The sky above Beijing is best known for characteristics other than its bird life. Nevertheless, the city’s birds appear to have multiplied over the past ten years thanks to new habitats offered by reforestation to combat...
BBC reports on the massive sandstorm that blanketed Beijing today: By Saturday, the storm had spread over an area of 810,000 sq km (313,000 sq miles) with a population of 250 million, state news agency Xinhua reported. It was...
The New York Times Lens blog has posted a slideshow of desertification in China: [Sean] Gallagher traveled to the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northern China to document the rapid advance of its deserts. The sandstorm...
The Canadian magazine The Walrus has a lengthy article looking at the desertification of China: To date, Chinese farmers and herders have transformed about 400,000 square kilometres of cropland and verdant prairie into new...
A compelling multimedia project from Circle of Blue reports on the freshwater crisis in Inner Mongolia, where desertification threatens not only its startlingly beautiful steppes, but its nomadic residents’ way of life....
From The World Changing blog: Western China is turning into a massive dust bowl. Desertification now affects fully one-third of the world’s population — and what’s happening in Western China represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert anywhere in the world, consuming over one million acres of land each year. The dust isn’t […]
Desertification in China is a pressing environmental challenge. Here is some alarming data, from AFP: “China has raised the environmental alarm bell after a survey found over a quarter of its land has become desert, with much of the damage caused by human activity. Desertification has affected 28 per cent of China’s land mass, with […]
From The Guardian: The Great Wall of China , built to withstand raiding hordes from the steppes, is now in peril from a far more insidious threat: sandstorms generated by desertification in the country’s north-west. The Great Wall of China, built to withstand raiding hordes from the steppes, is now in peril from a far […]
AP warns that the western sections of China’s Great Wall encountered the damage and “may disappear entirely in 20 years.” From MSNBC: …”Frequent storms not only eroded the mud, but also cracked the wall and caused it to collapse or break down,” Xinhua quoted archaeologist Zhou Shengrui as saying. One of the most threatened sections […]
Danwei carried an interview video with Evan Osnos who is the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Danwei says that “Evan Osnos recently won the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for distinguished journalism for a series of articles about China’s Great Grab, subtitled ‘how China’s exploding appetite […]
Would you believe that these two pictures were taken from exactly the same spot, only eleven minutes apart? From the The Opposite End of China blog: How much sand could a sandstorm storm if a sandstorm could storm sand? Well, I received quite a vivid and colorful answer yesterday morning as I was preparing to […]
Dust Storms from China? The filmer says so. From YouTube: This incredible site, filmed during a level 4 dust storm from China More below:
From ChinaDialogue.org: Beijing is choking as dust sweeps in from China’s arid, ecologically-degraded west. Gaoming Jiang investigates, and finds that efforts to restore the western grasslands are failing. In Beijing, the weather forecast says that more sandstorms are on the way. The capital was hit by four sandstorms in March, and even Shanghai was recently […]
From Lian Yue’s Eighth Continent: 1. Pan Yue (holding the microphone), vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), is speaking during a tree planting event: 2. Suddenly, a sandstorm attacks Pan and SEPA minister (front left): 3. As the sandstorm gets stronger, Pan Yue can’t help covering his nose and the minister even […]
From Xinhua via China.org: The Chinese capital was blanketed by floating dust from Friday night on. This year’s first sandstorm should be cleared up in the city till Saturday night, says the China Meteorological Administration (CMA). The floating dust was brought in by a cyclone developed in Mongolia, which moved eastward through Inner Mongolia Autonomous […]
From China Daily: Global warming has caused China to experience its second warmest winter in 50 years. It has also caused sandstorms, heavy fog and severe drought. The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) said yesterday the winter season from December 2006 to February 2007 recorded a national average temperature of -2.4 C, following the warmest winter […]
A dust storm in Beijing this Spring, from justso.blog
From China Watch (link): As of late April, northern China had encountered eight severe sandstorms this year alone, worsening the air quality in half the region’s cities, according to China’s National Environmental Monitoring Center. In one recent storm in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, two people died and widespread damage was reported. New storms have been […]
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