For the past 15 years, in a unique and ambitious project funded by the Chinese government and the World Bank, local people have been working to restore the severely degraded landscape of China’s vast Loess Plateau. Now their efforts in planting trees and building terraces over a 90,000 square kilometre area have started to pay off. Once barren hillsides are again cloaked with trees, and farmers who struggled to survive are beginning to reap the benefits of the improving soils. But the Loess Plateau project didn’t just transform the landscape - it also inspired film-maker and tve partner John Liu to become a soil scientist based at the Rothamstead Institute in the UK and the US’s George Mason University. In ‘Hope in a Changing Climate’, John Liu goes back to report on the transformation of the Loess Plateau, and travels to Africa to explore whether lessons learned in China could help restore other degraded lands around the world. Can restoring soil fertility and tree cover, he asks, also help tackle climate change by soaking up more CO2 from the atmosphere?
Earth Report Special, Hope in a Changing Climate, is broadcast on BBC World News on Friday 27 November at the following times:
04.30; 09.30; 14.30, 18.30 (Middle East only); 21.30 and 23.30. (all times GMT UK time zone)
 John on ancient millstone on Loess Plateau.
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This is China’s Loess Plateau… Until recently this was one of the poorest regions in the country. A land renowned for floods, mudslides and famine.
John Liu: My name is John Liu, I’ve been coming to the Plateau for 15 years. I first came here in 1995 as a filmmaker to document an ambitious project where local people aided by the Chinese Government and the world bank were setting out to construct a new landscape on a vast scale. Transforming a barren land into a green and fertile one, over an area of thirty five thousand square miles. The project certainly changed me. It convinced me to become a soil scientist. The lessons I have learned here in the last few years have made me realise that many of the human tragedies that we witness around the world. The floods, the droughts, and the famines are not inevitable. They happen because, we have eroded and despoiled our natural environment with years sometimes centuries of over-farming. But here on the Loess Plateau, I have discovered that this process can be reversed. People can lift themselves out of poverty. They can radically improve their environment, and by doing so reduce the threat of climate change.
When I first came to the Loess Plateau I was astounded by the degree of poverty and degradation and I wondered how could the Chinese people, the largest ethnic group on the planet, and my fathers and my own ancestors come from a place that was this barren.
China’s Loess Plateau is a region that stretches for 640,000 square kilometres across north central China. Unspoilt valleys in neighbouring Sichuan show us how it might once have looked. It’s the sort of natural abundance that is necessary to support an emerging civilisation. How could a landscape with this potential have been reduced to this?
 Gao Xing Zhuang Village on the Loess Plateau regreened.
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When Chinese scientists and civil engineers began to survey the area they realised that several thousand of years of agricultural exploitation had denuded the hills and valleys of vegetation. The relentless grazing of domestic animals on the slopes, meant there was no chance for young trees and shrubs to grow. The rain was no longer absorbed in the soil, but simply washed down the hillsides, taking the soil with it. Over the millennia, this process progressively destroyed the region’s fertility. It’s a process which has been repeated on every continent.
John: One thing that became apparent early on is the connection between damaged environments and human poverty. In many parts of the world there’s been a vicious cycle. Continuous use of the land has led to subsistence agriculture and generation by generation this has further degraded the soils. The vital question we have to answer is - can this be destructive process be reversed?
Fifteen years ago, the World bank and Chinese officials were confident it could be. They decided that to prevent further erosion it was imperative to cease farming in certain key areas and allow the trees and shrubs to grow back. This could not happen without the consent of the farmers themselves. They took some persuading?
Mr Ta Fu Yuan Chief Engineer: Of course a lot of people didn't understand the project, and could not think in the long term.
Old man: They want us to plant trees everywhere. Even in the good land. What about the next generation? They can’t eat trees.
The people were eventually won over by the assurance that although they were sacrificing some land to trees and plants – the new terraces and fields they were building would be more productive.
Mr Ta Fu Yuan Chief Engineer: The goal was to give a hat to the hilltops, give a belt to the hills as well as shoes at the base. The hat meant that the top of these hills had to be replanted with trees. The belt meant that terraces had to be built, to be used for crop planting and also for tree. The shoes meant the dams which we had to build. So that the hills could get back to life and our economy as well as our lives could improve.
One vital change was in the local laws. Hills and gullies of the new ecological zones were to be protected. Farmers were given financial compensation for not farming on them and keeping their livestock penned up. When I first filmed Mr Ta Fu Yuan and his colleagues back in 1995 I had no idea that such an initiative could achieve such dramatic results. The effort that people put into converting their slopes into terraces resulted in a marked increase in agricultural productivity. And now the fields are surrounded by an abundance of natural vegetation. Now when it rains, the water no longer runs straight off the slopes. Trapped by the vegetation, it sinks into the ground, where it is retained in the soil, taking weeks and months to gently seep down and irrigate the fields and terraces, below. The transformation you see in this valley has been replicated over an area of thirty five thousand square kilometres. The impact of such a huge change in vegetation goes far beyond the plateau itself. There’s been a marked reduction in the soil rushing down into the Yellow river. Scientists point to a more global benefit. Plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, reducing the green house gas effect which could help us cope with global warming”
Professor Cai Mantang: In terms of Climate change, we can say that the project made a double contribution. First the project was successful in recovering vegetation on a large scale. So many trees and so much vegetation grew up, so this definitely helped take carbon out of the atmosphere. Secondly, because the health of the Loess Plateau’s eco-system has been so much improved, the region will be better able to resist the negative impacts of climate change.
As a result of its success the procedures of the Loess Plateau project are now being applied all over China. But could such projects work elsewhere in less centrally controlled societies, with fewer resources and different soils? Ethiopia, perhaps more than any other country, has come to symbolise the vulnerability of humankind to environmental catastrophe. This is a country whose problems have been increased by war and civil conflict, and now human induced climate change is likely to make matters worse. As on the Loess Plateau, centuries of subsistence farming practices have stripped the hillsides of the natural vegetation. But just as I have witnessed in China, there is hope that the situation can be reversed. In just six years Professor Legesse Nagash and local villagers have transformed a severely eroded terrain by planting indigenous trees and plants. Almost miraculously a clear water stream has emerged, where once there was a muddy trickle.
John Liu: How is it that you can get the stream to flow throughout the year?
Legesse Nagash: It is because of the vegetation cover which has been regenerating on this mountain. This water is maintaining the landscape because as soon as rain falls, on the canopy of this vegetation that rain then infiltrated gradually into the ground ending up with this steady flow of this river. Water is life. Without water nobody can do anything.
A thousand kilometres further North in village of Abraha Atsebaha, another near miraculous phenomenon is occurring. Farmers are finding water at the bottom of their wells, despite the poor rains this year. The famine of 1984, struck the people of this valley very hard. Many migrated, many died. But now the people are returning. The village chairman Gabre Giday well remembers how life used to be.
Gadre Gida: Ten years ago I’d say even five years ago, I’ll tell you what the situation was, it was absolutely terrible. In 1990, 1991, 1992, it was a very dry land. The sun, the drought, the wind, it was all dry like the desert. There was refugee programme for our village. So we had a choice, leave the valley or do something.
Just as in China, and with government advice and support, the villagers were persuaded to set aside farming land for nature to grow back. In ravines they have built small dams, which are now fed by underground springs. And like Professor Nagash’s stream, rain that fell weeks ago now slowly seeps through the sub soil, replenishing the supply of water. The eroded land became fertile, The land changed for the better.
Gadre Giday: In the drought our fruit trees, dried up. Now they’re coming back, and now we grow even more varieties. These are the real benefits we’ve had. We have food security and our children can go to school – our lives are better. We no longer need to beg the government for aid.. Because thanks to these changes we can feed ourselves. Wild animals who’d disappeared are returning, even the leopards.
The villagers of Abraha Atsebaha are now better able to withstand the impact of to climate change. With International assistance, their Achievement could be repeated across the country. The benefits would spread far beyond its borders. The Ethiopian Highlands are The water table for East Africa. Great rivers like the Blue Nile and the Awash are born here. Restoring the country on a large scale would benefit Sudan Egypt, Somalia and Kenya. Environmental degradation is not only a problem for dry country’s like Ethiopia. It can be just as devastating for countries like Rwanda where rainfall is plentiful. This tiny country is grappling with the problem of a growing population, trying to eke out a living on a finite amount of land. This was one of the underlying causes of the recent genocide and civil war. Catastrophes from which the country is still recovering. As in China and Ethiopia, over-farming leads to the erosion of the slopes. As the productivity of the slopes declined, people moved to some of the country’s protected areas. In northern Rwanda lie the Rugesi wetlands – a site of international importance. Famed for its wildlife. Yet, in the nineteen nineties, local farmers who’d already eroded the slopes above the wetlands, moved down to grow food. Soon over cultivation began to dry the marshes out. The results were catastrophic. The water that pours out from the Rugesi wetlands is a vital source of hydro-power for the country’s electricity supply.
John Liu: When I first came here, four years ago, the water fall was considerably diminished. Its declining power was more than a matter of local interest it had become an issue of national importance. The reduced flow meant that the hydro power stations below were unable to generate enough electricity for the countries capital city Kigali. The Rwandan government was forced to buy diesel power generators to replace the lost electricity. Dr Rose Mukankomeje, took me to see them.
Dr Rose: So what is happening here is that those generators we are lending them from this company and we are then obliged to lend to them especially when we degraded the wetland and we lost 20 megawatts of electricity and to run those machines we’re paying 65,000 years dollar a day.
John Liu: Sixty five thousand dollars a day - that’s multi-millions of dollars.
Dr Rose: Yes it is six million dollar and as you must, might know Rwanda is not a rich country. Some of that money has been borrowed from the bank, is from tax payers.
John Liu: How does this affect the climate?
Dr Rose: Of course those machines they’re run on diesel and when you burn the diesel up you are producing green house gases.
The cost of the imported generators meant that the local people were now burdened with a threefold rise in the cost of electricity. Government policy makers focused on how to restore the Rugezi wetlands. If the people were the problem they could also be the solution.
H.E. Paul Kagame President of Rwanda: We had to take a careful look at what had actually been happening. That damaged this system and therefore had to reverse that again with the human action and this is why it is important to look at how human actions can destroy or can reverse what has been destroyed or even protect our environment.
Government policy is now focussed on helping the people to leave the wetlands and farm the slopes above more efficiently. On the hills above their terraces, they too will encourage natural vegetation to grow back and capture the rain.
Dr Rose: What we have been doing was conducting some meetings, in collaboration with local government by asking them how they came up to come into farm here, why they came, so we have been supporting them by doing terraces. Specifically there on the hills where they can increase and improve the productivity. The most important is to have people with you, on your side.
Wetlands are now recovering, great volumes of water now cascade down powering the hydro stations. Carbon free electricity is replacing the diesel powered generators, electricity prices are falling. What the Rwandan’s recognised here is that the marshlands are far more valuable as an unspoilt natural system than they were for cultivation. The principle is just as valid for the for hillsides and ravines that have been restored back on the Loess Plateau. Thanks to them the new farm land is far more productive. And After just fifteen years, the soil is already becoming enriched with organic material from dead plants and animals that contain carbon.
John Liu: What’s interesting about this is all these root materials, all this other stuff, this is organic material and this organic material is mixing together with the loess, the geologic soils here and it’s making a living soil. This is where the moisture resides, yesterday it rained and there’s still moisture in this soil. This is where the nutrients are recycled so that each generation of life emerges here and this is where the carbon is. What’s interesting about this they made this field, this is new, so they’re helping to sequester carbon.
And it is this organic matter in the soil that contains on average three times more carbon, than the foliage above the ground. Scientists calculate that a quarter of the earth’s land mass has been degraded and could be restored. Imagine what an impact this would have on reducing climate change.
What we’ve seen in China, in Africa and around the world is that it’s possible to rehabilitate large scale damaged eco-systems. If we can transfer the capital, the technology and empower the local people to restore their own environment it’ll have enormous benefits. Restoration can sequester carbon, reduce bio-diversity laws mitigate against flooding, drought and famine. It can ensure food security for people who are now chronically. Why don’t we do this on a global scale?
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