In the past 10 years, China has added more than 22 million hectares of forest. Thanks to generations of tree planters, our surroundings are becoming much     1     (green).

In 2022, China completed the afforestation (植树造林), of 3.83 million hectares and treated 1,847,300 hectares of rock-deserted land. After continuous effort, China has achieved remarkable progress.

China’s forest coverage rate has reached 24 percent, and forest accumulation has reached 19 billion cubic meters,     2     has laid a solid foundation for maintaining national ecological security and improving people’s well-being.

In terms of vegetation     3     (restore), in 2020 China published a guideline to perform a forest chief scheme nationwide. Principal leaders of governments should     4     (appoint) as “forest chiefs” at various levels     5     (range) from the provincial level to the village level.

Bazhou District in China’s Sichuan Province is     6     unique biodiversity ecological zone. In the past, the surface of the mountain there     7     (expose) due to mining.     8    , after the government’s management, the area has returned to its former green self.

In terms of ecological civilization education, in Shanghai, for example, an elementary school has     9     (creative) combined traditional Chinese medicine resources with AR technology to help children to learn plants. Meanwhile, Suzhou in Jiangsu Province has digitized tree planting activities through a mini-game on how     10     (identify) different types of trees.

2 . Global animal populations are declining, and we’ve got limited time to try to fix it. That’s the outcome of a new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which analyzed years of data on wildlife populations across the world and found a downward trend in the Earth’s biodiversity.

According to the Living Planet Index, animal populations across the world decreased by 69% between 1970 and 2018. Not all animal populations decreased, though, and some parts of the world saw more dramatic changes than others. But experts say the loss of biodiversity is a worrying sign of what’s to come for the natural world. “The message is clear and the lights are flashing red,” said WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini.

According to the report’s authors, biodiversity loss mainly results from land-use changes driven by human activities, such as infrastructure (基础设施) development, energy production and deforestation. But the report suggests that climate change — which is already causing wide-ranging effects on plant and animal species globally — could become the leading cause of biodiversity loss if rising temperatures can’t be limited to 1.5℃.

Lambertini said the crisis of biodiversity loss and climate change is already responsible for plenty of problems for humans, including less access to food and water and a rise in the spread of diseases. He said world leaders should take major steps to deal with environmental damage. They are locked in old-world thinking, with no sign of the brave action needed to achieve a nature-positive future.

WWF chief scientist Rebecca Shaw told a radio station that humans have the opportunity to change how they do things to benefit nature. “We don’t have to continue the patterns of development we have now. And we have an opportunity to change the way we produce, what we cat and how we consume food and what we waste when we consume our food,” Shaw said. “Little things that we can do every day can change the direction of animal population declines.”

4 . Cows produce much methane (甲烷) the world’s second worst greenhouse gas, as they break down the grass. They are a large source of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. Now scientists have shown the pollution from cows can be reduced by adding a little seaweed (海藻) to their food.

Recently, the researchers from the University of California studied 21 cows on a farm for about five months. They taught the cows to get their food from inside a special hood, which allowed the scientists to know the amount of the methane the cows were giving off. They used a small amount of seaweed, which they mixed with the cows’ food.

The consequences were surprisingly good. In some cases, the cows produced 82% less methane. The improvement depended on the kind of food the cows were given. Even the worst-polluting cows produced 33% less methane. Over the five months, the scientists didn’t see any signs that the cows’ stomachs were getting used to the seaweed and starting to produce more methane again. What’s more, the cows that were fed seaweed gained just as much weight as the other cows.

But there are still some big problems with the idea of feeding cows seaweed. For one thing, there’s not enough seaweed to feed all of the cows in the world. So farmers would have to figure out a way to grow lots of seaweed. A bigger problem is that for most of their lives, cows live in the fields, where they eat grass. That means there’s no chance to feed them seaweed every day.

Still, as the study shows, something as simple as feeding cows seaweed can help reduce some of the pollution causing the climate crisis.

5 . It's just past 7 a.m.on a February morning in Maya Bay, several weeks after authorities reopened what is one of Thailand's most popular tourist attractions to the world for the first time since June 2018 following a massive restoration program.

In the hours to follow, a slow but steady flow of tourists becomes in great numbers as dozens of tourists make their way to the white﹣sand beach, phones at the ready as they take photos. Swimming is not allowed, though visitors can take a few steps in. It's disappointing, but a huge improvement over what visitors once experienced here.

Maya Bay is located in a Thailand's national park.The destination was made famous by the 2000 film The Beach，starring Leonardo DiCaprio.As the film's popularity grew，so did tourists' desire to visit the location where much of it was shot —Maya Bay.

"Around 40 years ago, Maya Bay was already a tourism destination, but mainly for Thai tourists because you didn't have speedboats at that time, " says Thon, a marine biologist and professor who requested authorities to close the bay four years ago. Over the years, the number of tourists rose from less than 1, 000 to as many as 7, 000 or 8, 000 visitors a day at its peak. On average, around 5, 000 people entered the bay each day.

In 2018, the Thai government closed the bay and began to restore the damaged ecosystem.

Since then, Thon and a team of fellow marine experts and volunteers have replanted over 30, 000 pieces of coral, much of it grown off the coast of a nearby island. Meanwhile, the wildlife also returned and has been growing. "Only three months after we closed the bay, the blacktip sharks came back and gave birth…so there are a lot of things happening in Maya Bay."

8 . In 2018, a severe drought brought Cape Town close to “Day Zero”, when it could have become the world’s first major city to run out of water. Dam levels in South Africa’s Western Cape fell to below a fifth of capacity and the province suffered its worst water crisis in 100 years.

“The water supply was dwindling and it just wasn’t raining,” recalls Thinus Booysen, a professor at Stellenbosch University, who had created a device in 2015 designed to help homeowners cut their power usage. Seeking to reduce water waste, Booysen figured he could adapt the device to measure water usage instead of electricity use.

Soon, Booysen launched a start-up, Bridging the Internet of Things (BridgloT), to develop his idea. Called Count Dropula, the device reports water usage once a minute while many conventional devices only record data once an hour. The system uses an app in the user’s cellphone and sends short messages in real time. “Within minutes, we would be able to tell the user, ‘Something has burst, or something is leaking,’” he says.

Then Booysen discovered that a key issue was maintenance (维修), with the poorest schools using by far the most water. Leaking toilets could waste 1,000 liters of water per day. “We found that the biggest problems are things like children not closing taps properly, but often that would be because the taps just don’t close,” Booysen explains. During the test, the invention saved one school more than three million liters of water in three months. Another reduced its water usage 55 percent in four months.

Businesses including Cape Talk radio station and Africa’s largest food company, Shoprite, became sponsors, partnering with the Western Cape Education Department to install (安装) test devices in 350 schools. They saved more than $2.7 million and almost 550 million liters of water in 17 months. Booysen has looked at expanding to government buildings, hospitals and hotels. There are plans to roll out the device across Africa.