Perceiving Ecological Changes | The Clean Land Protection Battle Delivers Impressive Results

Soil quality is related to the people's "rice bags" and "vegetable baskets." General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out the importance of strengthening soil pollution control and restoration, effectively preventing risks, and ensuring that people can eat and live with peace of mind. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, our country has continuously strengthened soil pollution prevention and control, steadily advancing the clean land protection battle. A soil environmental safety protection network that "prevents, monitors, and strictly manages" has quietly taken shape, and the nationwide trend of worsening soil pollution has been initially curbed.

This summer vacation, visitors have been coming in an endless stream to Fujian Zijinshan National Mining Park. When the reporter met Chen Xinghua, he was holding a phone and introducing the old appearance of the place to the people beside him.

Through real-scene 3D technology, we have seen more intuitive changes in this soil. Today, on the 23,800-acre soil of Zijinshan, 4.27 million various flowers and trees are thriving, and the annual carbon sequestration is equivalent to absorbing the exhaust emissions of 300,000 cars for a whole year.

Through satellites, more soil recovery can be witnessed. In Pingxiang, Jiangxi, the abandoned winter melon trough mine has transformed from a black "ecological scar" into a "terraced oasis"; in Nanning, Guangxi, over 300 mottled leftover mining pits have become the mining pit garden of the Garden Expo Park; in Wuhan, Hubei, Lingshan quarry has changed from a dust-filled "gray mountain" into the "Lingshan flower realm," now a hundred-acre sea of flowers interspersed with cliff meadows.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, our country has continuously strengthened ecological protection and restoration of mines. Sixty-eight historical legacy mine restoration demonstration projects have been successively launched nationwide, and over 5 million acres of "wounds" left by mining have been healed.

The "scars of the earth" are being healed, and lands once troubled by pollution are now revitalized. In Yueyang, Hunan, major grain grower Yao Lin no longer worries about whether industrial wastewater from nearby industrial parks is being illegally discharged or leaked into the land.

"They" refer to more than 1,000 sets of online sewage monitoring devices installed at the drainage outlets of various enterprises in Yueyang City. Inside these blue pipes is wastewater produced by industrial enterprises. More than 60 companies each have independent sewage pipes connected through main pipelines to a sewage treatment plant 3 kilometers away. Any abnormalities in each pipe are detected by the real-time monitoring system.

Today, a three-dimensional network for preventing soil pollution from the source has been established nationwide: in the sky, seven satellites are closely monitoring soil pollution and ecological safety; on the ground, 38,880 soil environment monitoring points form an integrated air-ground-space monitoring network that provides round-the-clock protection for the supervision of soil and groundwater ecological environment quality. Persistent and unremitting efforts have initially curbed the trend of worsening soil pollution in our country. In 2015, only 70.6% of polluted farmland was safely utilized; now, this proportion has increased to about 93%.

(Source: CCTV.com)