China strives to increase carbon sinks

BEIJING - China has been making efforts to increase the country's forest and grassland coverage and enhance protection over these areas in order to increase carbon sinks and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released Wednesday.

In 2011, China completed afforestation across nearly six million hectares and upgraded 788,800 hectares of forest that had been haunted by low yield capacity and low protection efficiency, said the report, titled "China's Policies and Actions for Addressing Climate Change."

More than 2.51 billion trees were planted in volunteer tree-planting drives last year, and China's urban green areas reached 2.24 million hectares, according to the report released by China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

The urban per-capita green park space reached 11.80 square meters, with the green area rate and green coverage rate of built-up areas reaching 35.27 percent and 39.22 percent, respectively, figures from the report show.

The State Forestry Administration has formulated a five-point action plan for forestry departments to mitigate climate change in the years until 2015. The action plan includes accelerating afforestation, improving forest management, strengthening forest resources administration, enhancing forest disaster prevention and control and fostering emerging forestry industries.

China has also made efforts to increase its grassland carbon sinks, the report said.

In 2011, the State Council disbursed 13.6 billion yuan ($2.16 billion) to develop a subsidy and award mechanism for grassland conservation in nine provincial areas, including Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Tibet autonomous region, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Gansu province.

Around 10.57 million households of farmers and herdsmen benefited from the subsidy and award policy in 2011, according to the report.

In 2012, the policy was extended to cover herding areas in five more provinces, including Hebei and Shanxi, the report said.

In 2012, as part of the project to return grazing land to grassland in nine provincial-level regions, such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Gansu and Sichuan, more than 4.4 million hectares of grassland have been fenced off for conservation and 1.4 million hectares suffering from severe degradation have been re-sowed, according to the report.

To strengthen agricultural carbon sinks, the central government has assigned 30 million yuan in special funds to promote conservation farming technology. It has also invested a total of 300 million yuan in conservation farming projects, the report said.

The carbon storage capacity of farmland soil can be increased by 20 percent by the application of conservation farming technology, which would help cut farmland emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases by 0.61-1.27 tons per hectare annually. This, if applied nationally, would amount to an annual reduction of more than 3 million tons of CO2, the report said.