The Green Great Wall is restoring large areas of northern China by stabilizing dunes with ‘‘straw checkerboards’’ and planting saplings under irrigation.About 300 million mainly rural laborers and sustained state investment have expanded planted forest across roughly 500,000 km2, raising coverage from about 5% to roughly 14% and cutting severely desertified land by more than 40% in parts of the region.Scientists including
Zhu Jiaojun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and
Barron Joseph Orr of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification say the gains are fragile and require decades more of monitoring, maintenance and political commitment to support resilient ecosystems and local livelihoods.