Planting at Scale — China’s National Forest Protection Programme and the Limits of Sovereign Nature-Based Finance

In 1998, catastrophic flooding along the Yangtze River killed 4,150 people and caused an estimated US$26
billion in economic losses. The disaster triggered a fundamental reappraisal of China’s state forestry sector:
decades of logging in natural forests had stripped watersheds of the vegetation that once moderated rainfall
into river flows, turning a severe monsoon season into a national emergency. The government’s response was
the National Forest Protection Programme (NFPP) — a commercial logging ban across natural state-owned
forests, paired with large-scale afforestation and reforestation, launched the same year.