China’s decades-long push to plant hardy shrubs and trees along the rim of the Taklamakan Desert has turned one of Earth’s most hostile landscapes into a functioning carbon sink, new satellite research has found. That is according to a study led by King-Fai Li, atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Riverside, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in January.
Drawing on years of data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and MODIS satellite imagers, Li’s team found that vegetation along the edges of the 337,000-square-kilometre desert is measurably drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide. During the July-to-September wet season each year, vegetation pulls CO2 levels down by approximately 3 parts per million relative to the hyperarid dry-season baseline.
Known locally as the “Sea of Death” and described by scientists as a “biological void,” the Taklamakan is the world’s second-largest mobile desert and has been a focus of Chinese ecological restoration since 1978. The team observed two independent indicators of success, namely a steady drop in atmospheric CO2 during the growing season alongside a rise in solar-induced fluorescence, the faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis.
“This is not like a rainforest in the Amazon or Congo,” Li said, noting that some afforested regions are little more than shrublands akin to Southern California’s chaparral. The fact that the drawdown can be measured and verified from space, Li told UC Riverside, is a positive signal the 48-year programme is working.
Spanning roughly 130,000 square miles of shifting sand, the Taklamakan is a core target of China’s Three-North Shelterbelt Programme, which runs until 2050. The programme now includes a 1,892-mile forest belt completed in 2024 that encircles the desert’s entire perimeter, along with plantings stretching the length of the 550-kilometre Tarim Desert Highway.
Beyond pure ecology, China’s motivations have been geopolitical and economic, with the state aiming to halt dune expansion, protect farmland, ease political tensions with local Uyghur communities, and lift northern forest cover from 5.05 per cent to 14.95 per cent as an explicit contribution to the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests. That expansion strategy mirrors Beijing’s wider push to position forestry as a pillar of sustainable development, as Wood Central reported in August when China’s central bank unveiled a 15-point plan to grow forestry assets.
If the entire Taklamakan were successfully blanketed in woodland, according to the UC Riverside team, it would absorb roughly 60 million tonnes of CO2 annually, a meaningful figure but still only a fraction of the 40 billion tonnes emitted globally each year. China’s afforestation has also curbed wind erosion across the region, reducing the frequency and severity of sandstorms that periodically reach Beijing, thousands of kilometres to the east.
Taking a cautious line on the climate implications, Li warned against reading the findings as a silver bullet. “We’re not going to solve the climate crisis by planting trees in deserts alone,” he said, adding that understanding where and how much CO2 can be drawn down under arid conditions remains essential to global climate strategy.
The Taklamakan experience stands in sharp contrast to the United Nations-backed Great Green Wall across Africa’s Sahel, a multibillion-dollar effort that Voice of America reports has faltered due to limited political support, weak organisational structures, and insufficient environmental consideration. Li’s team argues that long-horizon planning, running continuously since 1978, has been the decisive factor in the Taklamakan’s success.
With the Three-North Shelterbelt Programme running to 2050 and a 1,892-mile forest belt now encircling the Taklamakan’s perimeter, China’s long-horizon bet on desert afforestation has, according to Li, shown that “even deserts are not hopeless.”
