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.
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"Locals to be resettled will include those living in parts of Tianjin,
neighboring Hebei
Province and the Inner
Mongolia Autonomous Region," the official said.
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Resettlement efforts for the first batch of people from the massive
exodus has almost come to an end under the program 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.
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"With the help of the government, most of the resettled now have a
much better living conditions," he said.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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The National Afforestation Commission (NAC) released the report
yesterday on the eve of this year's annual tree-planting day.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To date, the area with human-planted trees across China exceeds 53
million hectares, ranking the nation the leader in the world.
(China Daily March 12, 005)