Study Disputes Success of China’s $100 Billion Forest Effort Meine said that These findings indeed point to major gaps between the way the concept of forest is defined in the various international conventions, versus how the general public understands it, Lu Zhi, a conservation biologist at Peking University in Beijing, who was not involved in the study, said its findings were consistent with recent research suggesting that China’s forest resources have not significantly increased despite the government’s extensive tree-planting campaign or its efforts to halt commercial logging in forests. The authors of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, wrote that their results highlighted a need for more refined forest monitoring and a better way of measuring performance of Chinese forests based on "climatic suitability." Please verify you’re not a robot by clicking the box. The major reason for ambiguity in forest estimates worldwide is that there are over 800 official definitions for the term "forest," with criteria ranging from over 10 percent to over 30 percent tree cover, the journal Nature Climate Change reported in 2015. Mr. Xu said the newly released study underscored how the Chinese government should pay closer attention to the areas that it targets for new forests, and avoid its practice of planting trees in semi-arid regions and deserts. But the newly released study, based partly on an analysis of high-resolution photographs, found that China had gained only about 12,741 square miles of forest over the same period, an area roughly the size of Maryland.
