The province that cleans up well

Environmental efforts benefit Fujian as eroded land is reclaimed, poverty reduced

East China's Fujian province has witnessed much progress in advancing ecological conservation in recent years, especially in tackling the problems of water runoff and soil erosion, local officials said.

Statistics show that after decades of efforts from the local governments at all levels, the province's overall soil erosion rate dropped from 17.25 percent in 1985 to 8.87 percent in 2015.

Since 2012, Fujian has received a total of 3.39 billion yuan ($491.47 million) of related financial subsidies at provincial and national levels. It has improved 1.1 million hectares of eroded areas by the end of 2017 and plans to recover a total of 6,000 square kilometers of eroded land during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) period.

On June 27 of this year, Fuzhou, capital of Fujian, hosted a provincial ecological environment protection conference and a promotional activity on the construction of a national ecological civilization pilot zone.

During the conference, Yu Weiguo, Party chief of Fujian, said a goal for the province is to complete a green development pattern by 2035, as well as to establish a comprehensive ecological environment control system and to modernize its governance capacity.

Fujian was officially designated as China's first national ecological conservation pilot zone in 2016 and currently retains a laurel as one of the highest-ranking provinces in the country in terms of forest coverage ratio, leading the nation for 35 consecutive years.

However, due to unreasonable resource development, industrial pollution and excessive reclamation, some areas in Fujian, particularly 22 counties including Changting, Anxi, Yongchun and Fuan, used to suffer from severe water runoff and soil erosion.

In 1983, the provincial government made Changting, located in western Fujian, a pilot county for soil erosion control and treatment.

Since then, a range of targeted measures have been taken, including collaboration among government agencies and financial and policy support, to help Changting gradually turn its eroded areas into oases and wetland parks.

Due to the huge success, other cities and counties in Fujian have started to use the Changting experience as a reference to contribute to the province's ecological development.

In Datian county, for example, many abandoned, barren mines have been transformed into lush mountains.

Despite the great difficulty and high costs of the restoration, the Datian government built a partnership with several research institutes, including the provincial water and soil conservation experimental station, to investigate and classify these mines and create tailored treatment measures.

They aimed not only to turn these mines into mountain villas, parks, industrial zones, ecological tourist spots and agricultural areas, but also to help alleviate local poverty through the initiative.

Today, a mine in the county's Junxi town has become a destination to develop leisure and sightseeing agriculture, with such supporting facilities as a restaurant, a soil-free growing technical center and intelligent temperature control vegetable greenhouses.

The industry now helps 50 farmers generate an average annual income of more than 20,000 yuan each.