China Has Added Forest the Size of Texas Since 1990
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Reforestation
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China has added a significant amount of forest cover since 1990, but the discussion highlights concerns about the quality and sustainability of this effort, as well as its implications for global environmental issues.
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The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.
People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public opinion.
Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.
I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)
I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.
> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed
You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.
China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always, do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by keeping their oil in the ground.
Sure if you need to bootstrap to the 18th century. It’s much faster and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by importing equipment.
The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a major issue for many countries long before industrialism.
Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need, they use less space.
Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.
It is. I have seen the data
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.
Because I know of several organisations doing this and are organising projects state-wide (they focused in Bihar and surroundings).
If you don't, readers of this comment are going to assume there aren't any, and you're just doing an ego-defense of Indian "capability".
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you seek evidence you must put good faith efforts in finding the evidence or evidence of absence before asking others to waste time nullifying your claims for which you have produced no evidence.
> India State of Forest Reports (ISFR)
Published every 2 years shows strong growth in India's forests. Though their methodology, methods of calculation have been questions the general trend of forestation is not questioned by anyone.
Indian government has had many programs for forestation. I am not familiar with all regions but I am specifically aware of western Ghats in India. These very ghats were once nearly destroyed by "experts" writing in "peer reviewed" journals who introduced non-native fast growth trees in the region as replacement for native trees. These trees such as Acacia etc. were very detrimental for local wildlife and rest of the ecosystem.
While I am skeptical of government initiatives in general, they have worked for India's western ghats pretty well mostly due to urbanization. These initiatives pay local communities and farmers to grow and plant trees. A lot of scams happen and money gets stolen. Survival rate of trees remains at 30% instead of expected 60%. Trees planted are often of only 3-4 varieties and sometimes non-native but all things considered it works out positively.
The number of planted tree grows but benefit not seen, except for the group doing it. People are too into feelings, by seeing the headlines they need to feel good that's why so much publicity is needed, so many banners everywhere, ads in news-paper spending billions by gov.
Environmentalists and bureaucrats are epitome of evil in India. Where I lived in India, the forest officials themselves hunted the wild game and gifted it to environmentalists and vice versa. Need exotic meat to eat ? The forest officer or the local wildlife activist is the guy who can make it happen. Want to eat Olive Ridley Turtle eggs ? The officer incharge of their conservation can sell it to you.
India's forests, rivers, beaches have been inhabited by their native people for thousands of years. Over years they did figure out what works and what does not. For example ban on fishing during breeding season was a traditional system. Not hunting in "God's forest" was essentially a wildlife preserve. Religion, way of life and sustainability was part of the society in an organic way. Need to build a checkdam seasonally ? we had a local process for that. The dam was built on new moon day of X month and taken down with the first rain etc.
I am not romantacizing the poor people's life in India. Their systems had problems. Unscrupulous people took advantage of religious beliefs, some systems were based on exploitation etc. etc. But with growth in population and urbanization required a seamless transition of these traditional systems into governance structures of local bodies.
That did not happen because of Indian Government. They adopted the British I*S system and airdropped young and corrupt idiots as the overlords of the areas. Activists who wrote papers in "peer reviewed" journals then wrote reports on how these babus gotta civilize the villagers and put in new system in place.
Once you ban hunting entirely, the hunters go back to their life and poachers take over. Hunters understand concept of wild life preserves. Poachers don't. Hunters now out of business don't have incentive to stop poaching. Before you know it the poachers and babus have formed a nexus to sell game meat.
Same goes for trees. Government banks cutting down trees entirely as if it is murder. Entire wood logging industry is killed off under the sheer weight of red tape. Since I come from wood logging family, the red tape meant we could not sell our trees profitably anymore. I had to look for altnerative occupation for myself and sell the land to wood mafia who now use the land for a "pretend forest" while they actually steal wood from national parks and public lands.
For example if you go from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, a distance of 499 miles, it will take you 10 hours and 25 minutes.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-war-i...
"Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine..."
North America does this with South America readily.
Reforestation alone doesn't matter. What matters is total result of deforestation and reforestation. Russia reforests only about 1Mha/year :
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-reforeste...
while the total resulting loss is
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?ca...
"In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO₂ emissions."
>But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chines...
in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and Kazakhstan".
https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-druzhboj-a-...
and there were strong leaks, not officially dispelled, that Baikal water was raised during the most recent Putin/Xi meeting.
You may read it whatever way you like. If we look at the facts - statista and globalwatch is some Western sites/orgs, topwar is straight Russian and Guardian is Great Britain.
>Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
This is why you're using that offensive "404" notation (an expression of the Russian propaganda point that Ukraine isn't a sovereign independent state) when referring to Ukraine?
Like Ukranians a number of nations - for example Hungarians, Chezh, Finnish, Latvians, Estonians, etc. - for centuries didn't have their own state and were parts of larger empires and got their own states only relatively recently.
Like any other, the Russian propaganda thrives on people's ignorance. In this case "Ukranian people and Ukraine don't exist and never have existed, it is just an inferior kind of Russians on historically Russian territory". That is why nor Russian textbooks nor wide Russian info space never mention the 1651 book by French engineer D'Beauplan "Description of Ukraine, a Province of the Kingdom of Poland situated between Moskovia and Transilvania" where he clearly describes in detail a separate Ukrainian ethnicity living on their own separate territory (which is pretty close to the territory of modern Ukraine. Also note that Russia din't even exist back then, it was just a "Moscovia" duchy).
>and never will be. Geopolitics is a ruthless game and those in the middle sometimes get crushed. Which is why you generally want natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
The same applies to all the above mentioned nations, and this is why they joined NATO, and why Ukraine is trying to.
Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
Official state news https://ria.ru/20160503/1425318933.html
"Moscow invited Bejing to discuss fresh water transfer project from Russia to China - stated the Russian Minister of Agriculture"
and the further description of the proposed project is exactly the second project described in the topwar link.
It isn't article itself that counts here. The official statement of the Russian Minister of Agriculture is the fact here. Whereis you so far stated only your personal opinion.
>there’s no such plans
You contradict the above mentioned official statement of the Russian Minister of Agriculture.
some materialized, some haven't.
>This is one of them.
how would we know that? For example, nuclear powered cruise missile is beyond bizarre, yet they did it. Water transfer project is much more practical thing (and they already do have oil transfer pipelines, so why would they not do a water pipeline - if anything, unlike the oil, the water is a renewable resource), and there has been official interest on both sides, and adding your bizarrity indicator - we can conclude it is much probable thing to happen than the missile.
>If you still insist this thing is real, you should prove it with specific parameters of this project. Construction start, volume, length of pipe etc.
Where that info would come from? I pointed officially available facts. You have so far provided only blind statement "it wouldn't happen" and no facts to counter my facts.
As it happens simple Google has even more facts, including info you've been asking for:
https://www.rbc.ru/business/16/05/2019/5cdbde629a7947f8534b0...
"The government will consider $88B water transfer project to China.
Russian MP Alexey Chepa asked to approve construction of the largest in the world water pipeline.
...
Government sent the project down to various government agencies for working out further details of the project.
...
first stage by 2026 - 1200-1500km, 600-700 millions m3/year. second stage by 2040 - 1.8-2.4B m3/year.
"
I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.
One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.
Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.
Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.
What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.
What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.
A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
A few good ones that I watched:
- Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58
- China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y
- Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc
There are way more. One channel that I might call https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels.
Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.
Most of these ditches are dug out by the locals with shovels. We're talking subsistence farmers here in areas where people are more or less trying to live off the land. Their hands and some primitive tools is all that's there.
I would still call people using bigger stuff to be doing manual labor. For the same reason that using a lawn mower is still a manual labor job.
I imagine they /want/ it, it would just be a massive issue because they do not have equal supply chains to more developed nations, and them having to pay to make up the difference makes the cost-to-benefit ratio not make sense
It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered. The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a heavily eroded flood plain before.
It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and some elbow grease.
No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"
Edit: for the downvoters
https://gemini.google.com/app/6da2be1502b764f1
They build 10x more solar power (total numbers compared, in percentages solar nearly tripled since 2021, nuclear had a 10% increase)
That seems more like a modest increase.
Honestly solar seems to have an exponential growth, nuclear linear at best.
Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/15418989
My home country we are only 40 million. I am sure they consume much more than us.
Was pretty obvious, but I wrote it down for you as you seem to be having trouble understanding the concept.
"Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions" (emissions adjusted for imports/exports)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
"Imported or exported CO₂ emissions per capita" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as tons)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
"Share of CO₂ emissions embedded in trade" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as percentage of total)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...
Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.
And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?
And now AI...
And the consumer goods.
Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.
Thanks.
The US is fairly high but below Canada, Russia, and many Middle Eastern countries. US emissions have also consistently fallen for the past 25 years or so.
They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.
Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than a person in America?
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that budget, but does so by significantly less than the average American. So the average American is more at fault for climate change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: “Mitigated” rather than totally solved, because to go back to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be negative. But let’s say we’re talking about staying within 2C or some similar goal.
Why are some people entitled to more than others based on where they live?
The US is the world leader in per capita CO2 emissions. Has been for over a century. Only in 2021 China has reached 8t per capita. Do you know when the US reached that figure? 1899.
The inhabitants of the US, and of the UK before it, have been enjoying the benefits of energy-intensive industry for hundreds of years. But the externality of that process - the emissions - is a burden shared with everyone else in the world. As others have mentioned, the planet does not care who emitted CO2.
None of those countries is in a position to criticize the emissions of China or India or Brazil or whatever other country.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.
China is currently building out all of this renewable energy and EVs, when the early industrial powers didn't, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is now the easy way.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
The lack of a single world government is why.
Agreements between nations are only enforced by honour, and while that's more than nothing, it's not great.
The practical outcome of this is that who is "allowed" to do anything is dynamic, and who may do something the most can be inverted extremely quickly.
Indonesia: 275M / 650M ton / 2.3 ton
Pakistan: 240M / 225M ton / 1 ton
Nigeria: 220M / 110M ton / 0.5 ton
Brazil: 215M / 475M ton / 2.2 ton
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less than the US. People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries near the equator and fertile countries will always be more populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person right?
dCO2/dt
"My maths" is that countries cannot use per captia stats as an excuse to produce tons of pollution. Would it be acceptable for every country to pollute as much as China if every country in the world had 1.5b people? No it wouldnt we would say thats to many people.
If a country wants to have 5million people and produce 15(units) of co2 per captia thats fine that is not globe threatening levels of pollution its living within their means. However if that country were to have 2 billion people and had a per captia of 10(units) I would say they need to significantly reduce that to about 2.5(units).
Whereas you'd be making the argument that the country is actually doing a lot better even though they produce 20billion(units) total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
The propaganda aspect is comparing absolute emissions of China to the absolute emissions of some smaller nation. That's only done to confuse people and delay the transition to emission free energy production.
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
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