China Planted 78 Billion New Trees, and Seriously Messed Up Its Water Cycle

It's not about attacking China. It's a lesson that large scale terraforming needs to be done thoughtfully and may have unintended consequences.

Uhm China is very fascist.

Right, the Americans...

Scientists from Tianjin University, China Agricultural University in Beijing, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands found that between 2001 and 2020, increased vegetation reduced water resources in both the eastern monsoon region and the northwestern arid region.

The whole intro to the article even puts China in a favorable light. Why are you so ready to go to the mat for China without even trying to read what they're saying?

And also has no water

Arizona town facing severe water restrictions as supply could run out by summer

Did you even read the article? Chinese researchers found that reforesting areas like grasslands into forest (as an example), redistributed water from the water cycle.

Nowhere in the article doesn't it say "China bad". The researchers said they should take into account how water availability could change when planning future deforestation efforts.

Not everything is political...you're the one making it political.

The US plants around 1.3 billion a year, so...

Your ignorance is astounding.

You obviously don't know anything about about forestry so why say anything at all? Tree planting doesn't magically create ecosystems.

Mass tree planting creates homogeneous forests that have no undergrowth or biodiversity. They don't retain water and are usually the forests that burn up during fire season. China created a bunch of tree farms not forests lol.

Yeah I mean if you are trying to clarify you might want to point out it happens through plant leaves.

Right, I mean why would you ever want to learn a new word while reading a science article???

Moving water is like the hardest of the infrastructure projects.

They said it was an unintended consequence. The study authors are chinese...

“Not sure why” = American propaganda against “communism”

It's since 1980, they've had almost half a century to do it.

Just a matter of scale. Every seventh person lives in China.

Or to recontextualize: The article talks about a time span of around 45 years. That's around 1.7 billion trees. Remember, that's an english (short) billion, 1700 million. (In other languages a billion is a million millions, and not just a thousand millions.)

If a worker can plant 20 trees a day and works 200 days a year, that means around half a million people are more than enough to do it. In a country with around 1400 million people, that's 0.035% of the population, or roughly one in 3000 people.

Suddenly, it's not all that crazy anymore.

In Estonia we plant about 20-40 millions of trees every year.

RMK ( State Forest Management Center) alone plants about 20-25 million trees every year.

And we are nation with 1,3 million people. So for China that number over the years isn’t big at all.

I always laugh when in the western news there is some organization, what makes big words that they planted 2 million trees and if that is something of a big achivments what should be boasted around the news.

Yes, I was shocked too. But in 1949 apparently 8.6% of the country was forested; in 2022 it was 24%.

In 2005 they launched the "Greening China" initiative to plant 13 Trillion (yes Trillion with a T) trees in 10 years. They didn't succeed but in 2021 the People's Daily claimed 78.1bn trees planted in 40 years Link.

However - China is known for inflating statistics to suit the communist party's own ends, and the People's Daily is part of the country's propaganda system. It's probably far less than 78bn, and that figure doesn't count replants and commerically logged trees. But it seems that whatever the figure there really has been a concerted long term reforestation effort in China.

Wail til she gets to the horse.