China trying to old back the desert

" it will take 300 years to turn back China’s advancing deserts at the current rate of progress." 

Out of time

China Is Building The Great Green Wall To Hold Back The Desert

We Are,

19 October, 2015

In 1978, China began planting The Great Green Wall to create a 2,800-mile long green belt in an effort to tame the expanding Gobi Desert. Over the last few decades, more than 66 billion trees have been planted in northern China. The Wall is planned to be completed by 2050 and is expected to increase forest cover across China from 5% to 15%. By 2050, more than 100 billion trees will occupy a 2,800-mile belt, 1.6 million square miles – covering about a tenth of the country in greenery. Chinese officials claim that by 2050 much of the arid land can be restored to a productive and sustainable state.

China has seen 1,400 square miles of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert. The encroaching Gobi, about half a million square miles in area, has swallowed up entire villages and small cities and continues to cause air pollution problems in Beijing and elsewhere while racking up some $50 billion a year in economic losses. The Wall will have a belt with sand-tolerant vegetation arranged in checkerboard patterns in order to stabilize the sand dunes. A 6-foot-wide gravel platform will hold sand down and encourage a soil crust to form. The trees will serve as a windbreak from dust storms.

According to a study published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, the total amount of carbon stored in all living biomass above the soil has increased globally by almost 4 billion tons since 2003, with China contributing in a notable way to the increase.

“The increase in vegetation primarily came from a lucky combination of environmental and economic factors and massive tree-planting projects in China,” said Liu Yi, the study’s lead author and a remote sensing scientist from the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

A 2014 study, led by Dr Minghong Tan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that Chinese government’s ambitious plan is working. “The results show that in The Great Green Wall region, vegetation has greatly improved, while it varied dramatically outside The Great Green Wall region. In most places in the study area, greenness continued to increase between 2000 and 2010. In North China as a whole, we think the environment is getting well. From the results, we infer that the implementation of The Great Green Wall programme has effectively decreased dust storm intensity by improving the vegetation conditions,” the researchers wrote.

Tree cover in the North, the Northeast and the Northwest area has increased from 5% to 12% since 1977. That’s a commendable feat. But still more than one quarter of China is either covered by desert or is land that is suffering desertification adversely affecting the lives of over 400 million people. Since 2003, 450,000 people in Inner Mongolia have been moved off land to prevent it degrading further. Is this a sign that The Great Green Wall is failing to beat the sand?

Opinion is, therefore, divided about The Wall’s success and advisability.

Hong Jiang of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, says, “China’s aggressive attitude towards nature, especially planting trees where they do not grow naturally, will not ultimately work. Instead of controlling nature, we need to follow nature.”

David Shankman of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, says, “The ecological issues are complex, and long-term results are not clear. What is the mortality rate of planted trees? What happens when they die? And how do these trees affect grass and shrubs, which in general are more resistant to drought and more effective at erosion control?”

A senior Chinese official, Liu Tuo, who leads China’s efforts to tackle the problem, said in 2011 that it will take 300 years to turn back China’s advancing deserts at the current rate of progress.