A sternuous ecological project : Each year, China creates 5.3 million hectares of forests, afforests another 3.7 million hectares of mountains where hunting and grazing are prohibited, and plants 2.4 billion trees by advancing the compulsory tree planting campaign. These efforts have stabalized the coverage of the nation's manually planted forest at 33 million hectares, and China now ranks first in the world in both the speed and scale of afforestation.