North China Plain Nature Nonprofits

The North China Plain is where Chinese civilisation began, a flat expanse of loess soil built up by the Yellow River over millennia of flooding and silt deposition. The river carries so much sediment that it has raised its own bed above the surrounding land in places, running between levees higher than the fields, which is a spectacular and precarious arrangement that has produced some of the deadliest floods in human history.

Today the problem is the opposite. So much water is drawn from the Yellow River and from the aquifers beneath the plain for agriculture and for cities that the river has, in some years, failed to reach the sea at all, and the groundwater beneath the plain is falling fast enough that the land itself is subsiding. This is one of the most severely water-stressed regions on Earth, and it feeds hundreds of millions of people.

The organizations here work on water conservation and pollution, protect the remaining wetlands, and defend the coastal tidal flats of the Bohai and Yellow Sea, which are essential refuelling stops for migratory shorebirds and which have been reclaimed at devastating scale.