"The Adaptation Advantage" By CWP Fellow Eyck Freymann
On an August day last year, Xi Jinping visited Saihanba National Forest Park to inspect the trees and flowers. Spanning nearly 200,000 acres northwest of Beijing, the old imperial hunting ground turned to desert in the 19th century amidst deforestation and overuse. With no trees left to catch the wind, violent sandstorms rolled in from Inner Mongolia, filling Beijing’s air with choking sediment. But in 1962, Chinese authorities began a multi-decade project to restore the region into a “Great Green Wall” defending the capital. More in this series: The Diplomatic Deadlock It worked. Today, Saihanba is the world’s largest planted forest. During his visit, Xi praised the Communist Party’s four decades of “struggle,” which he said had transformed a wasteland where “yellow sand covered up the sky” into “a source of rivers, a homeland of clouds, a world of flowers, a sea of forests and a paradise for birds.” Saihanba, Xi said approvingly, is a “model example in China’s pursuit of ecological progress.”
https://www.thewirechina.com/2022/07/17/chinas-climate-adaptation-advantage/ - BY EYCK FREYMANN — JULY 17, 2022
Eyck Freymann is an upcoming CWP fellow for 2022-23. Previously he was a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.
In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.
Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others, and he is a reporter and columnist for The Wire China.
Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/22612-22612/
