'Changing the environment through hard work': Taiwanese tree-planter in Mongolia
As soon as Mongolia opened its borders following a period of COVID-19 isolation, Taiwanese national Cheng Li-yi boarded a plane and flew 3,000 kilometers to the grasslands. Her mission? To plant trees.
Cheng's Compassion Foundation has an ambitious target: to plant one billion trees.
"We want to make more environmental contributions to the global village," biology major Cheng told RFA from Mongolia, where sandstorms regularly turn the sky orange amid the environmental scourge of desertification.
"Seventy percent of land in Mongolia has succumbed to desertification," Cheng said, citing growing swathes of land denuded of forests, with the fragile steppe ecosystems collapsing under unsustainable pressure.
"Back then, there were trees everywhere, but now they're all gone," she recalled of a trip she made to mountains near Ulaanbaatar back in 1990.
Deforestation means that when torrential rains fall, floods gather quickly, washing much of the topsoil with it. A recent flash flood wrought havoc with Cheng's tree-planting project.
"The torrential rain fell for about two hours non-stop, and flash floods came immediately, breaking through the [perimeter] wall in several places," Cheng said.
"It turns out that there used to be a river passing through the area," she said. "When it rains, because there are no more trees in the upper valleys, the water immediately gets funneled down the old river bed."
"When it doesn't rain, there's no water -- these are the consequences of a lack of forest regulation," Cheng said.
