Landscape Restoration Pilots by TRI China in the 2023-2028 National Forest Plan
In Early 2023, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) released the "National Sustainable Forest Management Pilot Implementation Plan (2023-2025)" (NSFMPIP), planning to lead and drive innovation in the management mechanism and improvement of forest quality in the country, including through generating outcomes in pilot demonstrations. The seven pilot Sate Forest Farms (SFF) of the TRI-China project are included in the NSFMPIP.
Forests are the main body and essential resources of terrestrial ecosystems. After the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, "sustainable forest management" became a common understanding of the international community to deal with forest issues. China highly values forestry development, which shows through forest area growth and stock growth in the past 30 years. However, the unit stock volume, biomass, and carbon sequestration capacity are far behind the world's average level. Therefore, improving forest quality through sustainable forest management became the focus of forestry development.
Recently, the NFGA officially released the NSFMPIP (2023-2025), planning to lead and drive innovation in the management mechanism and improvement of forest quality in the country, including through generating outcomes in pilot demonstrations. NSFMPIP states that in 2023, the extent of pilot projects will be roughly 167,000 ha, with about 1.1 billion yuan invested in financial investigation. After comprehensive screening and expert demonstration, 310 pilot units were identified, including 221 SFFs (4,297 SFFs in China), and 7 of them are from the TRI-China project.
"In the past four years, we supported the pilot SFFs to develop and implement the FLR-based Innovative Forest Management and Restoration Plan (the IFMR Plan). I am honored that they were selected in NSFMPIP, which recognizes our approach.” Ms Liu Jing, the project manager, said, “What is the difference between the IFMP and the traditional forest management plan? The traditional plan is based on a local forest stand (a forestry scale unit) while the IFMR plan takes on a landscape approach. Also, the traditional plan focuses on timber production while the IFMP aims to enhance forest ecological services by using many advanced technologies.”