Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region created 667,000 jobs in ecological protection as of 2018, which has not only protected the plateau's ecology but also helped farmers and herders combat poverty.

A forest ranger(left) and his son were making a daily inspection in the Yarlung Zangbo River protection forest on July 23, 2018.(Photo: Xinhua News Agency)

Tibetan regional authorities had set up a special working team for poverty alleviation and ecological protection, an official from the Tibet regional environmental protection bureau told the Global Times on March 7.

The team hires local people as rangers to tour, clean or plant trees, which helped alleviate farmers' and herdsmen's employment, he said.

Puciren, 31, a forest ranger in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, whose job is to check around local forests every day and organize villagers to plant trees in spring, said, "To protect the forest is to protect our hometown."

Compensation to these rangers rose to 3,500 yuan per person per year in 2018, according to Xinhua News Agency.

In 2018, the Tibet regional government invested 10.7 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) to protect the local ecological environment and to create jobs, Luo Jie, head of the Tibet regional ecological environment department, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

A total of 74,100 hectares in the region had been planted with new trees in 2018 with the local forest coverage rate in the Tibet region increasing to 12.14 percent, Luo said.

The region has vowed to lift 150,000 people out of poverty and eradicate absolute poverty this year.

A white paper "Ecological Progress on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau" released in 2018 by the State Council said that "China has initiated a series of ecological compensation mechanisms, including transfer payments to key ecological function zones, forest ecological benefit compensation, grassland ecological protection subsidy and rewards, and wetland ecological benefit compensation."