ABANDONED 1000 years ago by one of the first civilisations because of land degradation, China’s Loess Plateau has become the focus of a modern land restoration effort that has transformed agriculture and the local environment.
Key to restoration of 35,000 square kilometres of the 640,000 sq km plateau was the surrendering of farmland to purely ecological plantings.
According to a film made by soil scientist John Liu, in Australia last week to talk to the National Business Leaders Forum, local farmers strongly resisted the idea of giving over farmland to trees, but were persuaded by compensation payments on land taken permanently out of production.
As reported in Mr Liu’s film, Hope in a Changing Climate, available on the internet here , engineering landscapes and re-planting vegetation across key ecological recharge areas has changed the environment in ways that have lifted farm incomes threefold.
The Loess Plateau, which takes its name from the mineral-rich wind-borne sediments that make up much of its soil, was for several thousand years the base of China’s Han people.
It is thought the plateau was the second place on Earth to have a settled agriculture based on cultivation of the soil, after Mesopotamia.
Mr Liu said that China’s extensive written records show that over thousands of years, the plateau progressively lost its ability to sustain the Han. Their primitive agriculture degraded the landscape and destroyed the ecology, until about 1000 years ago the Han power base shifted east to what is now Bejing.
The plateau has since earned the distinction of being the most eroded place on Earth. Eroded loess provides the “yellow” in China’s Yellow River.
In 1995, when Mr Liu was invited to record the initial stage of the landscape restoration project, the plateau was being farmed at a subsistence level by desperately poor farmers who unwittingly compounded their own ecological troubles.
According to Mr Liu, Chinese scientists calculated the cost of sediment loss against the cost of restoring the landscape, and decided that restoration would be a quarter of the cost of allowing degradation to continue.
Less wealthy in 1995 than now, the Chinese borrowed US$500 million from the World Bank and set about rebuilding the landscape - mostly by hand.
In typically picturesque Chinese terms, the project aimed to give the eroded hills “a hat, a belt and shoes at their feet”.
That translates to tree cover on the upper slopes, farming terraces on the lower slopes, and dams in the valleys.
Massive landscape engineering was involved in the transformation - an approach unlikely to get much traction in Australia - “but the results are stunning”, Mr Liu said.
At one level, the project is an endorsement of the “front of pipe” approach to water management floated earlier this year by Australian landscape campaigner Major-General Michael Jeffery of Outcomes Australia.
On the Loess Plateau, more porous vegetation-covered soils and the flat terraces now catch and rainfall that once ran off the plateau during the rainy season, leaving it in drought during the dry season.
Water captured by the soil instead filters down through the terraces, fuelling crops. Waterways run clear, and farm productivity has soared.
Better productivity on the slopes, and the dams below, have allowed greenhouse agriculture to flourish in the valleys, extending the income-making opportunities for the local communities.
“It starts as a physical intervention, but it becomes a biophysical intervention once the biology stops gravity being such a destructive force,” Mr Liu said.
“The principle is to start the accumulation of organic matter and total vegetation coverage, and at a higher level understanding the role of biodiversity.”
“It’s an advance over the concept of simply tree planting, which is simplistic and doesn’t talk about other factors like soil condition or other forms of vegetation.”
Since 1995, Mr Liu has travelled to 60 countries looking at landscape regeneration techniques. He is a founder of the Environmental Education Media Project, which numbers the World Bank, Rockerfeller Foundation and Syngenta among its sponsors.
Although only briefly in Australia, Mr Liu was introduced to the environmental benefits of time-controlled livestock grazing practices in use here.
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