China’s experience in restoring degraded land can offer lessons for other countries, said Yasmine Fouad, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), calling for deeper strategic cooperation after her first visit to China in July.
She noted that in recent years, the areas of desertified and sandy land in China have continued to shrink, making the country one of the clearest large scale examples of reversing land degradation.
"First of all, as being the executive secretary for the UNCCD, being the global voice for land, China has so much to give to the world in the land restoration program, in the culture, its identity and the mix between the people and nature and the learning process, and this is what I saw today when I visited the forest. So I hope one of the outcomes of my visit is to extend the existing relationship and partnership with China at the strategic level," Fouad said.
During her visit, Fouad toured a land-restoration project at Beijing Xishan National Forest Park, in the capital's western outskirts. The park grew out of the Xishan Experimental Forest Farm, where Beijing began large-scale tree planting in 1952 after the surrounding hills had become largely barren. Decades of planting, tending and forest management have since transformed the area into the forest seen today.
"This is a story that we need to show to the world. What I saw there was not only a land restoration or afforestation project. It is a story of history, the story of people who were resilient in China. So it is an accumulation of different generations," Fouad said.
Her Beijing trip also included a meeting with scholars at Tsinghua University, one of China’s leading universities, to learn more about the country’s efforts to combat desertification.
Fouad said engagement with researchers, think tanks and universities was central to the UNCCD’s work, which draws on science to turn policy into action that can improve soil health and land productivity.
"In general, most of my missions, when I go for missions, even the political level, beside meeting the government, I'm very keen to meet the think tank research institutions and universities, and the reason for that is that the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification is a human-centered convention. It is based on science, promotes policies in order to accelerate action on the ground, to have more healthy soil and productive land. China is a country that is very well known and well recognized by science, technology as well as a peer-to-peer exchange and [knowledge] sharing," Fouad said.
The UNCCD was adopted in Paris in 1994 to combat desertification and mitigate the effects of drought, particularly in Africa. China signed the convention in October that year.
UNCCD chief hails China's land-restoration experience
