Chinese environmental authorities have vowed to finish planting 73 million hectares of forest by 2020 as part of a major ecological restoration project.
Zhang Jianlong, head of the State Forestry Administration, said on Monday that the project to increase China's total green space also includes completing the restoration of 140,000 hectares of wetland and counter-desertification measures across 10 million hectares, news site chinanews.com reported.
According to the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), the great greening initiative will help raise China's forest coverage level to 23.04 percent by 2020, while forest volume is expected to increase to over 16.5 billion cubic meters. This means the total area of planted forest will be twice that seen during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15).
Zhang said that in order to continue the major ecological restoration project, China should focus on several aspects, including planting grain for green space and preserving endangered flora and fauna.
China is home to 69.3 million hectares of planted forest - the most in the world - following more than six decades of afforestation work, Zhang was quoted by the Xinhua News Agency as saying on Sunday.
Total forest acreage has grown to 208 million hectares from 82 million hectares in the early 1950s, covering 21.66 percent of the country's total land area, compared with just 8.6 percent around 60 years ago, Zhang said at a national conference on accelerating afforestation over the weekend in Hohhot, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Zhang said the administration aims to plant more trees in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River economic belt and regions that host Belt and Road initiative projects, Xinhua reported.
