Planting more trees regardless of region rather than cutting them down has a profound effect on the air quality. Forests are an enormous help to carbon recycling.
pfdietz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder how the albedo has changed, and evaporation of water there.
engineer_22 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That was my thought too
Is it possible the trees can change the climate in the region? Can trees dampen regional water flux, seed clouds down range?
WillAdams [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, they do, which has had implications for rainfall patterns:
(if that doesn't come up, search terms to find it were "news china rainfall forest tree planting change")
culi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In fact as much as 50% of the Amazon's rain can be attributed to the trees themselves. Both through evapotranspiration strategies and increased cloud-seeding particles
However, I think the more relevant dynamic for this region is the water-holding capacity of the soil. If you get lost in a desert you are more likely to drown than to die of thirst because the water-holding capacity of the "soil" is almost nothing making flash floods likely. But soil that is at an advanced stage of ecological succession will be dominated by mycorrhizal fungi that produce glomalose. This type of soil can hold as much as 50x more water than "dead" soil
Alipay has a function called ant forest, you use the app more often, you get more credit. And when it reach certain amount, aliaba will plant a small tree in the desert. People used to be crazy about this shit, but not for now. I guess the main reason is that these effort are good activities, but it didn’t help that much, compared to the effort from the government. At least on the this topic, they did a pretty good job, it last for decades, and it will countinue.
Alipay has another function called zhima credit score, which is related to the ant forest, you can rent bikes and power banks with no deposit when you have a high score. and it’s the base block of so called ‘social credit score’ for Chinese people
Twirrim [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Projects around planting trees have often failed, in part from the choice of tree, in part because it takes more than just planting a tree to restore the habitat. It's generally better to work with the existing flora to promote growth and expansion, and/or help the stumps of trees that have been cut-down grow fresh again (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5g60g9vmlY)
rickcarlino [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Do initiatives like these hurt native desert species?
fhdkweig [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There is an interesting effect where deserts help rain forests and oceans grow new life. Winds carry desert sands and dust that are rich in iron and phosphorus into the oceans and act as fertilizer. Even lifeless deserts are important to the global ecosystems.
Surely deforestation hurt native species as well. Is there any reason to not try to reverse some of that damage? Do you think they are going to make things worse overall?
bilsbie [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I’ve never heard this mentioned but it seems like an environmentalist could support increasing total life on a piece of land vs preserving specific sparse species.
I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.
OutOfHere [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A desert already is a collapsed biome relative to when it was not a desert. As such, it has a huge debt to repay to what was lost due to the desertification. If the desertification is not reversed, it will go only deeper into debt, killing what little life is left there via a continued rise in temperature. As such, what is being done to restore the biome is most appropriate.
thyristan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes. But nobody cares about a few unimportant bugs and mice.
normalaccess [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is the way
blondie9x [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Are you able to find it on Google Maps? Having a hard time locating it.
"Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert, although only around its rim, represents the first successful model demonstrating the possibility of transforming a desert into a carbon sink," Yung said.
Those rows of greenery are the trees planted. They do a ton of this by hand, it's really fascinating.
triceratops [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There's definitely a ring of green around it. If that's all human-made, good for them.
aavci [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Maybe it's me but I couldn't see it.
triceratops [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Go to the link in GP's post then zoom out.
sct202 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A lot of the roads that cross the desert look like they're flanked by trees or by some kind scrubby grass mounds. This road is flanked by trees or bushes https://maps.app.goo.gl/JW3gxd8wxSiuwhnZ7
How much deforestation over the past decades has been reversed and is deforestation currently under control?
ceejayoz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Per the article:
> 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.
inglor_cz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The main problem with attempts at reversing the damage is that forests aren't fungible.
An old growth forest has a rich, balanced ecosystem. Newly planted forests tend to be susceptible to catastrophic damage by various critters, as the species mix is much less complex, and their fauna and flora is relatively impoverished.
HappyPanacea [3 hidden]5 mins ago
So you just need to be stubborn until they stick or cleverer in how you go about it?
inglor_cz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Biology is complicated, ecology even more so...
An old forest is a result of multiple waves successions after disasters (fire, windstorms etc.), which are really hard to emulate. Some desirable seedlings are hard to grow artificially, others just won't prosper in situ unless/until very specific conditions are met...
After a long enough time, the forest will eventually revert to a fully natural state, but that time is way longer than human lifetime. It is a living organism of sorts and living organisms are much easier to kill than to re-create.
1970-01-01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
So not really a carbon sink but a carbon perimeter.
contingencies [3 hidden]5 mins ago
[flagged]
wussboy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
And desertification has destroyed many existing biomes. I think, in the grand scheme of things, more forest is better than more desert, so this is a net positive.
contingencies [3 hidden]5 mins ago
An insufficiently nuanced perspective. In the grand scheme of things, when you destroy a biome it's gone forever. Note that China has a recent history of blockheaded moves like this, eg. mobilizing the entire human population to kill all the birds simultaneously across the country during the cultural revolution. India's discussing re-routing the Ganges. Humans never learn.
ceejayoz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's on the edges of the desert, to limit its ongoing expansion, which was directly due to human activity.
contingencies [3 hidden]5 mins ago
And may I ask where would you assume the highest diversity of life exists in a desert?
OutOfHere [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A desert is a collapsed biome relative to when it was not a desert. As such, it has a huge debt to repay to what was lost due to the desertification. If the desertification is not reversed, it will go only deeper into debt, killing what little life is left there via a continued rise in temperature. As such, what is being done to reverse the desertification and restore the biome is most appropriate.
ceejayoz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I would assume that the unchecked human-generated expansion of the desert reduces the diversity of what was previously not desert.
andrewstuart [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is not of the slightest interest to any politician in 2026.
ceejayoz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Even if that were true, it'd still be a dumb position to take.
So to plant a row of trees a bulldozer has to level sand dunes. I somehow doubt the exhaust from this process is factored into the CO2 sink calculation.
> Of course, we know that fuel consumption varies drastically from machine to machine, so we’ve looked at an example of a very high utilisation rate too. We found that an 8T excavator that spent 11 hours and 3 minutes working, 1 hour and 6 minutes of which were idle, it used 89 litres of fuel and resulted in 237.4kgs of carbon emissions. 4 hours saved on that machine would be a total of 84kgs of carbon emissions on average.
> To determine the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can absorb, we combine average planting densities with a conservative estimate of carbon per hectare to estimate that the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.
As long as they're not taking all day for one tree, I think they'll be OK.
zokier [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That tree carbon capture estimate is probably conservative here if planting trees achieved de-desertification and resulted a larger thriving ecosystem.
HN.zip
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/china-has-pl...
China's also been a major supporter of the Great Green Wall of Africa providing technology and funding.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3302068/why-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenho...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-ro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um6Fhw841p0
Is it possible the trees can change the climate in the region? Can trees dampen regional water flux, seed clouds down range?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/climate-change/china-accid...
(if that doesn't come up, search terms to find it were "news china rainfall forest tree planting change")
However, I think the more relevant dynamic for this region is the water-holding capacity of the soil. If you get lost in a desert you are more likely to drown than to die of thirst because the water-holding capacity of the "soil" is almost nothing making flash floods likely. But soil that is at an advanced stage of ecological succession will be dominated by mycorrhizal fungi that produce glomalose. This type of soil can hold as much as 50x more water than "dead" soil
Alipay has another function called zhima credit score, which is related to the ant forest, you can rent bikes and power banks with no deposit when you have a high score. and it’s the base block of so called ‘social credit score’ for Chinese people
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=desert+sands+fertilize+oceans
I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.
"Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert, although only around its rim, represents the first successful model demonstrating the possibility of transforming a desert into a carbon sink," Yung said.
Those rows of greenery are the trees planted. They do a ton of this by hand, it's really fascinating.
> 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.
An old growth forest has a rich, balanced ecosystem. Newly planted forests tend to be susceptible to catastrophic damage by various critters, as the species mix is much less complex, and their fauna and flora is relatively impoverished.
An old forest is a result of multiple waves successions after disasters (fire, windstorms etc.), which are really hard to emulate. Some desirable seedlings are hard to grow artificially, others just won't prosper in situ unless/until very specific conditions are met...
After a long enough time, the forest will eventually revert to a fully natural state, but that time is way longer than human lifetime. It is a living organism of sorts and living organisms are much easier to kill than to re-create.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
> Of course, we know that fuel consumption varies drastically from machine to machine, so we’ve looked at an example of a very high utilisation rate too. We found that an 8T excavator that spent 11 hours and 3 minutes working, 1 hour and 6 minutes of which were idle, it used 89 litres of fuel and resulted in 237.4kgs of carbon emissions. 4 hours saved on that machine would be a total of 84kgs of carbon emissions on average.
https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/how-much-co2-does-t...
> To determine the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can absorb, we combine average planting densities with a conservative estimate of carbon per hectare to estimate that the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.
As long as they're not taking all day for one tree, I think they'll be OK.