Greatest Land Restoration Project Of All Time That You Have Never Heard Of

It started badly, but lessons were learned and the project achieved remarkable results.

The straw checkerboard technique | People's Daily

Way back in 1978, China started its Three-North Shelterbelt Program in order to hold back the ever-expanding Gobi desert - a vast, 502,000 square mile (1.3 million sq. km) cold desert stretching across southern Mongolia and northern China, composed almost entirely of rocky plains, gravel, and sparse, arid grasslands.

In 1981, tree planting was made a legal civic duty (just like paying taxes) and work units, schools and factories set about organising mass tree planting days. What got planted? Willow and poplar.

It seemed like a good idea at the time because they are both fast-growing. However, they are not well suited to the arid climate as they are water hungry. Local groundwater got drawn down. Nearby crops suffered. Pests destroyed the saplings. The trees that were planted got counted while survival rates were ignored; when that wasn’t enough, the numbers were faked. Failure, right? Yes and no, because people learned.

Mixed plots replaced monocultures with more suitable, climate-adapted trees and the government started paying local farmers to keep plantings in arid areas alive. An innovative and now-famous straw checkerboard technique was widely adopted, and the deserts started being pushed back. The technique involves inserting forearm-length sticks into shifting sand, first in a row, then in an intersecting line, gradually forming a grid. Then saplings are planted at the center of each small square. It's a simple method to stabilize sand dunes against the wind and help plants take root.

Fast forward to today, and China’s desertified land has shrunk by around 10 percent since 2000, and severely desertified lands have decreased by more than 40 percent. A cumulative 124,000 square miles (320,000 sq. km) has been restored, equivalent to the size of Italy. It’s the greatest land restoration project of all time and mainstream media has largely ignored it.