# ‘All the birds returned’: How a Chinese project led the way in water and soil conservation

It was one of China’s most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to .

The primary focus was to restore agricultural production and incomes in the plateau, but the dust storms descending on already polluted cities, “making people cough even more”, also became a driver, says Peter Bridgewater, an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies.

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The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action and reversed decades of damage from grazing and farming.

World Bank participants spent more than three years designing the project, working with experts as well as communities, officials and farmers on how to overturn the longstanding but unsustainable grazing and herding of livestock. Tree-cutting, planting on hillsides and uncurbed sheep and goat grazing were banned. The sustainable practices demonstrated in some small villages were scaled up.

The project was extraordinarily ambitious, and was powered through by China’s authoritarian system. “If you want major change, the Chinese system is well adapted to making major change,” says Bridgewater wryly.

There were grain and cash subsidies for people converting farmland to grassland, economic forest or protected ecological forest. There were tax subsidies and benefits to offset farming losses, long-term land use contracts and conversion to more sustainable farming including orchards and nuts, and widespread tree-planting employment programmes.

By 2016, China had converted more than 11,500 sq miles of rain-fed cropland to forest or grassland – a 25% increase in vegetative cover in a decade, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. Other studies showed  and .

“When the environment improved, all the birds returned. The forest has developed its ecological system naturally,” the forestry worker Yan Rufeng .

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In hindsight, the early methods employed to regreen the dusty hills were also problematic. “There was a lot of mass tree planting – not necessarily natives – and in plantation format, in other words, monocultural stands,” says Bridgewater.

Mass-species planting eventually began to replace the monoculture plantations, helping to increase wildlife, but there were also issues with water management, with the burgeoning tree cover and agriculture taking more and more water out of the Yellow River system.

“It’s looking like there is a point at which the revegetation will become too successful in that it actually then swings the water balance of the landscape, reducing the potential for water to go into the rivers and be available for human use,” says Bridgewater.

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A big factor in the success and demands of the programme was and remains the changing climate. The plateau sits in a transition zone between arid and semi-humid climates. The varied natural factors of the region, combined with unsustainable human activity, had , a 2021 study found. “At the same time, the climate in this region has shown warming and wetting, particularly in the south in which precipitation increased by 20-50 mm from 2000 to 2014.”

The climate around the Loess plateau is changing, which means what existed, or even thrived, several decades ago can’t necessarily be put back, says Bridgewater. “But we can produce something, a system that will produce ecosystem services at a better range and a better quality and more regularly than the systems that we’ve destabilised.”

Lu FuChin, a former farmer, told the official state news outlet Xinhua that the programme had boosted local employment. “I used to cut trees for firewood, but now I grow them instead,” said the 52-year-old forestry worker. “It used to be that people had to go far for work, but now they can find employment by the Yellow River. As the environment is improving, I believe the villagers’ lives will become more prosperous too.”

_Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu_
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