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Chongqing Kicks off Massive Environmental Project
Chongqing Municipality, southwest China, has kicked off a 50 billion yuan environmental project to turn itself into a garden city in the next 10 years.
City mayor Bao Xuding said that the project will focus on air pollution in the urban area, treatment of industrial waste water, and turning hillside fields into forested land along the Yangtze River where the gigantic Three Gorges Reservoir will be located.
Bao said that the city will build two shelter forests which are 300 to 500 meters wide in the eastern and western urban zones.
Chongqing, covering 82,000 square kilometers and with a population of 30 million, only has an afforestated area of 23 percent, but the soil eroded area accounts for 63 percent of its total land area, 25 percentage points higher than the national average.
According to Bao, the city will in the next decade turn 180,000 hectares of hillside fields into forest and grassland, plant trees on 370,000 hectares of barren hills, and bring 20,000 sq km of soil erosion under control.
Upon completion, the project will help raise the city's forest coverage rate to 36 percent, expand the area of nature reserves to eight percent of its total land area and improve the urban air quality. Some 50 percent of the city's total soil eroded area will be harnessed, Bao said.
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