Data from China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) shows that China planted 529 million mu (35.3m hectares) of trees during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2015-2020).
The achievement is based on a national afforestation campaign in which the NFGA launched online and offline voluntary planting activities in 15 provinces and municipalities. Many poverty-stricken areas have used afforestation projects as a way of alleviating poverty. During the Five-Year Plan, local governments established some 23,000 organizations to help aid impoverished areas through afforestation, with 1.6 million impoverished people involved in the country’s ecological construction.
The NFGA also launched an array of ecological repair projects in target regions, such as returning farmland to forests and grassland in Yangtze River areas and planting trees in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to stabilize the source areas of sandstorms that affect Tianjin and Beijing.
During this period, 98 cities were added to the national list of forest cities whose forest coverage, according to the national standard, reached 25 percent for the north and 35 percent for the south, raising the total number of forest cities to 194. According to China’s ninth national survey on forest resources conducted between 2014 and 2018, China’s forest coverage has reached 22.96 percent.
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