More trees, less grass? Qingdao's forestation plan condemned

(Ecns.cn) -- The Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry made a response on Wednesday concerning a tree-planting initiative that has sparked public debate over the allocation of funds and whether the project has been carried out scientifically so far.

In a statement released on the city's government affairs Web site, the bureau elucidates the work of building a "National Forest City," admits weaknesses in preliminary tasks and shows a willingness to listen to opinions from the public as well as to make improvements.

However, residents of Qingdao, located in the eastern province of Shandong, still find the plan awkward, with many saying they cannot understand the decision to replace turf with trees, since turf on the roadside is also an important part of the city's ecological environment.

A rushed decision?

Last month, a post on the Sina Weibo microblogging site regarding Qingdao's greening project resonated among Web users who were surprised at the "sudden" decision.

With the matter widely followed, more and more people have accused the Qingdao government of squandering 4 billion yuan (US$634 million) on aggressive tree planting, a task carried out for the purpose of winning a "greener" city image during the 2014 International Horticultural Exposition, but not tackling desertification or global warming.

According to the Oriental Morning Post, the project was launched last month and involves Qingdao's seven urban districts and five county-level cities, which will invest a total of 4 billion yuan to plant different species of trees.

Qingdao's fiscal revenue was 56.6 billion yuan (US$9 billion) last year, which means the project alone will cost 7.2 percent of the revenue. Yet the government has failed to convene a single public hearing on the sensitive issue.

Local residents also blame the city government for a lack of communication and insufficient research during the preparatory stages.

Public doubts

Pan Caifu, a media employee, published a post on her Sina microblog on Wednesday outlining her failed attempts to contact government departments about the new plan. Her concerns include the details of the spending and the supervision of the project, according to the Global Times.

Pan's doubts, which focus on how the money would be spent and how the survival of the trees could be guaranteed, have been echoed and supported by thousands of others online.

Some microbloggers have also posted photos showing that the grass and soil in Huiquan Plaza had been removed to make way for tree planting, which was seen as wasteful behavior.

Fu Xing, a local resident, is very angry at the unexpected landscape, which he sees as a destruction of childhood memories and a waste of money. In Qingdao, Huiquan Plaza was the city's largest open area of lawn, where people liked to have picnics and fly kites, but the trees will change the whole scene, adds Fu.

A large number of other local residents also worry that the trees to be planted along the coastal avenue may destroy their precious memories of the city.

Moreover, experts say that treeless ecosystems are an integral part of the landscape, and that inappropriate tree planting can have unintended consequences not only for human beings but also for fauna.

Timely response

With Qingdao's tree-planting project sparking such a stormy debate, the local government responded to accusations and recognized the shoddiness of its preliminary work on April 18.

The Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry first refuted the accusation of wasteful spending by noting that the budget for the project is in fact 500 million yuan (US$79 million) from the city government, while the governments of the seven urban districts will also invest 1.1 billion yuan (US$174 million) in the afforestation.

The bureau then apologized for its lack of communication with residents and slow replies to their questions. It also admitted that the project was flawed by unreasonable planning in some regions and suffered from a lack of transparency, but promised to improve the working style and accept more public oversight in the future.

Some high-ranking officials have also weighed in on the debate. On the hotly contested issue of turf, Yang Yong, director of the Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry, said "removing the turf" is a misunderstanding, since most of the turf in Huiquan Plaza was planted around 1997, and that the bureau will not replace it with trees but other species of grass in renewed soil.

Removing the grass and soil is inevitable, and the staff is now preparing seeds for the sowing, added Yang, who revealed that the seeds will start to sprout before International Labor Day in May.

According to the specially-designed low carbon development plan, Qingdao will strengthen its effort to increase the city's vegetation coverage in the next few years, during which it will decorate 152 roads stretching 69.1 kilometers, renew 667 hectares of greenbelt, and plant more than 11 million trees and shrubs. The greening project should be finished by the end of 2014, according to the city's government Web site.