The deforesting Chinese land

The Chinese are cutting down the trees.  Deforestation has always been the opportunity cost of economic growth.  The demand for wood are from economic activities such as furniture-exporting and agriculture.  I'm going to focus on the impact of agriculture, on how croplands increase local temperature.

He et al. (2015) talks about how deforestation change the potential energy budget in China, namely the Northeast part.  Deforestation and land use change cause more than 10% of GHG emission (theguardian).   Over the past 300 years, 9.2% of forested area in China has disappeared.  The major cause of this is the conversion to cropland.  

In the article they uses satellite observation to investigate the impact of climate of land use change.  This would have less variation from difference model structures and parameters and would generate more constant result compare to climate models.  The study focuses in Northeastern China which is a main agricultural region and accounts for 20% of China's total cultivated area.

              

The conversion from forest to cropland not necessarily will heat up the surface.  Land surface albedo will increase (as seen in the graph) and will affect the shortwave radiation budget.  Short vegetation such as crops have a brighter surface and negative shortwave radiative forcing*, and will lead to local cooling.
*radiative forcing refers to "change in net radiative flux caused by an imposing change such as increase in CO2 or change in albedo" (He et al, 2015).

However land surface temperature (LST) increases when we includes some other factors.  For example, larger latent heat fluxes together with evapotranspiration will reduce LST in forests.  The average nighttime LST between crops and forest can be up to -2.30K*, which leads to forest area daily average temperature are cooler than croplands.
*K is a unit for LST

This graph shows how China's temperature increases from 1873-2008, which shares a similar pattern with the global temperature.  How is the impact of climate change treating China?  By 2030, the growing capacity of China's crop will reduce by 10%, including rice, wheat and corn.  There will be reduction in water resources in the major rivers and will increase disease attack and associated propagation. (Qin et al, 2010)

China is trying to address the issue by engaging in a massive tree-planting program in the North.  It is going to cover 2,800 miles across the Northern part of China.  According to the State Forestry Administration China has planted 32 million acres of new forest since 2008 (Quartz).   Can the afforestation in the future compensation the deforestation in the past decades?