Baseline Information
The targeted area, Mulong Village is located in Wuxi County, a poverty county at state level, with weak financial foundation and vulnerable ecology. The county?s per capita annual income is 4200 Yuan for 2015, mainly from farming and animal husbandry. The village possesses 2439.6 Mu of arable land and 2120.1 Mu of natural secondary forest. The forest coverage is 38.6%. Due to abrupt topographic relief of mountains and gullies, most villagers can only till on sloping fields. The high land reclamation rate has caused rocky desertification at some slopes. The project area has been one of the national natural forest protection areas since 2000, but collecting firewood and non-timber forest product (NTFP), grazing and quarrying by the villagers still lead to natural forest degradation.

Main Problems
Wuxi County, with high land reclamation rate and low forest coverage, is one of the worst areas suffering from soil erosion and rocky desertification. It is also a poverty county at state level with acute contradiction between people and land. Currently, the degraded area is expanding, landscape is being fragmented significantly, soil fertility is decreasing and habitat loss is getting worse, which will result in significant negative impacts on biological diversity and ecosystem services of local ecosystem. Local livelihoods are affected by the natural forest damage.

Proposed Activities
(1) Selecting suitable species to restore the degraded natural forest land: Main measures include cultivating mixed forest, replanting, habitat restoration, ecological corridor connection;
(2) Adopting integrated ecosystem management approach to improve the ecological service functions of degraded forest land, ensuring the sustainability of ecological service flow and thus alleviating local poverty;
(3) Agro-forestry approaches: increasing the supply of NTFP and developing the NTFP market chain in order to increase the income of the community;
(4) Developing ecologically friendly livelihoods to improve local environment; demonstration the use of solar water heaters and biogas;
(5) Organizing the participatory trainings to enhance local people?s capacity on integrated management of degraded natural forest land.

Anticipated Results
(1) 5 tree species and 3 forest management modes will be selected. 6 hectares of forest?s natural recovery is artificially promoted, whose vegetation coverage is increased to 50%.
(2) 50 hectares of degraded natural forest land will be restored. Forest canopy density will be raised from 0.3 to more than 0.5.
(3) 3-5 ecological farm demonstration households will be built. Economic trees such as pomelo, walnut and plum will be planted and cover more than 30% of arable land, virtually over 100 Mu to establish agro-forestry management system. Establishing demonstration household by providing pig and chick ecological raising technical system; establishing 4 farmer field schools.
(4) The livelihoods of the villagers will be improved with per capita annual income increasing by 120 Yuan. At least 15 households will install solar water heaters and the same for biogas digesters. At least 10 exemplary households will utilize conservation tillage technology on over 10 Mu of arable land.
(5) Community training workshops will be held 3 times concerning natural forest conservation and adaptation to climate change, involving 180 people in total. 4 villager meetings will be organized involving 200 people; 2 study tour will be organized involving. More than 95% of the villagers will be aware of the meaning of protecting natural forest and more than 50% of the villagers will participate in the protection actively.