Clear skies are set to return to Beijing on Thursday when a forecasted cold front will blow away Wednesday's massive sandstorm, but not before drawing international headlines and worrying local parents.
READ: Beijing Experiences First Big Sandstorm of 2018; High Pollution Levels Leave Beijingers Dismayed
With PM10 levels reaching nearly 2,000 and AQI levels measured beyond scale at 999 (or 500, if you're China Daily), the darkened skies were a cause for concern for city residents. But as it were, the same thing happened last May when a previous sandstorm pushed AQI levels above 900. Wednesday's sandstorm is the second to attack Beijing this year, while previous sandstorms of note came in 2010 and 2008.
As with the case with flying catkins, sandstorms are a seasonal occurrence that arrive with the onset of spring. But as familiar as we are with this yearly nuisance, Chinese authorities have tasked themselves to eradicate sandstorms ... only to bring up more problems by doing so.
This year, China announced a new program that will plant enough new trees to cover an area larger than the country of Ireland. With more than USD 65 billion already invested in reforestation programs over the past five years, the State Forestry Administration plans to increase China's forest area by two percentage points to 23 percent by 2020, and then up to 26 percent by 2035.
In response to the country's growing desertification, China created the "Great Green Wall," a human-made ecological barrier designed to stop the advancing desert and battle climate change. Eventually stretching from Xinjiang all the way to Heilongjiang some 4,500 kilometers away, the reforestation is almost as big as the problem it is trying to solve.
Since 1978, work on the Great Green Wall has required laborers to not just devote their entire lives to it, but that of their children. Popular conscripts for the Great Green Wall include a Shanghai couple who planted some two million trees over 12 years after selling their home, as well as a motivational speaker who inspires audiences with stories of his reforestation worker father.
Efforts are often as startling as they are readily visible. Take, for example, the construction of a 130-kilometer-long "ecological zone" out in the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang, and its nearby viewing platform built in celebration to allow unfettered views of the green-ified valleys that stretch out to the horizon (pictured below).
But, even with the promised success of reforestation close at hand for the benefit of all, according to a number of scientists from inside and outside China, putting an end to spring sandstorms may be more trouble than it's worth.
For one, Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Botany Professor Jiang Gaoming said the Great Green Wall has, in some places, accelerated ecological degeneration by putting pressure on precious water resources.
Two, University of Alabama geographer David Shankman has warned that the new trees won't be sustainable because they are not indigenous to the local ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Kunming Institute of Botany Professor Xu Jianchu says that although these new forests may offer local economic benefits by which forest pulp and wood may be harvested, growing "plantations" of homogenous tree species may harm the local biodiversity, the same warning raised by University of Washington Professor Stevan Harrell in regards to the disappearing plant species he witnessed during reforestation efforts in Jiuzhaigou.
Finally, scientists from the University of Oklahoma and Fudan University in Shanghai found that reforestation actually lowers a forest's potential to reduce climate change.
Wednesday's sandstorm in Beijing is a major nuisance and public health threat, but it may be wiser to keep a broader perspective instead of trying to plant forests in places where they've never been.
To third-generation tree planter Zheng Deng, reforestation is nothing short of performing a practical miracle. "To plant trees is to plant hope," she says, to which we'd respond: We all want to see more forests but we also have to see the forest for the trees.
More stories from this author here.
E-Mail: charlesliu1 (at) qq (dot) com
Twitter: @Sinopath
Images: Weibo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), BJ News, the Plaid Zebra, The Star