China implemented the Great Green Wall of China project in 1978 to hold back the advancing Gobi Desert and to provide timber to the local population. One-fourth of China’s land mass is desert which, until recently, was rapidly expanding.
According to Earth.Org, causes and impacts of desertification include “aeolian desertification” caused by wind erosion after vegetation is destroyed, “water and soil loss” caused by water erosion mainly distributed in the Loess Plateau, “salinisation” caused by poor water management, and “rock desertification”, mainly occurring in the Karst region of South-western China.
Studies have shown that over a quarter of China’s surface area has experienced some form of desertification. This affects about 400 million people, a third of the country’s population.
Feng Wang, associate professor at the Institute of Desertification Studies at the Chinese Academy of Forestry, told Earth.Org that “the main problem facing China is an oversized population living in the drylands that surpasses the ecological carrying and restoring capacity of this area”.
This issue is not unique to China. According to a 2013 report by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), desertification, land degradation and droughts have accelerated globally, especially during the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly in areas that are prone to arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid climates.
The report adds that throughout the past 40 years, the Earth has lost a third of its arable land, mostly to erosion and degradation.
The Great Green Wall project is expected to continue until 2050 and aims to plant around 88 million acres of forests in a wall stretching almost 5 000km across and 1 500km wide in some areas.
The Chinese government has subsidised and added numerous major afforestation projects in recent years, resulting in the biggest tree-planting project in human history.
The results have so far been satisfactory, as thousands of acres of moving dunes have been stabilised and the frequency of sandstorms nationwide fell by one-fifth between 2009 and 2014.
Some experts are still sceptical, with Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Washington DC-based Woodrow Wilson Centre, saying that “with the Great Green Wall, people are planting lots of trees in big ceremonies to stem desertification, but then later no one really takes care of them and they die”.
“Precisely speaking, many of the trees that are planted in areas where they do not grow naturally simply perish after a few years. Those that do survive can soak up a lot of the groundwater that the native grasses and shrubs need, causing more soil degradation.
“If afforestation continually exceeds the land’s carrying capacity, it will lead the trees to eventual death. Thus it is difficult to determine whether or not the China Green Wall is helping or hurting local ecosystems.”
A 2014 study of China’s major tree-planting programmes concluded that “the extent to which the programmes have changed local ecological and socio-economic conditions is still poorly understood, as local statistics are often not available or unreliable”.
Scientists predict that desertification will continue to increase as the Earth’s climate changes, proposing the withdrawal of human action and giving the ecosystem enough time to restore itself in the future.
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