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Vegetation grows on the banks of the Tarim River along the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. | Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Mass tree planting in China is turning one of the world’s largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research shows.
The Taklamakan Desert (also spelled Taklimakan or Takla Makan) is slightly larger than Montana and covers about 130,000 square miles (337,000 square kilometers). It is surrounded by high mountains, which prevent moist air from reaching the desert for most of the year, creating extremely arid conditions that are too harsh for most. PLANT.
However, in recent decades, China has he sowed a forest around the edges of the Taklamakanand a new study suggests that this approach is starting to pay off.
“We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively improve carbon sequestration even in the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to turn a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification,” co-authored the study. Check it outprofessor of planetary science at Caltech and senior research scientist in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science in an email.
More than 95 percent of the Taklamakan Desert is covered by quicksand, meaning it has long been considered a “biological vacuum,” according to the study. The desert has grown since the 1950s, when China underwent massive urbanization and agricultural land expansion. This natural land transformation has created the conditions for more sandstorms, which generally blow away the soil and deposit sand instead, causing land degradation and desertification.
In 1978, China implemented the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, a huge ecological engineering project designed to slow desertification. Also called the “Great Green Wall”, the project aims to plant billions of trees around the edges of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts by 2050. To date, more than 66 billion trees have been planted in northern China, but experts debate if the Great Green Wall has significantly reduced the frequency of sandstorms.
China finished encircling the Taklamakan desert with vegetation in 2024, and researchers say the effort stabilized the sand dunes and cultivated forest cover in the country from 10% of its area in 1949 to over 25% today.
Heavy machinery is being used to level sand dunes where China wants to plant trees and shrubs along the edges of the Taklamakan desert. | Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Now, scientists have discovered that the sprawling vegetation on the outskirts of the Taklamakan desert absorbs more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere than the desert releases, which means that Taklamakan can turn into a stable carbon reservoir.
The researchers analyzed ground observations of different types of vegetation cover, as well as satellite data showing rainfall, vegetation cover, photosynthesis and CO2 flows in the Taklamakan desert over the past 25 years. They also used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Carbon Trackerwhich models CO2 sources and sinks globally to reinforce their findings.
The results, published on January 19 in the journal PNASshows a long-term trend of expanding vegetation and increasing CO2 absorption along the edges of the desert which coincides in both time and space with the Great Green Wall.
Vegetation cover around the Taklamakan desert increased, boosting photosynthesis and CO2 capture. | Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
During the study period, rainfall during the Taklamakan Desert’s wet season from July to September was 2.5 times that of the dry season, averaging about 16 millimeters per month. Precipitation increased vegetation cover, greenness, and photosynthesis along desert edges, thereby reducing CO2 levels over the desert from 416 parts per million in the dry season to 413 ppm in the wet season.
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Previous research indicator that the Taklamakan Desert may be a carbon sink, but those studies focused on CO2 which is absorbed by the desert sand. They also suggested that the sand is not a stable carbon sink climate changebecause increasing temperature can cause the air in the sand to expand, which releases additional CO2.
“Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert, although only around its edge, represents the first successful model demonstrating the possibility of turning a desert into a carbon sink,” Yung said.
The Great Green Wall’s potential to slow desertification remains unclear, but its role as a carbon sink “could serve as a valuable model for other desert regions,” he added.