China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert that it's turned this 'biological void' into a carbon sink

Over 95% of the Taklamakan Desert is covered in shifting sand, meaning it has long been considered a "biological void," according to a new 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.

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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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The researchers analyzed ground observations of different vegetation-cover types, as well as satellite data showing precipitation, vegetation cover, photosynthesis and CO2 fluxes in the Taklamakan Desert over the past 25 years. They also used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Carbon Tracker, which models CO2 sources and sinks globally, to bolster their findings.