Tibet: a Seed for Transformation

Still in 1949, Tibet's ancient forests occupied 221,800 square kilometers. By 1985 their extent was 134,000 km², almost half. Most of the forests are found on the steep, inaccessible slopes that rise along the river-crossed valleys of the southeastern Tibetan region, in an area of moderate altitude. These are generally mountainous and tropical and subtropical coniferous forests, consisting mainly of fir, pine, larch, cypress, birch and oak trees. The trees grow up to 3800 meters in the wetter southern region, but reach 4300 meters in the drier northern regions.

Tibet's forests are centuries old, with trees about two hundred years old. The average tree density is 272 meters per hectare, but in the oldest forested areas of U-Tsang the highest levels of conifer density in the world are reached, 2300 meters/cubic meters per hectare.

As new roads make it possible to reach previously inaccessible areas of Tibet, the rates of deforestation gradually increase. It should be noted here that all roads are built at the initiative of the People's Liberation Army or by the Chinese Ministry of Forestry's engineering teams, and the related costs are characterized as spending on the “development” of Tibet. Through the opening of new roads, virgin forests are reached which are then simply bulldozed by the hasty method of logging, generating vast mountainous areas completely bare of vegetation. Timber thus obtained up to 1985 amounted to 2442 million cubic meters, or 40 percent of the existing forest stock in 1949 – a value of $54 billion. The forestry industry is one of the main sources of employment in Tibet: in the fertile geographical area of Kongpo alone, an integral part of the territory of the Tibet Autonomous Region, more than 20,000 Chinese soldiers and Tibetan prisoners are employed in logging and transporting timber.

In 1949, Ngapa district in Amdo still had 2.2 million hectares of forests. Its timber reserves amounted to 340 million cubic meters. By the 1980s such an estate was now at 1.17 million hectares, equivalent to an estimated timber reserve of just 180 million cubic meters. Following entirely similar logic, in the 30 years prior to 1985, China extracted 6.44 million cubic meters of timber from the Kahlo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Arranged in lined logs three meters long, with a diameter of thirty centimeters, such a volume of lumber would make it possible to go twice around the world.

The degradation of the environment on the Tibetan Plateau is steadily increasing, generating a growing process of desertification of a critically important territory, unique in the world in terms of its high altitude extent. The resulting climatic effects are such that they are affecting atmospheric circulation and the direction of winds and currents over all of Asia and, according to scientists, can lead to destabilizing outcomes on weather conditions over the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Forest regeneration and reforestation have been very limited due to the very steep terrain characteristics and particularly wet weather conditions with large diurnal temperature range and high surface-level soil temperatures. Under such natural conditions, the destructive effects of deforestation are irreversible.