|
 | Thursday, April 27, 2000, updated at 16:05(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
|
Life | ||||||||||||
|
Inner Mongolia to Improve EcologyChina is to allocate over 20 billion yuan (about 2.4 billion U.S. dollars) for some ten ecological projects in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the first decade of the century.The projects are expected to cover the whole region, and one of them with an investment of 1.75 billion yuan is to build one million hectares of forests in the 16 counties near Beijing to deal with sandstorms. The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is sometimes referred to as the backyard of Beijing in terms of ecological protection. Ecologist Zou Liejie said that it will take ten years for the region to set up a forest band to bring back blue sky and greengrass to the region as well as to the capital. Sand swept Beijing three times last month, with sandstorms in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region as one of the main factors. People used to think that northern Hebei province played a key role in Beijing's environmental conditions. However, the mud rain in Beijing in April 1998 due to the sand storm in Inner Mongolia made the country realize the region's key role in this regard. In the past two decades, central government's efforts have been effective in the region. Afforestation has helped put over three million hectares of farmland and pasture under protection, and 24 percent of water and soil erosion area has been under control. Yet, statistics show that 60 percent of the region's 1.18 million sq. km. land is still suffering from desertification, with an expansion rate of about 600,000 hectares per year.
 In This Section 
| ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright by People's Daily Online, all right reserved | | Mirror in U.S. | Mirror in Japan | Mirror in Edu-Net | Mirror in Tech-Net | |
