Vegetation grows on the banks of the Tarim River along the Taklamakan Desert's northern edge.
Mass tree planting in China is turning one of the world's largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research reveals.
The Taklamakan Desert (also spelled Taklimakan or Takla Makan) is slightly larger than Montana, stretching across about 130,000 square miles (337,000 square kilometers). It is encircled by high mountains, which block moist air from reaching the desert for most of the year, creating extremely arid conditions that are too harsh for most plants .
However, over the past few decades, China has sowed a forest around the Taklamakan's edges , and a new study suggests this approach is beginning to bear fruit.
"We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification," study co-author Yuk Yung , a professor of planetary science at Caltech and a senior research scientist in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science in an email.
Over 95% of the Taklamakan Desert is covered in shifting sand, meaning it has long been considered a "biological void," according to the study. The desert has been growing since the 1950s, when China underwent massive urbanization and farmland expansion. This conversion of natural land created the conditions for more sandstorms, which, in general, blow away soil and deposit sand instead, causing land degradation and desertification.
In 1978, China implemented the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, a huge ecological engineering project intended to slow desertification. Also called the "Great Green Wall," the project aimed to plant billions of trees around the margins of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts by 2050. More than 66 billion trees have been planted in northern China to date, but experts debate whether the Great Green Wall has significantly reduced the frequency of sandstorms.
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.
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Heavy machinery is used to level sand dunes where China wants to plant trees and shrubs along the edges of the Taklamakan Desert. (Image credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
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