According to sources with Sichuan Provincial Forestry and Grassland Administration, a total of 8.45 million mu of desertification land has been brought under control across the province over the 20-odd years since the Natural Forest Protection Project was implemented.

　　At present, Sichuan province is promoting the construction of key projects for desertification control, organizing and carrying out the sixth desertification monitoring work, and expanding the pilot region of protected desertification land, according to an official of Sichuan Provincial Forestry and Grassland Administration.

　　The province embarked on desertification control in the 1990s. In particular, at the end of the 1990s, it launched the campaigns such as Natural Forest Protection Project and "returning farming land to forestry". In recent years, the province has included ecological restoration in desertification areas as an important part of the ecological civilization system reform, taking the lead in coordinating subsidies channeled from the central budget of the Ministry of Finance (MOF) for key ecological functional zones, launching comprehensive management projects in ecologically vulnerable areas, and implementing large-scale afforestation projects. The preliminary statistics showed that over the past 20 years or so, Sichuan province has governed 6.65 million mu of Karst areas through measures such as closing hillsides to facilitate afforestation, artificial afforestation, grassland improvement and building water conservancy and conservation facilities, and reversed 1.8 million mu of desertification land through exploring such new approaches as willow barriers, sandbag sand barriers, shrub-planting, and windbreaks.