Pipeline project gives ecosystem top priority
By Liang Chao (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-24 07:31

Farmers in a village in Jingbian County in northern Shaanxi Province, a semi-arid area plagued by moving sand dunes, used to call where they lived Yinwan.

Today, they call the village "Nine Trees."

The name change originated from the West-East Natural Gas Pipeline, a project spanning nearly 4,000 kilometres from Xinjiang in Northwest China to Shanghai, a metropolis in the east.

In 2003, a pipeline was designed to go through a plot of 12 trees in the village.

Instead of cutting down the trees as they did in the past, workers replanted all of them, and luckily, nine survived. "We want to keep a better ecosystem for local people in the area vulnerable to water and soil erosion," the workers said.

It was just one of the achievements of thousands of constructors of the pipeline project, experts and officials said on Friday at a news conference.

Large infrastructure projects usually damage the physiognomy of places with fragile ecosystems. Mining, road and railway construction particularly tend to cause water and soil erosion.

However, what the pipeline constructors did was just the opposite.

The pipeline project, a major one for the country's "Go West" strategy, was put into operation by the end of 2004. It supplies 12 billion cubic metres of natural gas each year to 180 million people in the Yangtze River Delta.

During its two-year construction, more than 5,480 hectares of farmland were reclaimed, and a total of 10,444 hectares of affected physiognomy rehabilitated.

More than 90 per cent of the area affected by the pipeline achieved water and soil conservation, and their vegetation was rehabilitated.

"Such a level even exceeds the original ecosystem in some areas with water and soil erosion," said Li Yunxue, an expert on water and soil conservation.

"What the constructors have done is valuable for China, a country with over a third of its territory plagued by water and soil erosion," said E Jingping, vice-minister of water resources.

In north and northwest China's desert or semi-arid areas, stones were used to cover the surface soil damaged during project construction and to prevent dust from being blown away to cause sandstorms.

In mountainous areas and plateau, grasses and shrubs were planted to conserve soil and improve vegetation.

In the south, damage left to paddy fields in plains have been mitigated with most of farmland recovered.

Construction of the pipeline began on July 4, 2002 and cost more than 46 billion yuan (US$5.67 billion).

The pipeline, starting from Lunnan Oilfield in Tarim Basin of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, spans eight provinces and autonomous regions and ends at Shanghai, the commercial hub.

Trunk pipelines run through Gobi deserts, grasslands, the world's worst eroded Loess Plateau and forests in the north, as well as some wetlands and fertile farmlands in the south.

About two-thirds of the trunk lines run through Northwest China's Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia and Shaanxi, where water and soil erosion are severe.

"If the local fragile vegetations is damaged by the project, it's hard to rehabilitate them," E warned, adding that "consequent water and soil erosion will also threaten the security of the pipeline itself."

Under China's Erosion-Control Law, construction projects will not be approved until they work out practical erosion-control plans.

Those causing new erosion during construction are required to pay compensation for damaging the environment.

(China Daily 12/24/2005 page1)