Despite a decreasing global forest reserve, China's forest inventory expanded by 3.6 billion cubic meters to reach 13.7 billion cubic metres during the past 20 years, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) Vice Minister Yin Hong said at a press conference.
China has strengthened its fiscal support for increasing forest area, launched a number of national ecological projects and implemented a nationwide compulsory tree-planting program to expand forests since the inking of the first global environmental treaty at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, Yin said.
The country currently has 61.68 million hectares of man-made forest, the most in the world, and 7.81 billion tonnes of forest-carbon stock.
Its desertification area is dropping by 1,717 square kilometres annually, compared to an annual expansion of 3,436 square kilometres at the end of the 1990s, Xinhua news agency quoted Yin as saying.
China aims to expand its total forest area by 40 million hectares, and its total forest inventory by 1.3 billion cubic metres from 2005 to 2020, the report said.
It also plans to convert 1.07 million hectares of farmland into forest during its 12th five-year plan period (2011-2015), Yin said.
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The "grain-for-green program" will be carried out in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River, the stony deserts in southwest China and the northwestern Loess Plateau, she said.
To date, China has invested USD 51.59 billion in converting cropland to forests, she noted.
In regards to global forest protection, Yin said all parties concerned should cherish the hard-won outcome of consultations on forest protection following the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference, and they should work together to establish a global forest governance system that adapts to the times.