Eideard

An innovative program to encourage sustainable farming in rural China has helped restore eroded forestland while producing economic gains for many farmers, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.

“The Sloping Land Conversion Program, which began in 2000 after massive flooding caused in part by land clearing, focuses on China’s largest source of soil erosion and flood risk — farms on steep slopes,” said study co-author Gretchen Daily, a professor of biology at Stanford.

The program aims to return more than 37 million acres of cropland on steep slopes back to forest or grassland. The government pays villagers in varying amounts of cash and rice to give up farming and find new sources of employment.

“It’s a tremendously innovative program designed to address two critical problems — securing the environment and providing economic opportunities for people in rural, desperately poor areas,” said Daily…

China’s land conversion program has its roots in the late 1960s, when farmers in the mountainous western provinces began clearing vast stretches of land to make way for more crops. The increased agricultural production helped feed a growing nation but also set the scene for disaster. When record monsoon rains pelted the region in 1998, soil from the agricultural fields washed down the mountain slopes, killing thousands of people in the villages below.

The unprecedented damage caused by the floods prompted China to reconsider the wisdom of replacing forests with farms — especially in steeply sloping terrain. In 2000, the government launched a campaign to reforest the countryside and established several large-scale programs to help farmers in the western provinces find new work in surrounding cities…

Ecologically speaking, China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program has been a clear win since it was implemented a decade ago, said Daily, noting that the program has helped to decrease soil erosion by as much as 68 percent in some areas…

On average, families that participated in the program reported doing better financially than those who did not, but some farm workers had trouble finding new work, according to the study. Households that profited most did so by sending a husband-and-wife team into the city to earn money as unskilled laborers. The wages they earned in the city combined with the government subsidy easily topped what they had earned as farmers…

Finding your way politically and socially through qualitative social and economic changes is difficult enough under the best of circumstances. Fortunately, the world at the beginning of the 21st Century seems to be a bit more willing to lend a hand than that era defined by Cold War polemics.

RTFA for lots of details.

An ambitious project that aims to turn arid desert land into a green oasis took a step closer to becoming reality last week when an agreement was signed on the rights to develop a pilot system in Jordan. The Sahara Forest Project’s (SFP) first facility will be located on a 2,000,000 square meter plot of land in Aqaba, a coastal town in the south of Jordan where it will be a test bed for the use of a combination of technologies designed to enable the production of fresh water, food and renewable energy in hot, arid regions.

The partners behind the Sahara Forest Project are Bill Watts of Max Fordham Consulting Engineers, Seawater Greenhouse, Exploration Architecture and the Bellona Foundation, an international environmental NGO based in Norway, who have been working on the idea since 2009.

In 2009, after first studies showed that the concept was feasible and economically viable, the project was presented internationally at the December 2009 UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where it was well received. In June, 2010, Jordan’s King Abdullah II saw a project presentation during a visit to Norway and was impressed enough to say he was ready to facilitate its implementation in Jordan.

The main pillars of the project are saltwater greenhouses, concentrated solar energy, and cultivation of traditional crops along with energy crops such as algae, which all come together in one location to solve a whole range of environmental problems…

The project envisions three separate stages of development. In depth studies will be carried out throughout 2011, construction of a Demonstration Center is slated to start in 2012, and commercial-scale development is set to start in 2015.

RTFA for details. I wish them success.

Switzerland-based Global Wood Holding will invest 900 million euros to grow Eucalyptus trees in Tunisia and export the wood to Europe, creating 45,000 jobs.

The project will be sited on 160,000 hectares in the Tunisian desert some 500 km south of Tunis.

The company’s deputy chairman Aldo Bonaldi, speaking at news conference with Tunisian State Lands Minister Fouad Dagfous, said he expected to export two million tonnes of wood each year.

The project would be completed over 15 years, he said.

Eucalyptus has attracted attention from development researchers and environmentalists. It is a fast-growing wood, its oil can be used for cleaning and functions as a natural insecticide, and it is sometimes used to drain swamps and thereby reduce the risk of malaria…

Generally, anyone who wishes to impede an earth-based project providing both jobs and improvements to the environment [like reforestation] can find some tame “analyst” to back up their criticism. It’s reaching a bit to oppose eucalyptus trees used for forest industries – but, I imagine that some junk science skeptics will come up with something.

Meanwhile, the Swiss and Tunisians are going ahead with providing jobs, income and reversing desertification.

The world’s net rate of forest loss has slowed markedly in the last decade, with less logging in the Amazon and China planting trees on a grand scale.

Yet forests continue to be lost at “an alarming rate” in some countries, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 finds the loss of tree cover is most acute in Africa and South America. But Australia also suffered huge losses because of the recent drought.

“It is good news,” said the report’s co-ordinator Mette Loyche Wilkie, a senior forestry office with FAO.

The area of… forests undisturbed by human activity continues to decrease, so countries must further strengthen their efforts to conserve and manage them

The last decade saw forests being lost or converted at a rate of 13 million hectares per year, compared to 16 million hectares in the 1990s.

However, new forests were being planted to the tune of more than seven million hectares per year; so the net rate of loss since the year 2000 has been 5.2 million hectares per year, compared to 8.3 million in the 1990s.

Globally, forests now cover about 31% of the Earth’s land surface.

The biggest change has been in Asia which now reports a net forest growth

The Beeb left out an important detail in the northern hemisphere. Of all surprises [to some] one nation showing the way to reforestation is Mexico. They actually planted more trees than did China.