Forestry authorities banned commercial logging in two major forests in the Greater and Lesser Hinggan Mountains in Heilongjiang province, in order to restore the ecosystem. As China’s largest forest area, the two could help control climate change and conserve water and soil. They are also the source of major rivers, including the Nenjiang and Heilongjiang river. In the 1950s, China started large-scale logging in virgin forests to contribute to economic development. In more than half a century, two forestry companies extracted more than 600 million cubic meters of timber. By the early 1980s, loss of forest cover through logging was blamed for droughts and floods. Big, mature trees became scarce. The forests have retreated 100 kilometers, according to official data. In 1998, the Chinese government started to invest some CNY100 billion to protect the remaining forest and return cultivated land to forest or pasture. A blueprint for the protection of the Greater and Lesser Hinggan Mountains in 2010 set a target of increasing the forests by 1.7 million hectares over the next decade, the Shanghai Daily reports.