Desertification

One of the joys of the French Concession is that the roads are lined with large trees which bow across the road to create a green canopy in the summer. I was, therefore, mildly alarmed to read that Shanghai's council is to spend 3m Yuan on cutting down trees in Shanghai. This seemed particularly surprising given China's much publicised campaign to plant trees in order to stop the shrinking desert sands from invading the cities. This sounds like a contradiction but if I understand it correctly, the deforrestation causes the sand to blow away so the deserts are shrinking and the sand is invading the cities.

Visions of trees crashing down all over the French Concession as local government policy struck home did not seem too far fetched given that some London councils are allegedly going to cut down all the lime trees in their boroughs to prevent personal injury claims from people who slip on the residue. Further reading revealed, however, that only trees which were planted less than four metres from housing or those causing severe insect problems would be targetted. Apparently, in many houses and apartment blocks, people look out on a Jack and the Beanstalk like view where the foliage obscures everything else so they get no natural light through the windows. Whether this is due to expanding buildings or poor landscape gardening, I do not know.

On the subject of desertification, the key note speaker at a recent conference on desertification (is this a technical term?) in Beijing claimed that only 30% of the sand storms in China actually originated from China and the rest were "foreign invaders". He went on to say that despite being blamed for many of Asia's sandstorms, China only produces a third of the world's sandstorms - the other major culprits are Asia's near neighbours, Africa, the US and Australia. OK.