--- SEARCH ---
WEATHER
CHINA
INTERNATIONAL
BUSINESS
CULTURE
GOVERNMENT
SCI-TECH
ENVIRONMENT
LIFE
PEOPLE
TRAVEL
WEEKLY REVIEW
Learning Chinese
Learn to Cook Chinese Dishes
Exchange Rates


Hot Links
China Development Gateway
Chinese Embassies


Tree Planting Area Exceeds 46 Million Hectares

Tree-planting has become a way of living for Chinese people today with millions of citizens involved as volunteers making the country greener.

Trees planting is a bit of a tradition, marking the beginning of children's schooling, one's enrollment of colleague in army service, or for a wedding or as birthday commemoration.

Many trees are planted in special places for civil servants, professionals, model workers, journalists, and Party members to help raise public awareness of environmental protection.

"Each spring - citizens have a duty to plant trees - there will be dozens of places open to the public for tree planting in urban areas, particularly in metropolitan areas like Beijing and Shanghai," Zhou Lijun said, an official with the National Afforestation Commission (NAC) in Beijing.

Most places provide free planting kits, and people can buy different kinds of saplings there for 20 to 40 yuan (US$2.40 to US$4.80) each a little bit more.

In rural areas "planting more trees to get rich" has been very popular since farmers can sell some of their adult trees to make money and improve their living standard.

People are also allowed to pay for tree-planting if they are too busy to attend afforestation season events, NAC experts say.

Over the past two decades, people from all walks of life have participated in tree-planting since China set March 12 as a National Tree Planting Day in 1979 and launched the national voluntary tree-planting campaign in earlier 1980s.

According to the 1981 resolution by China's top legislature on the campaign, every healthy Chinese citizen older than 11 has a duty of planting three to five trees each year without pay.

Last year, nearly 560 million people planted more than 2.5 billion trees throughout China. The accumulated efforts of volunteers reached 8.8 billion with more than 42 billion trees planted during the 1982-2003 period, NAC's statistics indicate.

To date, the area with human-planted trees across China has exceeded 46 million hectares, ranking first in the world.

(China Daily March 12, 2004)

China's Artificial Forest Area Ranks First in the World
Progress Achieved in Forest Program
Reforestation Halts Desert
China Makes Further Achievements in Afforestation
Youngsters Plant Trees to Protect Environment
China Greens World's Longest Desert Highway
Enterprises in Western China Invest Heavily in Afforestation
Beijing to Add Second Green Belt by 2008
50 Billion Yuan Invested in Western Forest Belts
Print This Page
|
Email This Page
About Us SiteMap Feedback
Copyright © China Internet Information Center. All Rights Reserved
E-mail: webmaster@china.org.cn Tel: 86-10-68326688