Where should China practice forestry in a warming world?

Abstract

As a nature‐based and cost‐effective solution, forestation plays a crucial role in combating global warming, biodiversity collapse, environmental degradation, and global well‐being. Although China is acknowledged as a global leader of forestation and has achieved considerable overall success in environmental improvements through mega‐forestation programs, many negative effects have also emerged at local scales due to the planting of maladapted tree species. To better help achieve carbon neutrality and the new vision of an ecological civilization, China has committed to further increase forestation. However, where forestation lands and such efforts should really be located is not so well understood yet and agreed upon, especially in the face of rapid climate change. Based on an ensemble‐learning machine, we predicted the spatial habitats (ecological niche) of the forest, grassland, shrubland, and desert under present and future climate conditions based on the natural climax vegetation distribution across China. We show that the potential forestation lands are mainly located in eastern China, which is east of the Hu Line (also known as the Heihe‐Tengchong Line). Under future climate change, forests will shift substantially in the latitudinal, longitudinal, and elevational distribution. Potential forestation lands will increase by 33.1 million hectares through the 2070s, mainly due to the conversions of shrub and grassland to forests along the Hu Line. Our prediction map also indicates that grassland rehabilitation is the universal optimal vegetation restoration strategy in areas west of the Hu Line. This analysis is consistent with much of the observed evidence of forestation failures and recent climate‐change‐induced forest range shifts. Our results provide an overview and further show the importance of adaptive science‐based forestation planning and forest management.

Updated estimation of forest biomass carbon pools in China, 1977–2018

“…Therefore, planted forests in arid and semi-arid regions such as northwest China generally present low survival rates due to frequent drought events (Cao, 2008;Cao et al, 2011;F. Wang et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2022). Although people try to improve the survival rate of trees by selecting an appropriate afforestation method, choosing proper tree species, and cooperating with a series of management measures, such as the application of fertilizer and irrigation, tending operations, etc.…”

Increased forest coverage will induce more carbon fixation in vegetation than in soil during 2015–2060 in China based on CMIP6

“…Similarly, a previous study reported that ecological restoration projects such as afforestation contributed more than half of the contribution to the enhancement of China's carbon stocks in project areas (Lu et al 2018). Moreover, the two monsoonal climatic regions are appropriate for potential afforestation (Zhang et al 2021). CO 2 had an effect equivalent to forest coverage in two monsoonal climatic regions but has a weaker contribution in the high-cold Tibetan Plateau with a high soil carbon sequestration potential as indicated by the relatively low Ratio sink .…”

“…Given that the growth rate of planned forest coverage is relatively stable, we linearly extrapolated the planned forest coverage during 2035-2060 using trends over the past two decades. The planned forest coverage is less than the potential forest coverage in China reported by Zhang et al (2021). The green and orange columns in figure (c) are the predicted vegetation and soil carbon sinks in China under the forest coverage of the planned policies, respectively, assuming constant sensitivities (i.e.…”

The Grain for Green Project in Contiguous Poverty-Stricken Regions of China: A Nature-Based Solution

“…The GGP, started in 1999, is mainly applied to areas with serious soil erosion and to cultivated land with a slope above 25 degrees, involving vegetation restoration and conversion to forest [15,16]. It is the largest in scale and the longest in duration of all the projects in China, also affecting the largest population and attracting the largest amount of investment [17,18]. The GGP involves 2435 counties (including county-level units) in 25 provinces across the country.…”