So many trees planted in Taklamakan Desert that it's turned into a carbon sink

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.

Is it possible the trees can change the climate in the region? Can trees dampen regional water flux, seed clouds down range?

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.

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.

And if it was the US? Well I don't see that attitude from the US of 2025-present, or 2017-2021.

And what about the Europeans? https://geopolitique.eu/en/2026/02/12/the-unravelling-of-the...

At least the Chinese rulers saw how smog was choking Beijing, and maybe they decided to try to technology their way into breathable air, compared to the US ruling class, who'd rather take oil/coal lobbyist money. Or EU ruling class, who liked BMW, VW and Mercedes-lobbyist money...

As a nice side effect, the Chinese tech will be needed all over the world. If you can't rule the world by controlling the oil (by bombs or being friends with Saudis), why not look at the next tech and try to rule that.. Paul Krugman was writing during Dubya's dumb regime how the US was surrendering the lead on climate technology to China...

They have decided to build their empire not with bombs and sanctions but with roads and projects which help the local community.

You might want to check your own attitude about China.

I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=desert+sands+fertilize+oceans

"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.

> 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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

> 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.