TVE's Earth Report: Hope in a Changing Climate

Hope in a Changing Climate

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)