China's loggers down chainsaws in attempt to regrow forests

China's massive tree-planting scheme masks disastrous deforestation and damage to biodiversity thanks to the country's insatiable desire for wood
Jonathan Watts, guardian.co.uk 11 Mar 09;

Viewed from the snow-covered hills of Tangwanghe, the forests of China's Great Green Wall seem to stretch out endlessly towards the horizon.

The man-made ecological barrier is designed to halt sand and dust storms, just as the original 2,500-year-old Great Wall was built to keep out the Mongol hordes.

But today as millions of Chinese people seek to reinforce the barrier on National Tree-Planting Day, the greater threat comes from within, as a result of an unsustainable demand for wood.

Every March 12 an estimated 3m party members, civil servants, model workers, and state leaders take up shovels for the country's biggest green propaganda event. As well as raising awareness, they are fulfilling a legal duty for everyone over the age of eleven to plant at least three Poplar, Eucalyptus, Larch or other saplings every year.

Many are planted in the northern shelterbelt, also known as the Great Green Wall. Initiated in 1978, the tree belt is supposed to stretch 4,480 km from western Xinjiang to eastern Heilongjiang to protect cities and cropland from floods and the desert.

If the plan is completed as scheduled in 2050, trees will cover over 400m hectares or 42% of China's landmass, creating arguably the biggest man-made carbon sponge on the planet. China overtook the US as the largest carbon emitter in 2007, although its greenhouse gas emissions per capita are still much lower.

But the mind-boggling statistics mask a calamitous decline of China's forest quality, diminishing biodiversity and extra pressure on woodland overseas to satisfy an appetite for timber that has – until the economic crisis - grown enormously in the past 10 years.

At Yichun, a north-eastern city in Heilongjiang province close to the frozen river border with Siberia, the forests were once so dense that the area was known as the Great Northern Wilderness. But more than fifty years of unsustainable logging have taken their toll. Yichun was classified last year as one of China's 12 "resource-depleted cities."

"We are in a situation where we have no wood to cut. None of the forests are mature enough," Dong Zhiyong, former vice-minister in the forestry administration said.

The dire environmental consequences have been apparent for more than a decade now. The loss of forest and grass cover has exposed the soil to erosion and led to dust storms. With fewer trees to retain water, Heilongjiang has suffered devastating floods.

The government has tightened logging restrictions and increased reforestation efforts, including aerial seeding of remote areas. Lumberjacks in Yichun have been told that they must soon lay down their chainsaws.

Hou Zhengkuan accepted change was inevitable. "The forests are thinning. There are fewer and fewer trees. The whole mountain will be closed off in two years."

To create alternative jobs, the nearby town of Tangwanghe was named late last year as China's first national park, loosely modelled on Yellowstone in the United States.

"We are pioneers. The idea is to protect the ecosystem on a large scale, develop seven tourist sites and to help local people get rich," explains the town's young tourist chief, Ma Shengli. But apart from a few small birds, there is little sign of wildlife.

The main attractions of the park are granite formations with colourful names, such as Kissing Boulders, Drunken Tortoise and Pine Teasing Golden Toad.

The decline of biodiversity is a problem across China. Although tree coverage has increased from 12% to 18% of the nation's land area, many saplings are planted in semi-desert areas where they deplete water supplies. Even in Heilongjiang, the amount of life underneath the canopies is declining as a result of over-hunting, fungus-and-herb gathering and the tendency of foresters to replace old growth forests with blocks of fast-growing trees.

"China plants more trees than the rest of the world combined," says John McKinnon, the head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme. "But the trouble is they tend to be monoculture plantations. They are not places where birds want to live."

The vulnerability of the new forest stock was evident last year when winter storms destroyed 10% of these thin barriers. The World Bank has advised China to concentrate more on quality than quantity.

But it will take decades. There is almost no old-growth left in China.

Until the economic crisis, the global demand for wood rose sharply. The biggest consumer was China. Since domestic logging was restricted in 1998, the volume of wood entering China has risen ninefold. Some is processed for overseas markets, but most logs are consumed domestically for construction timber. This demand has accelerated illegal deforestation in South America, Africa and Indonesia.

The biggest supplier by far is Russia, which provides 60% of the logs that come into China. As buildings go up in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing, the vast Taiga boreal forests of Siberia are being flattened. At current harvesting rates, the Russian far east could be logged out in 20 years, according to a study by the Beijing Forestry University.

The economic crisis could help. Forestry officials and processing firms say demand for wood is plummeting though it is too early to say how far. In the meantime, China hopes to ease the sand storms and its carbon guilt by mass campaigns.

At Tangwanghe, the ground is still frozen too hard for locals to join in National Tree Planting Day, but they will catch up after the spring thaw. This year, the local governments plans to plant 750,000 trees in the mountains and 1,500 in the town to spruce up the streets for the hoped-for influx of tourists.

Although tree-planting is a civic duty, the new National Park will pay former loggers to do the job. "Forestry is our business," says the tourist chief Ma. "Voluntary tree planting doesn't really work. You see that every year. It's all for show."

Biodiversity vs carbon absorbtion

Although it was initially conceived as a barrier against the desert, China's Great Green Wall is increasingly used as a defence against accusations of climate change irresponsibility.

The mass tree-planting required for this and other projects has given China the biggest artificial forest in the world, covering more than 500,000 square kilometres, or twice the size of Britain.

While blocks of monoculture tree plantations are criticised as a disaster for biodiversity, the country's forestry scientists argue they are far more effective at absorbing carbon than old, slow-growth forests.

Zhang Xudong, of the China Academy of Forestry, says fast-growing poplar and white birch capture as much as double the amount of carbon as Korean pine, larch and firs. He claims China's 175m hectares of forests more than offset the country's 1.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

The claim is likely to be contended given uncertainties about the amount of China's emissions and definitions of forested land. The government includes nurseries and shrubland with very few trees. The balance between forest sequestration capacity and carbon output is also likely to change if China meets its goal to more than double the size of its economy by 2020.

"Given that China has large areas of forest, and trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, forest preservation and reforestation can clearly play an important short-term role in climate change mitigation. Of course, forest carbon sinks are no longer-term substitute for reductions in fossil-fuel emissions as there is not enough land in China or elsewhere to plant enough trees to mitigate emissions and avoid danergous climate change," said Dr Simon Lewis, University of Leeds.

Chinese conservationists say the emphasis on forests as mere carbon sinks is wrong. "The west is too focused on carbon. People there have lost sight of the need to protect bio-diversity," warned a prominent environmentalist.