The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is administering a project of 13.8 million US dollars to help combat land degradation in six priority provinces and autonomous regions of the western China.

The ADB said in a statement that the project is the first step in a 1.5-billion-dollar 10-year program to 2012 under the Global Environment Facility (GEF)-China Partnership on Land Degradation in Dryland Ecosystems, which was designed with ADB assistance and approved by the GEF Council in October 2002.

The project will work at the central level and in the six provinces and/or autonomous regions with the worst dryland degradation in the country -- Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia Hui, Qinghai, Shaanxi, and Xinjiang Uygur with a combined population of 117 million -- to address integrated ecosystem management of drylands, the statement said.

It will boost institutional capacity, improve the quality of the policy and regulatory environment, planning mechanisms, project design capacity, and monitoring and evaluation skills, it added.

"This preliminary work will ensure that the investments planned under the partnership have the maximum impact on the poor rural communities and diverse ethnic minority groups that are most affected by land degradation," says Bruce Carrad, a principal project specialist at ADB's Resident Mission in China.

The western region, comprising 12 provinces and autonomous regions, supports a population of more than 285 million, including many of the country's poorest and most vulnerable people, and is very ethnically diverse.

According to the ADB, China faces some of the world's most serious land degradation problems, with more than 40 percent of its land area increasingly affected by wind erosion, salinization and desertification.

Apart from profound social and economic consequences including lower household incomes, increased poverty, higher unemployment rates and higher migration rates, the degradation is also threatening biodiversity in a region rich in endemic species and is a major source of dust storms, the ADB said.

Besides land degradation, the GEF also plans to provide about 150 million dollars in grant assistance for the partnership program to combat poverty and conserve biodiversity through capacity building investments and developing a series of model investment projects.