英国《卫报》报道：百鸟归巢，中国引领世界防风治沙

"All the birds returned’: How a Chinese project led the way in water and soil conservation

《百鸟归巢，中国引领世界防风治沙》

The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action and reversed decades of damage from grazing and farming

导语：黄土高原是地球上水土流失最严重的地区，直到中国通过系统治理，让这片因过度放牧与农耕遭受数十年破坏的土地重获新生。

It was one of China’s most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.

这堪称中国迄今为止最雄心勃勃的生态修复壮举之一。

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people.

跨越三省四区、面积超过24.5万平方英里（64万平方公里）的黄土高原，养育着约1亿人口。

By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

然而生态学家John D Liu在纪录片中揭示，至20世纪末，这片曾孕育文明的沃土沦为了全球水土流失最严重的地方。

Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover.

世代农人在此开垦并耕种，土壤结构逐渐瓦解，植被覆盖持续退化。

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, a fine wind-blown sediment, across Chinese cities – including to the capital, Beijing.

每年，高原泥沙裹挟着细碎黄土（这正是黄河得名由来）涌入河道，扬尘跨越千里直抵首都北京等中国各地的城市。

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 once forested hillsides that would become what the bank described in 2004 as “the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world” .

因此，1999年中国政府采取了紧急行动，启动了“退耕还林”计划，这是一个由世界银行资助的试点项目，旨在逆转黄土高原因过度放牧与毁林开垦导致的生态灾难。世界银行2004年将其誉为"全球规模最大、成效最显著的水土保持工程"。

The primary focus was to restore agricultural production and incomes in the plateau, but the dust storms descending on already polluted cities, “making people cough even more”, also became a driver, says Peter Bridgewater, an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies.

澳大利亚国立大学遗产与博物馆研究中心荣誉教授Peter Bridgewater指出，尽管工程首要目标是恢复高原农业生产与居民收入，但"加剧城市居民咳嗽症状"的沙尘暴问题同样是重要推动因素。

World Bank participants spent more than three years designing the project, working with experts as well as communities, officials and farmers on how to overturn the longstanding but unsustainable grazing and herding of livestock.

世界银行的参与者历时三年多进行项目设计，联合专家、社区、政府与农户共同制定转型方案。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Tree-cutting, planting on hillsides and uncurbed sheep and goat grazing were banned.

禁伐令、禁垦禁牧休牧相继实施。

The sustainable practices demonstrated in some small villages were scaled up.

部分村庄探索出的可持续模式也得以推广。

The project was extraordinarily ambitious, and was powered through by China’s authoritarian system.

这项宏伟工程的推进，彰显着中国集中高效治理体系的优势。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

“If you want major change, the Chinese system is well adapted to making major change,” says Bridgewater wryly.

Bridgewater意味深长地说："若想实现根本性变革，中国体制具有独特优势。"

There were grain and cash subsidies for people converting farmland to grassland, economic forest or protected ecological forest.There were tax subsidies and benefits to offset farming losses, long-term land use contracts and conversion to more sustainable farming including orchards and nuts, and widespread tree-planting employment programmes.

政策组合拳包括：退耕还林（草）现金与粮食补贴，为弥补农业损失提供税收补贴和福利，以弥补农业损失、长期土地使用合同、经济林果转型扶持及大规模植树就业计划。

By 2016, China had converted more than 11,500 sq miles of rain-fed cropland to forest or grassland – a 25% increase in vegetative cover in a decade, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change.

根据《自然气候变化》杂志上发布的一项研究，到2016年，中国已将超过11500平方英里的雨养耕地转变为森林或草地，十年间植被覆盖率提升25%。

Other studies showed large reductions in erosion and positive changes in plant productivity.

多项研究表明水土流失大幅减少，植被生产力显著提升。

“When the environment improved, all the birds returned. The forest has developed its ecological system naturally,” the forestry worker Yan Rufeng told the state-run news channel CGTN.

"生态改善后，百鸟重归故里，森林自成系统。"林业工作者严如峰向CGTN如此描述。

It wasn’t straightforward, however. There was some community resistance, particularly to demands to plant trees on farming land.“What about the next generation? They can’t eat trees,” said one man interviewed for Liu’s documentary.

然而，转型之路并非坦途。部分社区对"粮田种树"存有抵触，纪录片中一位农民直言："（我们的）后代怎么办？总不能啃树皮充饥吧。"

In the early years there also appeared to be a correlation between the project and a sudden drop in grain yield.Over the years, officials would debate whether the programme was harming China’s food security, although studies found there to be several factors at play, and that yields later improved.

项目初期还出现粮食产量波动，虽后续研究证实多重因素作用且产量逐步回升，但粮食安全争议始终伴随工程推进。

In hindsight, the early methods employed to regreen the dusty hills were also problematic.“There was a lot of mass tree planting – not necessarily natives – and in plantation format, in other words, monocultural stands,” says Bridgewater.Mass-species planting eventually began to replace the monoculture plantations, helping to increase wildlife, but there were also issues with water management, with the burgeoning tree cover and agriculture taking more and more water out of the Yellow River system.

回望治理历程，早期的山丘绿化方式也存在问题。Bridgewater表示："大规模种植单一树种人工林的做法值得商榷。"虽后续转向混交林培育促进了生物多样性的提升，但又出现了水资源管理问题，日益扩大的树木覆盖和农业消耗了越来越多的黄河水系的水资源。

“It’s looking like there is a point at which the revegetation will become too successful in that it actually then swings the water balance of the landscape, reducing the potential for water to go into the rivers and be available for human use,” says Bridgewater.“So this is another element that was not really thought about at the start, because the aim wasn’t ‘let’s stabilise the system’.But it’s a good lesson as to how all these interconnecting factors need to be thought about very carefully before you launch into these things.”

Bridgewater说："当植被恢复过度成功的话，可能会打破区域水平衡，减少入河径流量，影响人类用水。这是一个很好的教训，提醒我们启动此类工程前，必须系统考量各生态要素的复杂关联。"

A big factor in the success and demands of the programme was and remains the changing climate.The plateau sits in a transition zone between arid and semi-humid climates.The varied natural factors of the region, combined with unsustainable human activity, had contributed to the fragility of the plateau, a 2021 study found.

气候变化始终是影响工程成效的关键变量。2021年研究显示，处于干旱与半湿润气候过渡带的黄土高原，在人为活动与自然因素叠加下生态脆弱性显著。

“At the same time, the climate in this region has shown warming and wetting, particularly in the south in which precipitation increased by 20-50 mm from 2000 to 2014.”

“与此同时，该地区的气候表现出变暖和湿润的趋势，尤其是在南部，降水量从2000年到2014年增加了20-50毫米。”

The climate around the Loess plateau is changing, which means what existed, or even thrived, several decades ago can’t necessarily be put back, says Bridgewater.“But we can produce something, a system that will produce ecosystem services at a better range and a better quality and more regularly than the systems that we’ve destabilised.”

"气候变迁意味着数十年前的生态系统难以简单复原。"Bridgewater强调，"但我们可以构建新型生态系统，使其以更优质量、更广范围、更可持续的方式提供生态服务。"
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Bridgewater adds: “Given the speed of climate change, and not just climate but hydrology and all the other associated global changes, we need to be thinking about what we want.What we want out of our ecosystems are actually services.We need to think actually in multi-dimensions … to develop a whole new way of thinking as to how we manage the landscape.And in a way, the whole Loess plateau project is a good example of that, [even if] that wasn’t the way of thinking at the start.“

Bridgewater补充道：“面对气候、水文等全球性变化，我们需要思考我们想要的是什么，我们从生态系统中所期望的实际上是服务。我们实际上需要多维度思考……开发一种全新的思维方式，来管理我们的景观。从某种意义上，黄土高原工程正是这种思维的实践典范，尽管其初始设计尚未完全体现这种系统性。"

Lu FuChin, a former farmer, told the official state news outlet xinhua that the programme had boosted local employment.“I used to cut trees for firewood, but now I grow them instead,” said the 52-year-old forestry worker.“It used to be that people had to go far for work, but now they can find employment by the Yellow River.As the environment is improving, I believe the villagers’ lives will become more prosperous too.”

52岁的林业工人（曾经的农民）卢福勤向新华社讲述他的转型故事："我以前砍树取火柴木，但现在我反而种树。过去人们必须远行工作，但现在他们可以在黄河边找到工作。随着环境的改善，我相信乡亲们的日子定会越来越红火的。"

theearthgarden John D Liu in this article made one of my favorite documentaries of all time Green Gold about the Loess and other rehabilitation projects around the globe. Pretty shocking results!

在这篇文章中提到的John D Liu参与制作了我有史以来最震撼的纪录片之一《Green Gold》，这部纪录片聚焦黄土高原生态修复工程及全球其他类似项目，效果简直炸裂！