Large Chinese the wall of the modern era is not made of brick and stone. It is actually green and is a giant belt trees and the bush around the Takla Makan desert in the northwest of the country.
In order to stop the expansion of deserts, in the last five decades, China has "girdled" the Takla Makan and Gobi with more than 66 billion trees, and it is planned to enrich the areas with an additional 34 billion seedlings by 2050. Climate 101.
Already, China's green belt represents the world's largest man-planted forest system and one of the most serious eco-engineering endeavors.
Although individuals have been skeptical of this Chinese megaproject called the Great Green Wall, new research published in the journal PNAS shows: the forest ring around the desert not only stops the sand, but actively "sucks" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This means that the Great Green Wall has both local and global importance for the climate.
"We found for the first time that human-led intervention can effectively increase carbon storage even in the most extreme arid regions," study co-author Jack Young, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a senior research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told LiveScience in an email.
According to him, these findings show the potential for transforming the desert into a "sink" of carbon and suppressing the desertification process.
Photo: Screenshot/YouTube/Solar PathsThe Takla Makan Desert, located in the Xinjiang region, is one of the driest regions on the planet
From a "place of no return" to a green oasis
The Takla Makan Desert, located in the Xinjiang region, is one of the driest regions on the planet. Due to its dangerous, shifting sand dunes, extreme temperatures and reputation, it is also known by the ominous names "sea of death" and "place of no return".
During the mass urbanization and expansion of agriculture in China in the middle of the last century, the desert expanded intensively.
In order to prevent sand from engulfing agricultural land and reduce the intensity of sandstorms that reach as far as Beijing, China has been conducting a reforestation campaign since 1978.
By 2024, the 3.046-kilometer long green belt around the Takla Makan desert was completed, and the forest cover increased from the former 10 percent to more than a quarter today.
But the project does not stop there, it continues until the middle of the century by planting new trees and shrubs.
Upon its completion, it is estimated that the Great Green Wall will create approximately 356.000 square kilometers of forest. It is an area four times larger than the area of Serbia: imagine the endless expanses of forest from Subotica to Šar mountain - and so not once, not twice, not three times, but even four times.
What are the results so far?
Photo: Screenshot/YouTube/Solar PathsPrevious studies have confirmed the importance of the Great Green Wall in China for its primary purpose of stabilizing sand and mitigating sandstorms.
Earlier studies confirmed the importance of the Great Green Wall in China for its primary purpose of stabilizing sand and mitigating sandstorms.
A team of scientists from the United States of America (USA) and China also shed light on additional benefits: thanks to the afforestation of the desert rim, the Takla Makan area has become a carbon store. This means that the new green oases are now absorbing more carbon than the desert itself and its surroundings are releasing.
For the purposes of this research, the authors analyzed satellite data from the Takla Makan desert, tracking two main indicators of successful reforestation. These are the drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the increase in the so-called "fluorescence caused by the sun" - the light emitted during photosynthesis, which shows exactly how abundant the plant life is in Takla Makan.
The results showed that increased photosynthesis effectively turned the desert into a carbon sink.
Between 2004 and 2017, the Takla Makan desert absorbed about 8,3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, while emitting only 6,7 million tons, practically "sucking" huge amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
In other words, thanks to greening, the Takla Makan desert net stores about 1,6 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. This is an amount close to the total annual emissions of countries like Malta, or almost half of what Montenegro emits into the atmosphere.
"These are not rainforests like those in the Amazon or the Congo," emphasized King-Fai Li, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside. "Some of these forested areas are really just plain, low scrub, similar to those wiry bushes you see in southern California. But the very fact that these plants manage to 'suck up' carbon dioxide at all, and do it continuously, is a big thing that we can clearly measure and confirm even from space."
The results confirm that afforestation can moderate the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to some extent. However, these advances are modest.
As reported, even if the entire Takla Makan - which is roughly the size of Germany - were to be completely reforested, it would neutralize only about 10 percent of Canada's annual emissions, or about 60 million tons of carbon dioxide. By comparison, total annual world emissions reach about 40 billion tons.
However, this does not mean that the effort is in vain.
"We're not going to solve the climate crisis just by planting trees in deserts," Lee concluded. "But understanding where and how much carbon dioxide can be pulled from the atmosphere is key. This is only one piece of the puzzle."
The scientific community remains in agreement: such projects are valuable for local resilience and ecosystems, but the primary focus of the global fight must remain on leaving fossil fuels.
