Climate protection: China is the world champion in reforestation

Reforestation is sometimes promoted as a sort of panacea for climate change. In 2019, a study from ETH Zurich made headlines because it claimed that a significant portion of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere from burning coal and petroleum products could be captured through reforestation. In the journal “Science,” 56 scientists from North and South America, Europe and Asia countered this in a joint statement. The potential of forests has been overestimated by a factor of five. Globally, reforestation could remove not 205 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, but only 41 billion tons. That would correspond to 147 billion tons of CO₂ and about three and a half years of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Reforestation is by no means the silver bullet to solving the climate crisis, but it can make a certain contribution. Accordingly, the People’s Republic of China, for example, committed to significantly expanding its forests as part of international climate negotiations in 2015. This was certainly all the easier for her as China is an extremely poor forest country due to many deserts, high population density and the hunger for wood during industrialization. Reforestation campaigns since the late 1970s are intended, among other things, to keep the deserts in check. Deserts and land threatened by them make up around 44 percent of the country’s area. Their spread endangers valuable pasture and arable land, and dust storms occasionally cause significant pollution even in large metropolises such as Beijing. In spring, people often have to suffer from the fine desert sand, even on the Korean peninsula or in Japan.

The approximately 80 billion trees that have been planted since 1978 have not been able to change that much, says the British non-governmental organization World Forest, which is dedicated to creating new forests. But at least the effect of the deserts and their spread have been somewhat reduced, and the forest area has expanded considerably. A study published in “Nature Sustainablity” in 2019, based on satellite data from NASA, showed that between 2000 and 2017, the area covered by green plants worldwide increased by five percent. A remarkable 25 percent of these newly vegetated areas were in China, with 42 percent of the increase being a result of reforestation and 32 percent being due to the expansion of agricultural land. Meanwhile, despite some setbacks, the forested area in China has doubled from twelve percent in the early 1980s to 24 percent.

A study published last year in the journal “Communications Earth & Environment” compared satellite data from the 1980s and the years 2000 and 2010 from southern China. The result: A region that was almost forest-free 40 years ago, in which there were only old forests in the upper regions of the mountains, was again overgrown with dense forests in 2020, which – as the satellite images also showed – were created around 2000. 730,000 square kilometers of new forest were added, an area almost twice the size of Germany. But that’s not the end of it: in 2022, China’s then chief climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos that 70 billion more trees would follow by 2030.

But what benefit does China’s reforestation have for the climate? A team of scientists from various Chinese institutes investigated this question. Using satellite data and in-situ investigations in the forests, they examined the new forests of the People’s Republic between 1990 and 2020. Their results were published in the journal in mid-May »Nature communications« published. The amount of carbon stored in China’s forests has almost tripled between 1990 and 2020, meaning a good 1.8 billion tons of carbon have now been bound. A little more than half of the increase came from reforestation, the rest from the growth of trees in the few old forests that still existed. The old and new forests are now absorbing 40 million tons of carbon per year. This corresponds to almost 147 million tons of CO₂, i.e. 1.3 percent of China’s annual emissions. Not exactly a lot, but other positive effects include the aforementioned containment of deserts, the reduction of erosion in China’s fertile loess regions and the protection of the last wilderness refuges.

A major contributor to the growth of China’s forests is the fact that domestic logging has been severely restricted. In 2019, a law was introduced to prevent the overexploitation of forests. But apparently it has not yet been applied to imports. In October 2023, the international environmental organization Global Witness reported on the activities of the Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development company. In 2022, they illegally felled 30,000 tons of hardwood in the Democratic Republic of Congo and exported them to China. The Chinese demand for teak and other valuable types of wood is putting strong pressure on the rainforest in the Congo Basin.

Global Witness said it contacted Chinese customs authorities months before publication. In September 2023, they replied that their hands were tied because the Chinese Forest Protection Act did not apply abroad. The Chinese authorities could only take action if companies violated the laws of another country and whose government asked them for help. However, the government in Kinshasa seems to have no interest in the People’s Republic stopping imports of illegally harvested tropical wood. Beijing, on the other hand, has stated that it wants to combat the import of illegal timber, but so far has no corresponding laws and regulations.