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The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action

Posted by skybrian
Tags: conservation, water, china, loess plateau, erosion, ecosystems, soil, agriculture, farming.livestock, grazing, wildlife, birds, politics, chinese communist party, policy.environment, the alternatives, author.helen davidson, source.the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/14/how-china-led-way-water-soil-conservation

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Title
'All the birds returned': How a Chinese project led the way in water and soil conservation
Authors
Helen Davidson
Published
Mar 14 2025
Word count
1168 words

1 comment

  1. skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

    Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover. Every year, the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess, a fine wind-blown sediment, across Chinese cities – including to the capital, Beijing.

    And so in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and overcultivation of the once forested hillsides that would become what the bank described in 2004 as “the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world”.

    2 votes