So many trees planted in Taklamakan Desert that it's turned into a carbon sink
livescience.com139 points by Brajeshwar 6 hours ago
139 points by Brajeshwar 6 hours ago
China accounts for more than 25% of the global net increase in leaf area between 2000 and 2017, according to NASA data
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/china-has-pl...
China's also been a major supporter of the Great Green Wall of Africa providing technology and funding.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3302068/why-...
Addressing desertification of land is actually pretty smart. It's not pure charity. The land is actually more valuable when it isn't a desert anymore. If the land can support soil and hold water again, it becomes suitable for farming. If you don that sustainably (i.e. don't allow it to turn it back into desert), that adds to the economy.
There's a lot of degraded land all over the world that with a little bit of focus and attention could be upgraded back to something more valuable.
Some example:
- centuries of overgrazing by sheep and goats has turned much of the middle east into a waste land. Simply keeping sheep off the land with some fences can actually restore land within a few years.
- Places like the UK and Ireland used to be covered in Atlantic Rain forest. Forestry and overgrazing has turned much of both countries into land with very low bio diversity. Restoring forests would be a lot of work. But like the middle east, keeping the sheep from destroying new trees before they have a chance to establish themselves would help. Places like Dartmoor are effectively so barren that the only thing that grows there is a type of grass that even sheep don't like.
- Scotland has a lot of planted pine forests that have drowned out native species. Bio diversity is low.
- Parts of Germany have similar issues with lots of production forests having no bio diversity. There's a crisis in parts of Germany where insects are destroying parts of those forests now. The solution is actually just ripping out the production forests and re-introducing native species.
- Prairies in the US used to be kept in check by herds of bison that no longer exist and are no longer able to migrate around. Continuous cattle overgrazing of the same land destroyed much of the land. It no longer recovers in between grazing. And mono culture of low value crops like corn and soy beans isn't helping either.
There are many more examples around the world. The problems vary from area to area but they have in common that local farmers abuse the land and the land then degrades. Soil erosion, problems with water retention, vastly reduced bio diversity, etc. are the result. The other thing they have in common is that putting a stop to the negative behavior tends to revert some of the effects. In some cases fairly quickly even. And as the Chinese show, putting some effort in can actually work. There's no one size fits all solution. But there are plenty of things that can work.
I live in the UK. Most of our farmland is divided into relatively small parcels owing to geography and history (they were divided long before mechanisation).
However, when you come across a field of wheat, rape or corn it's notable how little diversity there remains. A complete absence of birds or insects for example. The agricultural deserts, I believe, are as damaging as their drought based cousins.
The 8-8-8 rule (8 hrs work, 8 hrs play, 8 hrs sleep) that unions lobbied for during labor reforms helped establish a common sustainable work week. Something similar for land management could go a long way.
33% for farming, 33% for human development, 33% for forest/dense wild. Just an example, but you get the idea.
And most of their carbon dioxide production is due to “developed countries” consumption
Meanwhile the US government is abandoning the regulation of emissions that cause climate change.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenho...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-ro...
Here's a video about this effort from 2013 which gives a good view on how a lot of it was done:
I am left wondering why China is making all of these "green" changes; more renewables, planting trees at the edges of deserts, etc. I mean, I guess it could be altruistic, to help the Earth and it's people. However, I just don't see that kind of attitude coming out of China. So, again, I am left wondering what their angle is. Is it simply to "stick it" to the United States?
What is everybody's opinion on this?
I think the real question is the other way around; why isn't the US the world leader in this?
China's answer is fairly straightforward - jobs, exports, energy independence, wind/solar is cheaper, and they have 1.3B people who don't want to live in a big polluted desert.
Because China wants to rule the world. That includes roughly being seen as a great bastion of awesomeness.
The huge solar rollout is very much because China thinks it might end up in a war, and they are currently very vulnerable to a blockade for energy resources, and grid scale solar is unblockadable for like 20 years. You can bomb it, but that's a hard mission.
If what I believe is correct, there would also be evidence of China creating unblockadable food transport lines and relationships.
Global Warming is well understood all over the world. China doesn't want the world to suck right before they finally undo their Century of Humiliation and retake their "rightful" place as mega empire that exports culture and tech and power. They want to be the super power ruling over an awesome world, not ruling over ashes.
I've heard arguments that China has fairly limited "Soft power", and they really want to fix that, which takes actions that at least look altruistic and win-win.
With the US self-defeating, China is in a great place to be the leader of a stable world, and even be a counterweight to an abusive USA.
I wonder how the albedo has changed, and evaporation of water there.
That was my thought too
Is it possible the trees can change the climate in the region? Can trees dampen regional water flux, seed clouds down range?
Yes, they do, which has had implications for rainfall patterns:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/climate-change/china-accid...
(if that doesn't come up, search terms to find it were "news china rainfall forest tree planting change")
In fact as much as 50% of the Amazon's rain can be attributed to the trees themselves. Both through evapotranspiration strategies and increased cloud-seeding particles
However, I think the more relevant dynamic for this region is the water-holding capacity of the soil. If you get lost in a desert you are more likely to drown than to die of thirst because the water-holding capacity of the "soil" is almost nothing making flash floods likely. But soil that is at an advanced stage of ecological succession will be dominated by mycorrhizal fungi that produce glomalose. This type of soil can hold as much as 50x more water than "dead" soil
Rainforests are tropical largely because of the trees. If you cut them down, it reverts to desert. Geography helps, but it's mostly the plants changing local climate.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/china-has-pl... was posted in another comment. The tl;dr seems to be less rainfall in the eastern regions and more in Tibet.
50 years in on a 70 year project. It's not sexy / monumental like the pyramids, which was built in less time.
Planting more trees regardless of region rather than cutting them down has a profound effect on the air quality. Forests are an enormous help to carbon recycling.
Do initiatives like these hurt native desert species?
There is an interesting effect where deserts help rain forests and oceans grow new life. Winds carry desert sands and dust that are rich in iron and phosphorus into the oceans and act as fertilizer. Even lifeless deserts are important to the global ecosystems.
Surely deforestation hurt native species as well. Is there any reason to not try to reverse some of that damage? Do you think they are going to make things worse overall?
I’ve never heard this mentioned but it seems like an environmentalist could support increasing total life on a piece of land vs preserving specific sparse species.
I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.
A desert already is a collapsed biome relative to when it was not a desert. As such, it has a huge debt to repay to what was lost due to the desertification. If the desertification is not reversed, it will go only deeper into debt, killing what little life is left there via a continued rise in temperature. As such, what is being done to restore the biome is most appropriate.
Alipay has a function called ant forest, you use the app more often, you get more credit. And when it reach certain amount, aliaba will plant a small tree in the desert. People used to be crazy about this shit, but not for now. I guess the main reason is that these effort are good activities, but it didn’t help that much, compared to the effort from the government. At least on the this topic, they did a pretty good job, it last for decades, and it will countinue.
Alipay has another function called zhima credit score, which is related to the ant forest, you can rent bikes and power banks with no deposit when you have a high score. and it’s the base block of so called ‘social credit score’ for Chinese people
Projects around planting trees have often failed, in part from the choice of tree, in part because it takes more than just planting a tree to restore the habitat. It's generally better to work with the existing flora to promote growth and expansion, and/or help the stumps of trees that have been cut-down grow fresh again (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5g60g9vmlY)
Does the title make sense? A desert should be carbon-neutral, therefore a single tree growing in the desert is enough to make it a carbon sink.
Certain areas can release more carbon than trees bind if there are trees there, for example peats (obviously not a desert) and tundras (more akin to a desert). These have often a lot of carbon bound in the ground which can be released.
This is the way
Are you able to find it on Google Maps? Having a hard time locating it.
"Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert, although only around its rim, represents the first successful model demonstrating the possibility of transforming a desert into a carbon sink," Yung said.
I believe this is an example https://maps.app.goo.gl/aXtwERHb2pVxEVnV6
Those rows of greenery are the trees planted. They do a ton of this by hand, it's really fascinating.
There's definitely a ring of green around it. If that's all human-made, good for them.
A lot of the roads that cross the desert look like they're flanked by trees or by some kind scrubby grass mounds. This road is flanked by trees or bushes https://maps.app.goo.gl/JW3gxd8wxSiuwhnZ7
So not really a carbon sink but a carbon perimeter.
How much deforestation over the past decades has been reversed and is deforestation currently under control?
Per the article:
> China finished encircling the Taklamakan Desert with vegetation in 2024, and researchers say the effort has stabilized sand dunes and grown forest cover in the country from 10% of its area in 1949 to more than 25% today.
The main problem with attempts at reversing the damage is that forests aren't fungible.
An old growth forest has a rich, balanced ecosystem. Newly planted forests tend to be susceptible to catastrophic damage by various critters, as the species mix is much less complex, and their fauna and flora is relatively impoverished.
In the grand scheme of things having an old growth forest is probably better than having a new growth forest, but if a goal is to increase carbon absorption, new growth forests beat the pants off old growth forests.
So you just need to be stubborn until they stick or cleverer in how you go about it?
Biology is complicated, ecology even more so...
An old forest is a result of multiple waves successions after disasters (fire, windstorms etc.), which are really hard to emulate. Some desirable seedlings are hard to grow artificially, others just won't prosper in situ unless/until very specific conditions are met...
After a long enough time, the forest will eventually revert to a fully natural state, but that time is way longer than human lifetime. It is a living organism of sorts and living organisms are much easier to kill than to re-create.
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And desertification has destroyed many existing biomes. I think, in the grand scheme of things, more forest is better than more desert, so this is a net positive.
An insufficiently nuanced perspective. In the grand scheme of things, when you destroy a biome it's gone forever. Note that China has a recent history of blockheaded moves like this, eg. mobilizing the entire human population to kill all the birds simultaneously across the country during the cultural revolution. India's discussing re-routing the Ganges. Humans never learn.
It's on the edges of the desert, to limit its ongoing expansion, which was directly due to human activity.
And may I ask where would you assume the highest diversity of life exists in a desert?
I would assume that the unchecked human-generated expansion of the desert reduces the diversity of what was previously not desert.
A desert is a collapsed biome relative to when it was not a desert. As such, it has a huge debt to repay to what was lost due to the desertification. If the desertification is not reversed, it will go only deeper into debt, killing what little life is left there via a continued rise in temperature. As such, what is being done to reverse the desertification and restore the biome is most appropriate.
This is not of the slightest interest to any politician in 2026.
So to plant a row of trees a bulldozer has to level sand dunes. I somehow doubt the exhaust from this process is factored into the CO2 sink calculation.
https://www.sunbeltrentals.co.uk/news-and-blogs/decrease-you...
> Of course, we know that fuel consumption varies drastically from machine to machine, so we’ve looked at an example of a very high utilisation rate too. We found that an 8T excavator that spent 11 hours and 3 minutes working, 1 hour and 6 minutes of which were idle, it used 89 litres of fuel and resulted in 237.4kgs of carbon emissions. 4 hours saved on that machine would be a total of 84kgs of carbon emissions on average.
https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/how-much-co2-does-t...
> To determine the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can absorb, we combine average planting densities with a conservative estimate of carbon per hectare to estimate that the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.
As long as they're not taking all day for one tree, I think they'll be OK.
That tree carbon capture estimate is probably conservative here if planting trees achieved de-desertification and resulted a larger thriving ecosystem.
Likely very conservative considering the changes to the local biome, capture in the soil, etc : https://www.climate-forests.org/post/carbon-sequestration-an...