What can be done?

What we can do to improve the Hulunbuir Grassland

Though government has published laws such as “The Grassland Law of PRC” to strengthen the protection and management of resource use of the Hulunbuir grassland, we think that there is much more we can do to slow down the speed of land degradation. 

1) We should reserve sufficient amount of grassland for ecological study. As Hulunbuir grassland is known as “the Kingdom of grass” in China, it contains more than 120 kinds of nutritious vegetation. But, due to the dramatic degradation of grassland, the kinds of vegetation decreased from 130 to 30 and some herbage even disappeared from the land (Squires et al. 91). It is not surprising that the rate of vegetation species loss will accelerate over the years, corresponding with the acceleration of decreasing grassland area. In that, people will lose vegetation species this is only going to impair biology and ecology research.

2) For endangered regions like serious desertification areas, people should be banned from allowing livestock to graze there. For light and medium desertification areas, reconstruction and reduction of cultivated lands should be put into government and people’s agendas. Besides the supervision departments that government has established to work on those tasks, forming a local organization to advocate reducing cropland can be more direct in practicing such an assignment. 

3) To impose the idea of protection of grassland by reducing cropland, people must be well educated so that they can realize how significant this assignment is. As most people in the Hulunbuir grassland are nomads, they don't receive a good education. The traditional thought of making a living, namely through stock breeding, would be mainly based on what their ancestors have taught them. However, as population growth dramatically increases, only surviving on stockbreeding will make the grassland disappear in the future. Therefore, education is very important to not only help local people have a correct understanding of how severe the grassland is, but also to lead them towards a new way of making a living, such as developing regional cooperative livestock industries to efficiently use grassland.

4) We also need to advocate the idea of a “low-carbon life”. It is not only for the protection of grasslands but also for our earth. As climate change is considered one of the causes of Hulunbuir land degradation, we should reduce carbon dioxide release, which directly damages the climate. Also, from our research on the severe coal mining destroying the ecosystem in Hulunbuir grassland, we suggest the reduction of the demand of high carbon products and the use of coal.

Work Cited

Squires, Victor R., Xinshi Lu, Qi Lu, Tao Wang, and Youlin Yang. Rangeland Degradation and Recovery in China’s Pastoral Lands. 1 st ed. London: MGP Books Group, 2009. eBook. < http://books.google.com/books?id=2fu6jVgfh-UC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=hulunbeier%20grassland%20ecosystem&source=bl&ots=k9cAoqE4rA&sig=4jjI6ZmIHwilwixgqZhuLynOId8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-2O1UNS9I4qUiQKzqIHYDw&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=hulunbeier%20grassland%20ecosystem&f=false>