In 1995, John D. Liu filmed 1 Loess Plateau project in China where slopes were terraced, vegetation restored and water managed. 25 years later, 35,000 sq km had recovered

In 1995, ecologist John D. Liu arrived on China’s Loess Plateau to document a landscape struggling under centuries of erosion, overcultivation and overgrazing. What he filmed would become one of the most closely documented examples of large-scale ecological restoration, as per a report by The Guardian and Ecoflix Foundation.

Across the plateau, bare hillsides, deep gullies and vast quantities of eroded soil had become part of everyday life. Then an ambitious restoration effort began changing the way land, water and farming were managed.

Slopes were terraced, vegetation returned and communities were given economic reasons to take part. Over the following decades, an area covering roughly 35,000 square kilometres saw major ecological recovery.


The transformation became a powerful example of what can happen when damaged landscapes and the communities living on them are restored together.

How badly had the Loess Plateau been damaged?

By the end of the 20th century, China’s Loess Plateau was considered one of the most severely eroded landscapes on Earth.

The plateau stretches across more than 640,000 square kilometres and supports about 100 million people. For generations, farming communities had cleared vegetation and cultivated the land, gradually weakening its fragile soil.

Overgrazing added to the pressure. Sheep and goats were allowed to graze freely, while tree cutting and cultivation on hillsides further stripped away vegetation.

The result was a landscape where huge quantities of soil were washed away during rainfall. About 1.6 billion tons of sediment were being produced every year, much of it eventually reaching the Yellow River.

The fine, wind-blown sediment known as loess also contributed to dust spreading toward Chinese cities, including Beijing.

When John D. Liu arrived in 1995 to document the restoration effort, he found enormous gullies carrying sediment during rainfall. In some places, vegetation cover had fallen to around 10 per cent.

The hydrology had also been severely disrupted. The supplied material says as much as 95 per cent of rainfall was being lost immediately as runoff instead of soaking into the ground.

The damage was the result of thousands of years of human settlement and land use. The plateau had supported agriculture for generations, but the pressure had become increasingly difficult for the landscape to withstand.

What changed when restoration began?

The restoration effort was not limited to planting trees. It involved changing how entire communities used the land.

The Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project directed approximately $500 million across an active area of about 35,000 square kilometres over roughly a decade. Communities, farmers and local officials were involved in developing ways to reverse the damage.

The Chinese government also launched the Grain to Green pilot project in 1999, backed by World Bank funding. Its focus was to restore agricultural production and incomes while reversing the effects of overgrazing and overcultivation.

Some of the most important changes involved the hillsides.

Slopes steeper than 25 degrees were taken out of cultivation and returned to natural regeneration. Free-ranging goats and sheep was banned, while tree cutting and planting on vulnerable hillsides were restricted.

Farmers received long-term land-use contracts, giving them a direct economic interest in the success of restoration. They could also receive grain and cash subsidies for converting farmland into grassland, economic forest or protected ecological forest.

Other incentives included tax subsidies, benefits to offset farming losses and employment through tree-planting programmes.

Farmers were also encouraged to move toward more sustainable forms of agriculture, including orchards and nut production.

The basic approach was to make restoration part of the local economy rather than treating conservation as something separate from people's livelihoods.

The World Bank spent more than three years designing the project with experts, communities, officials and farmers. Sustainable practices that had been demonstrated in smaller villages were then expanded.

Peter Bridgewater, an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, highlighted the role of China’s political system in enabling change on such a large scale.

“If you want major change, the Chinese system is well adapted to making major change,” Bridgewater says wryly.

The scale of the intervention was enormous, but the changes eventually became visible across the landscape.

What came back to the plateau?

As vegetation returned, the hillsides began holding more soil. Plant productivity improved, while studies showed substantial reductions in erosion.

By 2016, China had converted more than 11,500 square miles of rain-fed cropland to forest or grassland. A study published in Nature Climate Change found a 25 per cent increase in vegetative cover over a decade.

The ecological changes were also noticed by people living and working in the region.

“When the environment improved, all the birds returned. The forest has developed its ecological system naturally,” forestry worker Yan Rufeng told the state-run news channel CGTN.

The restoration was also tied to changes in people's economic lives.

In the village of Hojago, farmer Zhang Fang had spent most of her adult life living below the poverty line on only a few hundred yuan a year. During the project, her circumstances changed enough for her to earn money to build a house with electricity and running water.

Lu FuChin, a former farmer who became a forestry worker, described another side of the transformation to the official state news outlet Xinhua.

“I used to cut trees for firewood, but now I grow them instead,” said the 52-year-old forestry worker. “It used to be that people had to go far for work, but now they can find employment by the Yellow River. As the environment is improving, I believe the villagers’ lives will become more prosperous too.”

Yet the recovery was not simple, and the project had its critics.

Some communities resisted being asked to plant trees on agricultural land. One man interviewed for Liu’s documentary raised a concern that captured the tension between restoration and farming.

“What about the next generation? They can’t eat trees,” he said.

There were also concerns about food production. In the early years, grain yields appeared to fall alongside the project, leading officials to debate whether the programme could affect food security. Later studies found multiple factors were involved, and yields subsequently improved.

The restoration methods themselves also evolved.

Bridgewater noted that early efforts relied heavily on mass tree planting, including trees that were not necessarily native to the area. Planting in monocultural stands created another set of ecological concerns. Over time, more diverse planting began replacing those approaches, helping support greater wildlife.



Water became another important lesson.

As vegetation and agriculture expanded, they consumed increasing amounts of water from the Yellow River system. Bridgewater warned that there could be a point where successful revegetation altered the water balance too much, reducing the water available to rivers and people.

“It’s looking like there is a point at which the revegetation will become too successful in that it actually then swings the water balance of the landscape, reducing the potential for water to go into the rivers and be available for human use,” says Bridgewater.

“So this is another element that was not really thought about at the start, because the aim wasn’t ‘let’s stabilise the system’. But it’s a good lesson as to how all these interconnecting factors need to be thought about very carefully before you launch into these things.”

Climate change adds another layer to the story.

The Loess Plateau sits between arid and semi-humid climates, and a 2021 study cited in the supplied material found that both natural conditions and unsustainable human activity had contributed to the region’s vulnerability.

At the same time, the climate was changing. Between 2000 and 2014, precipitation increased by 20 to 50 millimetres in the southern part of the region.

For Bridgewater, that means restoration cannot simply mean recreating the landscape exactly as it once existed.

“But we can produce something, a system that will produce ecosystem services at a better range and a better quality and more regularly than the systems that we’ve destabilised.”

The Loess Plateau therefore offers a lesson that extends beyond planting trees. Its recovery involved soil, water, farming, wildlife, employment and the people who depended on the land.

Bridgewater said the experience showed why restoration needs to consider multiple connected factors rather than focusing on a single environmental target.

“Given the speed of climate change, and not just climate but hydrology and all the other associated global changes, we need to be thinking about what we want. What we want out of our ecosystems are actually services.

“We need to think actually in multi-dimensions … to develop a whole new way of thinking as to how we manage the landscape. And in a way, the whole Loess plateau project is a good example of that, [even if] that wasn’t the way of thinking at the start.”

What began as an enormous attempt to reverse erosion eventually became a long-running example of ecological recovery. John D. Liu’s documentation helped bring that transformation to a wider audience through his film, The Lessons of the Loess Plateau.

The scale remains central to the story: roughly 35,000 square kilometres brought into a restoration effort, with vegetation returning, erosion declining and communities gaining new economic opportunities.



The Loess Plateau had been shaped by thousands of years of human activity. Its recovery showed that changing human activity could also become part of rebuilding the landscape.

FAQs

1. What happened to the Loess Plateau?
   Restoration reduced erosion, brought back vegetation and improved agricultural livelihoods.
2. How large was the restoration area?
   The project covered about 35,000 square kilometres.