Liming, China, January 2025
Context of the project area: Biodiversity hotspot at risk
Stretching from southeastern Tibet to northern Yunnan, the Mountains of Southwest China are one of the world’s 36 Biodiversity Hotspots listed by the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund (CEPF). This important area is home to around 50% of China’s birds and mammals and 40% of the country’s plants, according to the CEPF. It is also a significant area of cultural and economic diversity, including agriculture.
The province of Yunnan, which makes up a significant part of this Biodiversity Hotspot, lost 1.03 million hectares of tree cover from 2001 to 2023, according to Global Forest Watch (GFW), the online platform providing data and tools for monitoring forests. The consequences include soil erosion, which will eventually reduce yields in the long term, and poor adaptation to the succession of droughts and floods, which are likely to increase in frequency and intensity as climate change spreads.
The droughts of 2022 and 2023 were followed by further extreme weather events. In April 2024, parts of central Yunnan saw a 42% reduction in rainfall compared with normal, according to the Ministry of Water Resources. And as though to illustrate the extreme nature of climate change in this region, less than three months later, most of the rivers in the south-east of the province were on flood alert.
Project description
The project started in 2021 with support from A Tree for You donors. It aims to plant 5,073 trees on a long-term basis to help the Lisu and Naxi ethnic minorities in the village of Liming, China. In addition to the trees, the project involves planting medicinal plants and experimenting with plant cover on test plots to tackle the high levels of erosion in the region.
As a result, 4 medicinal plant species and 19 tree species have been planted, including 8 economic fruit species and 11 environmental tree species.
These plantations will help tackle severe soil erosion in the region, contribute towards regeneratingwater resources, enrich the surrounding biodiversity, and generate additional income for local people through sales of medicinal plants and harvested fruit.
This project follows on from a first plantation in 2020, also supported by A Tree for You, in Liming.
Status of the Liming project supported by A Tree for You
In 2022, 5,190 trees were planted at the homes of 11 farmers who had been coached and trained thanks to support from A Tree for You donors.
During the follow-up visits at the beginning of 2023, the tree survival rate measured to gauge how many trees per species had survived the first year of planting. The first few years are crucial for good tree development. Monitoring is therefore essential to ensure long-term survival of the plantations.
In 2023, 4,644 trees were sustainable 18 months after planting. The main cause of this mortality rate is drought, which has been particularly intense in the project region over the last three years. A second, less representative cause was linked to the transport of certain species of seedlings. Indeed, the cherry and yew trees from Yunnan were transported over long distances between the nurseries and the agricultural plots where they were planted. In the light of this observation, for the following planting phases, special attention was paid to choosing nurseries depending on the characteristics of the species selected.
To bridge the gap between the current number of living trees and the initial target of 5,073 permanent trees by the project end, it was decided, in agreement with the A Tree for You team, to replant 200 trees in 2023 and 424 in 2024. For these replanting operations, five species have been selected – according to the requests of the farmers involved in the project and the availability of nurseries.
These trees will be monitored until the end of the project, in December 2025. This monitoring will also be used to establish the final number of permanent trees from the 5,814 planted since 2022.
Thanks to support from A Tree for You donors, two complementary projects have been completed.
Firstly, the medicinal plants planted at the start of the project, between 2021 and 2022 – Konjac, Rhizoma Paridis Yunnanensis, Gentiana Macrophylla and Aucklandia Costus – are still being cared for and used by the project’s beneficiaries. This aspect of the project is extremely interesting because the Lisu and Naxi communities have ancestral know-how in collecting and processing medicinal plants. The aim is to preserve this knowledge and pass it on to future generations.
Since 2021, the project has been experimenting with improving soil health in together with two of the project’s farmers on two, 0.17- and 0.28-hectare plots. The initiative involves sowing plant cover to complement the trees planted with these farmers. These plant cover crops, consisting of peas and alfalfa, are grown half the year, followed by beans and maize the other half. The aim is to balance the pH, improve nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels, and increase the amount of organic matter in the soils of these two agricultural plots.
After four planting phases of plant cover, soil samples will be analysed in a lab at the end of 2025. The results will be compared with those from the initial analysis carried out in December 2021.
Catch up soon for more news on the Liming project!
