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500,000 to be moved in bid to quell sandstorms
By Liang Chao (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-03-12 06:10
About 500,000 rural people will be pulled out from the ecologically
vulnerable remote mountainous areas of Beijing and surrounding areas to help
mitigate sandstorms resulting from human activity, officials say.
"Locals to be resettled will include those living in parts of Tianjin,
neighbouring Hebei Province and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region," the
official said.
Resettlement efforts for the first batch of people from the massive exodus
has almost come to an end under the programme known as the "Beijing-rim
sandstorm prevention project" launched in the autumn of 2000, said Wang Zhibao,
deputy director of the Office for the Development of the Western Regions under
the State Council, at an interview on Thursday with the New Beijing News.
"With the help of the government, most of the resettled now have a much
better living conditions," he said.
Wang, the former director of the State Forestry Administration (SFA), is
confident that the project can help rehabilitate ecosystems in Beijing and its
surrounding areas.
"The annual sandstorms recorded in North China, the worst-hit area, have
tended to decrease year after year, from 13 in 2001 to only six last year," Zhou
Shengxian, SFA's top official, told media yesterday in Beijing.
A breakthrough was made last year in the replanting of forests with up to 7.2
million hectares of new trees added, according to the 2004 annual report on
China's afforestation efforts.
The National Afforestation Commission (NAC) released the report yesterday on
the eve of this year's annual tree-planting day.
Over the past two decades, people from all walks of life have participated in
tree-planting since China set March 12 as a National Tree Planting Day in 1979
and launched the voluntary campaign in the early 1980s.
Every spring, tree-planting has become a way of life for most of Chinese,
with millions of citizens involved as volunteers to help make the country
greener.
Last year, nearly 550 million people planted about 2.5 billion trees
throughout China. The accumulated efforts of volunteers allowed the nation to
see more than 44 billion trees planted during the 1982-2004 period, NAC
statistics indicate.
To date, the area with human-planted trees across China exceeds 53 million
hectares, ranking the nation the leader in the world.
(China Daily 03/12/2005 page3)
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