The ‘Green Great Wall’ of China: Scientists issue new warning despite 50 years of work to tame desert growth

For five decades, China has engaged in a massive land restoration initiative known as the Three-North Protective Forest Program. Often called the Green Great Wall, this project spans the northern deserts. Workers use a technique called straw checkerboards to trap sand and create stable grids for planting saplings. This method prevents wind from moving dunes and allows new vegetation to take root in difficult terrain.

Government data shows that desertified land in the region reached its highest point in 2000. Since then, the country reports a reduction of more than 1,000 square kilometers of desert land each year. Forest cover within these program areas has grown from roughly 5 percent in 1978 to 14 percent by 2022. This progress relies on the labor of roughly 300 million rural workers who maintain the grids and trees.

While these results are significant, scientists highlight the difficulty of long-term maintenance. Zhu Jiaojun, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, notes that past success came from a mix of intense manual labor, state funding, and favorable changes in rainfall. Experts worry about how to preserve these ecosystems if the current level of government intervention or manual labor decreases in the future.

Contrast this with similar efforts in Africa, where a multi-country project to plant trees across the Sahel has faced delays. Activists there point to a lack of local budget allocations and a heavy reliance on international funding as primary hurdles. In China, local participants like Yin Yuzhen see the work as a multigenerational duty. She spent forty years transforming her local landscape and now emphasizes the importance of teaching younger residents to value the land.

Ultimately, experts agree that environmental restoration projects succeed only when they provide economic benefits to the local population. If residents view ecological health and their own income as separate, the work often stops. The current goal for the Green Great Wall involves finding ways to make the restored land self-sustaining so it survives without constant human input.