DgcityChinese ecologist Fu Bojie has received the 2026 Volvo Environment Prize in Stockholm for his research on ecological restoration and sustainable development, particularly the scientific foundation behind the recovery of China’s Loess Plateau.
Fu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher at its Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, has spent decades studying how damaged landscapes function as coupled social and ecological systems rather than as purely physical terrain.
The prize committee cited his pioneering work connecting local restoration with global sustainability. His long-term studies of the Loess Plateau and other dryland regions, it said, offer lessons for parts of the world grappling with land degradation, water scarcity and pressure on food production.
The Loess Plateau, spanning parts of several northern provinces, was once a byword for erosion. Centuries of tree clearing and farming left its wind-deposited soils exposed, feeding the Yellow River with silt while harvests and livelihoods deteriorated. Large-scale programs beginning in the late 1990s returned steep farmland to forest and grassland, terraced slopes and restricted grazing, with researchers helping to map where each measure worked best.
Fu was careful to frame the award as collective rather than personal. He described it as international recognition of Chinese scientists in restoration and sustainability, and pointed to the work of teams and successive generations of students on the plateau over many years.
The plateau has shaped Chinese civilization for millennia. Its fine, fertile soils supported early farming, but the same loess washes away easily once plant cover is gone, and for centuries eroded sediment has silted up the Yellow River downstream and worsened flooding. Restoration programs launched from the late 1990s returned steep cropland to forest and grassland, banned grazing on vulnerable slopes and moved millions of rural residents into less destructive livelihoods, giving researchers like Fu a landscape-sized experiment to measure.
The prize carries weight beyond the ceremony. Drylands cover a large share of the planet and are home to hundreds of millions of people, and the methods developed on the Loess Plateau, measuring vegetation, soil, water and human livelihoods together, are increasingly cited in restoration programs from Central Asia to Africa.
