#77 What is the Great Green Wall of China?

Thanks for reading the Daily Concept. If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a friend. If someone forwarded you this email, click here to subscribe.

Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

China has a big problem with desertification. (If you don’t know what desertification is, check out my earlier Daily Concept on the topic here)

The Gobi Desert in northern China is expanding by over 1,400 square miles each year, meaning that an area bigger than Rhode Island is turned from arable grassland into dry desert annually in China.

Moreover, destructive sandstorms make life difficult for rural and urban Chinese alike.

The Chinese call the Gobi Desert the “Yellow Dragon” due to the sandstorms that the desert emits across the rest of China each year.

So, nearly fifty years ago, the Chinese government came up with a solution: The Great Green Wall (GGW) of China.

The plan? Plant millions of trees and build a 2,800-mile-long 'wall' of forest that will prevent the expansion of the Gobi Desert into China's northern grasslands.

Key facts:

• Desert areas make up about a quarter of all landmass in China

• The GGW plan aims to plant around 88 million acres of forest

• The plan has been relatively successful since starting in 1978, with China's overall forested area to growing to nearly a quarter of China's total landmass — up from less than 10% in 1949

The Chinese government has used two tactics to plant the forests:

• aerial seeding, where tree seeds are dropped over arid areas

• paying farmers to plant trees and shrubs

Local farmers in northern China said that the GGW initiative has helped them:

Some critics, however, argue that the plan lacks follow-through.

Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center, said:

A few problems can come from this kind of mass tree-planting program:

• some of the trees die a few years after being planted because they're not native to the area

• new trees absorb groundwater needed by native grasses and shrubs, contributing to the soil degradation that the plan is supposed to reverse

Great Green Walls Go Global

China’s idea for a massive tree-planting program to halt or slow desertification has been adopted around the world.

A similar initiative was launched by the African Union in 2007 with the goal of halting the expansion of the Sahara Desert in Africa’s Sahel region, which covers over 1 million square miles and stretches across Africa. (see the purple area below)

The U.N. Development Program noted that the African Union’s GGW efforts have:

• restored over 20 million hectares of land

• created 350,000 jobs

• trained over 10 million people in sustainable water management practices

These type of initiatives require a massive mobilization of capital and manpower, and scientists are still unsure of how these human-driven efforts to transform the natural landscape will effect local ecosystems.

Despite the criticism, it appears that the GGW is working in China. A study found that the newly planted trees had reduced the frequency of sandstorms across China by 20% between 2009 and 2014.

There is also evidence that the new trees are offsetting some Chinese carbon emissions.

A study published by Chinese scientists found that the GGW program had created a major carbon sink that absorbed ~5% of the country's CO2 emissions between 1978 and 2017.

ART OF THE DAY

Thank you for reading. Please reply to this email if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Yours,
Dan