.China has met its afforestation targets in the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), with the country's forest coverage rate reaching 23.04% and forest stock surpassing 17.5 billion cubic meters, said Wang Hong, vice minister of natural resources and administrator of the State Oceanic Administration. 

The State Council Information Office holds a press conference on ecological conservation and restoration in Beijing on Dec. 17, 2020. [Photo by Jiao Fei/China SCIO]

During the five-year period, China has planted about 35.27 million hectares of trees and completed 42.53 million hectares of forest tending, said Liu Dongsheng, vice administrator of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office on Thursday in Beijing. 

Liu also said that promoting afforestation was an important measure to boost employment and income of the poor and win the battle against poverty.

Since 2018, over two-thirds of the afforestation tasks were allocated to impoverished regions in China, in a bid to raise the income of local poor people and eradicate poverty. Over the past five years, a total of 1.1 million people living in the country's impoverished areas have been employed by the government as forest rangers. The central government has allocated 20.5 billion yuan in the program and helped more than 3 million people to shake off poverty through related ecological poverty-relief efforts.

In addition, China has ramped up efforts to formulate and revise the laws regarding ecological conservation, such as the Forest Law of the People's Republic of China and the Land Administration Law of the People's Republic of China, in a bid to better protect forest resources and facilitate green development.