China’s anti-pollution war uses 60,000+ soldiers, artillery, and planes for tree planting and rain making

China has a war against its big air pollution problem.

Air pollution in China causes about 1 million deaths each year. These are deaths and health impacts comparable to what China faced in WW2.

China is using a massive amount of brute force and a lot of actual military equipment and power to fight back.

* assigning 60,000+ soldiers to plant forests that have the are of Ireland
* Use of airplanes to carpet bomb the desert with tree saplings
* Massive amounts of artillery to fire rain seeding material into clouds. 55 billion tons per year of rain created and this will be expanded to 280 billion tons of rain
* building 150 story air purifying towers that suck air through massive greenhouses at the base
* creating 200 high-rise buildings per city holding vertical forests

Vertical Urban Forests

By 2020 China could have its first forest city in China, with 100-200 vertical forests in tall buildings.

Stefano Boeri described his “vertical forest” concept as the architectural equivalent of a skin graft, a targeted intervention designed to bring new life to a small corner of China’s polluted urban sprawl. His Milan-based practice claimed the buildings would suck 25 tons of carbon dioxide from Nanjing’s air each year and produce about 60 kg of oxygen every day.

The first will be two neighboring towers coated with 23 species of tree and more than 2,500 cascading shrubs. The structures will reportedly house offices, a 247-room luxury hotel, a museum and even a green architecture school, and are currently under construction, set for completion next year.

Air purifying Burj Kahlifa scale skyscraper towers

China has created an experimental air purifying tower that is over 100 meters (328 feet) tall in northern China. It reduces 2.5 micron air pollution by about 15% over a 10 square kilometer area.

The system works through greenhouses covering about half the size of a soccer field around the base of the tower.
Polluted air is sucked into the glasshouses and heated up by solar energy. The hot air then rises through the tower and passes through multiple layers of cleaning filters.

The Xi’an smog tower project was launched in 2015 as a trial version of a much larger system the research team hopes will be implemented in other Chinese cities in the near future. It barely requires any power input throughout daylight hours. The idea has worked very well in the test run. The full-sized tower would measure 500 meters (1,640 feet) tall and 200 meters (656 feet) in diameter, with greenhouses covering nearly 30 square kilometers (11.6 square miles). This system is hoped to be powerful enough to purify the majority of the air within a small city.

60,000+ soldiers planting and Ireland of trees

China will plant new forests covering an area of 84,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Ireland, in 2018.

China aims to expand its forest cover to more than 23 percent by 2020 to combat climate change and soil erosion. The forest coverage was 21.7 percent at the end of 2016. An increase of 1.4 percentage points means the forest volume rising by more than 1.3 billion cubic meters, supporting China’s climate change obligation to add around 4.5 billion cubic meters of forest by 2030.

China has spent more than 300 billion yuan ($47.3 billion) in 20 years in protecting natural forests, according to sources with State Forestry Administration.

As a key measure initiated by the State Council after severe floods hit the valleys of the Yangtze River and Songhua River in 1998, natural forest protection project was implemented in 16 provinces, including Heilongjiang, Jilin, Hebei, Yunnan, Hunan and Liaoning.

China has protected 129.6 million hectares of natural forest has been well protected, according to an official in charge of natural forest protection.

Artillery for rain seeding

In 2017, China’s top economic planning agency has approved a 1.15 billion yuan (HK$1.3 billion) rainmaking project for the country’s dry northwestern provinces in one of the biggest government programmes to modify weather.

According to the National Development and Reform Commission, a feasibility study by the China Meteorological Administration found that rainfall and snow could be increased in an area of 960,000 sq km, 10 percent of the country’s territory, if the proposed investments were made.

The NDRC approved the budget to buy four new planes, upgrade eight existing aircraft, develop 897 rocket launch devices and connect 1,856 devices to digital control systems. The whole project will take three years.

The usual practice of making rain is to use aircraft or rockets to “seed” clouds with catalysts such as dry ice to induce or increase rainfall to relieve drought.

He Shengcun, an official at the Qinghai provincial government’s “weather influencing” office, told the China News Service that artificial rainfall enhancement had increased precipitation by 55 billion cubic meters from 2006 to 2016, equivalent to about 150 percent of water contained in the Three Gorges reservoir.

Beijing implemented a “development plan” for weather modification until 2020.

Great Green Wall of forests created by carpet bombing

China’s solution to the spread of the desert from Mongolia is to build a “Green Great Wall.” The Communist Party has promoted tree planting as a righteous cause, even a civic duty, for decades, but the Green Great Wall is staggeringly ambitious: By 2050, the government intends to plant 88 million acres of forests in a belt nearly 3,000 miles long and up to 900 miles wide in places.

China has at times tried to use planes to drop sapling trees with cone-shaped penetration dips to try to more rapidly plant a lot of trees.

The tree planting program has been criticized for not using trees that could survive for the long term.