Ban free-range grazing of livestock – this policy ended the practice of allowing great numbers of goats and sheep to range freely to denude the natural vegetation.Ban planting on steep slopes – this reversed centuries of unsustainable agricultural practice among poor farmers trying to plant crops on the sides of hills and gullies.Ban tree cutting – a law was instituted banning indiscriminate tree cutting throughout China following the devastating floods of 1998.The team divided their work into 2 areas: economic and social well being of the people, and ecologic health of the environment.įrom the planning process, a number of important decisions emerged. Over 3 years, Chinese planners from the Ministry of Water Resources and international planners from the World Bank worked together with experts in hydrology, soil dynamics, forestry, agriculture and economics, to design a workable project plan. It takes an overarching and ambitious vision to believe that what was destroyed over 10,000 years could be restored yet a little over a decade ago, the Chinese government decided to do just that. The Yellow River became known as “China’s Sorrow” because of all the suffering caused by the floods. The Yellow River gets its name from this yellow silt that it carries and the constant degradation gradually changed the river as the silt raised the riverbed and made it easier for the river to flood.Ĭhinese history is well documented and we know that the Yellow River has flooded more than 1,500 times in recorded history. This is the place where the Han, Qin, Tang and many other Chinese dynasties flourished.Įver since the advent of settled agriculture, the fine, powdery loess soil has eroded continuously, and in ever increasing amounts, until the plateau became one of the most eroded places on earth. This is the cradle of Chinese civilization where settled agriculture first emerged between 9,500 and 10,000 years ago. ![]() The Loess Plateau stretches over parts of 7 Chinese provinces Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan.įossil remains prove that humans and their ancestors have lived here for more than 1.5 million years. The mineral-rich windborne sedimentary loess deposits are hundreds of meter thick in many places. It gets its name from the powdery loess soil that is its primary feature. The Loess Plateau is approximately the size of France, encompassing 640,000 square kilometres in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River. Liu, Director of the EEMP, has documented the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau since 1995, and since then has presented his findings and the images of the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project to over 300 audiences in China, Europe, Africa, and USA.
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