'All the birds returned' How China restored the world's most eroded place

'All the birds returned'

- Helen Davidson

It was one of China's most ambitious environmental endeavors ever.

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. But by the end of the 20th century, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the land cover. Every year the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess sediment across Chinese cities - including the capital, Beijing.

And so in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project, backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and overcultivation of the previously forested hillsides. It became what the World Bank in 2004 described as "the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world".

The primary focus was to restore agricultural production and incomes in the plateau, but the dust storms sent to already polluted cities such as Beijing, "and making people cough even more" also became a key driver, says Peter Bridgewater, an honorary professor at the Australian National University's centre for heritage and museum studies.