Restoration and protection project of natural forest in Yuanzhou District, Guyuan City, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, May 11, 2022. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By LIN Yuchen

Since 1998, China has been initiating the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) that aims to restore fragile systems in terms of forest coverage and stocking. By the end of 2020, the cumulative reduction of natural forest timber harvest was 332 million cubic meters. Furthermore, the total afforestation of China has now accounted for more than four percent of the global net green area growth.

As the world's first and only ecological program that focuses on protecting natural forests, NFPP bears the historical significance of transforming China's timber-harvest-oriented forestry industry into one which features ecological sustainability.

Path to a greener land

The measures that have been implemented within NFPP areas include logging bans and systematic arrangements afterwards that ensure each component of work is attended to by designated individuals.

In some key protection areas like the Northeast or Inner Mongolia regions, for example, a three-level forest management network system of counties, farms and stations was established.

More than 40,000 management stations of various types had been constructed by the end of 2010, and the number of state-owned forestry workers participating in the management process increased from 32,000 in 1998 to 227,000 in 2009, with more than 106 billion hectares of forests under effective management.

The timber production in these areas was reduced from 18.53 million cubic meters in 2000 to 10.94 million in 2010.

Beyond that, between 2012 and 2022, China planted more than 6.13 million hectares of national reserve forests, about the size of Croatia.

Large-scale afforestation is also accelerating. The two rounds of afforestation at national level have raised central funding of 570 billion RMB since 1999, benefiting nearly 158 million farmers or herdsmen in total.

An outstanding example of this can be seen in the Chaxiang village in Guizhou. The national afforestation subsidy for farmland return per mu (about 0.06 hectare) was 150 kilograms grains and 20 RMB cash in 2000, when the local annual income per capita was less than 400 RMB.

A species of wild rose called Rosa roxburghii were then planted in the village. The plant's rosehip contains nutrients, including a significant amount of vitamin C and can produce juice for commercial use. By 2012, the average annual income per capita in Chaxiang village exceeded 10,000 RMB.

NFPP has received central funding of over 500 billion RMB to date, covering 31 regions nationwide, ranging from province to a district of a city, to curb commercial timber harvesting, plant forests, and retrain forest workers.

Creating new jobs for forest workers

The program is creating new employment opportunities for forest workers affected by the reduction in forest harvesting from the natural forests protection policy. 

By 2016, over 600,000 forest workers were retrained to work in forest protection, resource management, or silviculture including seedling production, and planting. The rest were resettled with a payout sum of three times their annual salary, according to the State Forestry Administration.

Many of them later accepted non-forest employment like mining and tourism. And some became self-employed in cultivating non-timber forests.

The total revenue from forest parks in China increased from 6.9 billion RMB in 2004 to 70.6 billion RMB in 2015, creating nearly 300,000 jobs, mostly in the natural forest areas.

The average annual salary in the regions with state-owned forests increased from 5,200 RMB to over than 40,000 RMB from 2001 to 2016.

China has been implementing cooperation projects with the European Union, the Global Environment Facility, the United Nations Development Programme and many other international organizations, providing Chinese solutions for global ecological protection and governance, and making forward-looking and strategic contributions to the global response to climate change, said Zhang Liming from NFGA.