms

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, June 05, 2002

China Locks in Degraded Grassland, Desert Rim to Rein in Sandstorms

China has locked in an area a little bit larger than Britain in size as a key move in its fight against land desertification and sandstorms in the north of the country.

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China has locked in an area a little bit larger than Britain in size as a key move in its fight against land desertification and sandstorms in the north of the country.

Chen Lei, vice-minister of Water Resources, said China could make a real difference in curbing desertification and sandstorms by tackling a water and wind-eroded region along the Great Wall.

The Ministry of Water Resources has listed the area, which covers 260,000 square kilometers, as its key target for soil and water conservancy in the coming decade.

Jiao Juren, director of the ministry's Water Conservancy Department, said the region mainly comprised parts of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Shanxi provinces and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

He described it as chiefly degraded grassland, desert fringes and the Loess Plateau, but excluding desert.

"Technologically speaking, we can do little about the desert right now. We should focus our attention on the desert edges and the degraded grassland."

The region has been included in an ambitious decade-long program launched last year after a two-year experiment targeting two major sources of sandstorms.

The program was designed to protect Beijing and Tianjin from sandstorms through massive ecological projects covering 458,000 square kilometers in the above provinces.

The 55.8 billion yuan (US$6.72 billion) projects involve afforestation, returning farmland to woods and grass, and relocating residents from ecologically fragile areas to environmentally sound places.

Since 2000, China has also moved to protect indigenous vegetation in the Tarim Basin in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Inner Mongolia by diverting several hundred million tons of water each year for ecologically important areas from water resources as far as 800 kilometers away.

The areas were the source of sandstorms that have been harassing northern China in recent years.

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