"There is wind every year, from spring to winter." This is people's impression of this place before the 1990s. At that time, the southern desert beach here was a pebble Gobi, sandy land, barren and desolate. Because it is located in the wind corridor on Hebei Bashang and south of the wind source in Inner Mongolia, there are more than 40 windy days throughout the year.
"In the past, it was full of pebbles and coarse sand, with sparkling flowers, and the sandstorm was particularly big, and the people were miserable." Ren Yang, the 75-year-old former owner of Yanqing County Greening Office, recalled the scene of managing the southern desert beach that year and was deeply touched. "The trees we planted in those years have now turned into forests, green dyed Guichuan, desert beaches turned into oases, and sandstorms disappeared."
17 is the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Landscaping and Greening recently announced that in order to prevent land desertification, Beijing has been stepping up the implementation of ecological projects for many years. At present, five sandstorm hazard areas in the city have been thoroughly controlled, and all the desertified land is covered with green shade.
At the beginning of the founding of New China, the forest coverage in Beijing was only 1.3%. Yanqing Kangzhuang, Changping Nankou, Chaobai River, Yongding River and Dashahe River basins are the five major sandstorm hazard areas, with a total area of 2.475 million mu and frequent natural disasters. "As long as the wind blows, crops are destroyed everywhere" and "two crops during the day and two crops at night" are the true portrayal of Beijing's ecology at that time.
In order to restore the ecology, since the 1980s, Beijing has successively implemented the "Three North" shelter forest, farmland forest network and afforestation projects in key sandstorm hazard areas. Since 2000, ecological projects such as returning farmland to forests, controlling sandstorms in Beijing and Tianjin, and planting millions of acres of plains have been implemented, and large-scale sand control and tree planting have significantly improved the urban and rural environment.
Yang, who has been fighting in the front line of afforestation for 40 years, said that since the 1990s, Beijing has intensified its efforts to control regional sandstorms. After six years' efforts, the people of Yanqing planted 32 kinds of more than 3 million seedlings here, which made the pebble wasteland all covered with green clothes and built a green ecological barrier in the north of Beijing.
It is extremely difficult to plant trees on the rocky beach. There is no soil, no water, and a shovel is full of stones. In some places, there are dozens of centimeters thick magma layers that are harder than concrete. To this end, Yang led the greening team to divert water from the reservoir 50 kilometers away to the wasteland, and transported five or six million cubic meters of "exotic soil" from nearby to plant trees.
"The most difficult thing is to dig a hole. This machine can't shovel stones. It needs people to dig with shovels. If you can't dig, you need a drill. Large plastic bags should be laid in every tree pit to prevent water and soil from leaking out of cracks in the stones. " Wang Huakun, deputy director of Yanqing District Greening Office, recalled. When she first joined the work, she ran to the pebble beach in the hot wind and sand every day, taking people from dot, digging holes, returning soil, seedling inspection, planting to watering, and strictly planting trees. In the end, the survival rate of seedlings reached over 95%.
"Today's Yanqing is tree-lined and there are' forest corridors' everywhere. This kind of beauty was unimaginable to Yanqing people decades ago. " Liu Ruicheng, deputy head of Yanqing District, said that the forest coverage rate in Yanqing was less than 7% in the early days of the founding of New China, and now it has reached 59.28%, laying a green foundation for the upcoming Beijing World Expo in Yanqing.
The Beijing-Tianjin Sandstorm Source Control Project, which started in 2000, is an important project to combat sandstorms in northern China. After years of implementation, Beijing has completed afforestation of 8.3 million mu in Mentougou, Changping, Yanqing and other districts, building the first line of defense against sandstorms in northwest Beijing. By the end of last year, the forest coverage rate in mountainous areas of the project area reached 53.9%, an increase of 14. 1% compared with 2000. The seven districts where the project is located have been successively rated as national ecological demonstration zones.
In 20 12, the largest afforestation project of one million mu in the plains in Beijing's history, large-scale greening was carried out in the plains, especially 253,000 mu in five sandstorm-damaged areas. Through this project, more than 20,000 mu of coal bunker in the west of Changping, which has been unmanned for more than 20 years, has formed a continuous forest landscape.
Overlooking the Baiyanggou West Bridge in Changping, various trees such as Sabina vulgaris, Fraxinus chinensis, Sophora japonica and Elm are growing well. Sun Huabin, chief of the Afforestation and Forest Management Section of Changping District Landscaping Bureau, said that there used to be nearly 2,000 mu of coal bunkers and coal yards here. Due to the long-term sand mining and indiscriminate excavation, sand pits are formed, some of which are as deep as four or five meters, and the soil and sand are barren.
More than 90,000 kinds of trees and shrubs and more than 65,438+00 kinds have been planted here to improve the soil and tidy up the terrain. The trees have grown up, putting an end to illegal mining, sand excavation and illegal construction, and the ecological environment has been greatly improved.
"In the past, we were either stones or sand, and we couldn't ride a bike. Now our eyes are all green, the sandstorm is basically gone, and the change is too great. " Zhang Chunyu, a 55-year-old villager in Tulou Village, Changping, said that through the afforestation project, he and more than 40 other villagers in the village are now forest rangers, each of whom is responsible for maintaining dozens of acres of forest land, and his income is much higher than that of farming on wasteland in the past.
Sandstorms are gradually leaving Beijing. According to the dust data of Beijing Observatory, in the 1950s, the average dust day in Beijing in spring was as long as 26 days. After 20 10, the average number of sandstorm days in Beijing is about 3 days, and the frequency of sandstorm in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei is reduced to 0. 1 day per year. By the end of 20 18, the forest coverage rate in Beijing has reached 43.5%.