"Green bank" helps China reduce carbon emission

GUIYANG, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- As the international community pins high hopes on the coming UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, for greenhouse gas emission reduction, farmers in a southwestern China county have already made tangible progress in this regard.

"When I was young, we used to chop down finger-thick trees to make fire for cooking," said Li Xue, a villager from Leishan County in Guizhou Province. "Now we don't even touch big trees."

Leishan was located on the upstream of two major water systems, the Yangtze River and the Pearl River. It was once one of the country's most ecologically fragile regions.

Thanks to the afforestation and forest protection measures jointly carried out by the local government and farmers in recent years, 70 percent of the county' land area is now covered with forest, up 11 percentage points from ten years ago.

"We often see wild boars in the forest nowadays. It was a rare thing in the past," said Li.

According to Li Tianyou, deputy director general of the Leishan County's Forestry Bureau, the local government started to contract collective forestland to farmers chronically in 2007. As of now more than 190,000 farmers have been issued forest warrants, covering 84,500 hectares of forest. "This is just like a 'green bank' we have built."

"Through reasonable logging, cultivation in forest and eco-tourism, the trees have been bringing farmers large fortune," said Li, adding that the government also gave compensation fees for local people to manage their forest.

A fruit tree called Litsea cubeba is Leishan people's favorite. It grows fast in barren soil on top of high hills. Its berry is edible and can be extracted to make oil for food flavoring.

Different from the traditional administrative pressure to "safeguard" a certain proportion of forest, China's current forest protection focuses on "smart" measures to let farmers take initiative in the protection work by giving them subsidies and encouraging them to make it a business.