(TMG) CHINA TO PLANT 70 BILLION TREES BY 2030

China has for decades been planting trees in the Gobi to form a "Great Green Wall" to prevent the encroachment of the desert. Part of that effort is shown here in Gansu Province on April 12, 2022. Costfoto/Future Publishing/Getty Images

China intends to plant and conserve 70 billion trees by 2030 in its efforts to fight deforestation and climate change, the nation’s special envoy on climate Xie Zhenhua told the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on Tuesday, as the world’s worst polluter ramps up attempts to rebrand itself as an environmental champion.

The pledge comes as part of the One Trillion Trees initiative, a global reforestation plan unveiled at the WEF two years ago, supported by funding from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne, who together also own TIME.

In a speech in Davos on Tuesday, Xie said the 70 billion trees commitment was to “green our planet, combat climate change, and increase forest carbon sinks.” It builds on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2020 pledge to have China achieve peak carbon emission by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.

There have been other significant tree-related pledges in recent years, though none approach China’s. For example, according to the One Trillion Tree Initiative’s website, the U.S. has pledged to “conserve, restore and grow more than 955 million trees…by 2030,” and, under the European Green Deal, the E.U. has committed to “planting at least 3 billion additional trees” in that same time frame.

Environmentalists have raised concerns that reforestation may be used as a fig leaf to obfuscate rising emissions. “Promoting nature at large scales can be fantastic if done in an ecologically responsible way, but it should not distract from efforts to decarbonize,” says Tom Crowther, an environmental scientist at ETH Zurich. They also point out that China has engaged in vast reforestation work in the past of varying success. 

In 1978, it launched a “Great Green Wall” to combat the encroachment of the Gobi Desert, with 2,800 mi of forest strips planned by 2050. Thousands of acres of shifting dunes have been stabilized while the frequency of the sandstorms that regularly plague Beijing especially fell by one-fifth nationwide between 2009 and 2014.

But problems such as land erosion and over-farming stalled efforts in many areas of the Great Green Wall, while chronic water pollution rendered some soil unsuitable to sustain life. There are also concerns over biodiversity since most reforestation efforts have centered on a specific plant species, making the resulting forests unappealing for bird life and susceptible to blights. In 2000, 1 billion poplar trees in the western province of Ningxia were lost to a single disease, setting back two decades of planting efforts.

“Any tree planting should also take biodiversity into consideration,” Li Shuo, senior climate and energy policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia, tells TIME. “We all know how monoculture is bad for our planet. A robbing Peter (biodiversity) to pay Paul (climate) dynamic should be avoided.” Time - link - Charlie Campbell - link - more like this (China) - link - more like this (reforestation) - link