Upscaling Sustainable Land Management to Improve Rural Livelihoods in the PRC

A project restores degraded lands, improves climate resilience of landscape ecosystems, and promotes green development in the western regions.

Overview

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced massive land degradation and soil erosion problems due to unsustainable farming practices, overgrazing, and loss of forests, among others. These weakened the environment and ecosystems in the western region of the country, contributing to low agricultural productivity and poverty.

In response, a technical assistance grant funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) expanded the scope of sustainable land management investments in selected provinces and autonomous regions to reduce regional economic disparities and ensure sustainable natural resources management.

Project information

48116-001: Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Land Management in the Western Regions

Project snapshot

• • • Approval date: 9 January 2015
    • Closing date: 31 January 2019
    • Total project cost: grant from Global Environment Facility ($4.61 million); counterpart funding, Government of the PRC ($3.04 million).
    • Executing agency: State Forestry Administration (reorganized as State Forestry and Grassland Administration in April 2018); Ministry of Finance (acted as the project coordinating office); Six provincial governments (Gansu, Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, and Sichuan).
    • Financing: Global Environment Facility, Government of the PRC.

Challenges

Land degradation leads to poverty. Severe soil erosion degrades grasslands and diminishes natural forests resulting in low agricultural productivity, damaged infrastructure, and loss of watershed protection. Almost 90% of rural people living in poverty in the PRC are in areas suffering from soil erosion. Social and economic consequences include high unemployment, low household income, and accelerated migration to more prosperous areas.

Compared with eastern and southern provinces, the situation is severe in the western region, which supports a population of about 400 million or 75% of the PRC’s rural poor.

Context

Sustainable land management and climate change resilience have been a national priority over the last 20 years. The government has been implementing various domestic programs to scale up land degradation control measures and investments in the western region. The government also partnered with the GEF to promote and introduce integrated ecosystem and sustainable land management since 2002 through the PRC-GEF Partnership on Land Degradation, for which ADB supported the development of the country framework. In 2012, the ADB helped develop a new 10-year sustainable land management strategy for the partnership to replicate and upscale earlier achievements of the framework, with a strong emphasis on investments by local governments and communities.

Solutions

A technical assistance grant was co-financed by the GEF to strengthen the capacity of the PRC government in implementing sustainable and climate-resilient land management approaches, such as integrated cropping systems, public-private partnerships, eco-compensation mechanisms, and access to e-commerce marketing. The project supported 16 pilot sites to demonstrate these approaches. These pilots were upscaled or replicated further through larger government investment programs and projects. It helped improve the resilience of landscapes and ecosystems to climate change and promote sustainable land management in six provinces in the western region—Gansu, Guizhou, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Shaanxi, and Sichuan.

The project also demonstrated practices that improved local farming methods such as water-saving irrigation, inter-cropping, and integrated pesticide management of forests.