China leads the way In creating harmless CO2 emissions, and In providing the means for dealing with it – China has been ‘greening’ deserts to create carbon sinks for years
Plant ' pretty'' natural forests that support birds for millions or erect ugly wind farms for billions that kill them - trees result in lower CO2 levels more than wind farms.
Regular readers will recall this article from October 2024:
Well It turns out, China had figured this out years ago.
From here:
Referencing this report:
Human-induced biospheric carbon sink: Impact from the Taklamakan Afforestation Project | PNAS
“In 1978, China implemented the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, a huge ecological engineering project intended to slow desertification.
Also called the “Great Green Wall,” the project aimed to plant billions of trees around the margins of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts by 2050.
More than 66 billion trees have been planted in northern China to date, but experts debate whether 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 has stabilized sand dunes and grown forest cover in the country from 10% of its area in 1949 to more than 25% today.”
“Long-term trends reveal significant increases in vegetation cover (6.8 × 10−4/y) and photosynthetic activity (6.1 × 10−3 W/m2/sr/µm/y), accompanied by a strengthening net CO2 uptake (NEE trend: −5.2 × 10−12 kg/m2/s/y).
These changes are spatially concentrated along the desert margins and their timing aligns with implementation of China’s Three-North Shelterbelt Program.
Our results provide the direct evidence that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification.
This underscores the critical role of dryland restoration in global carbon management strategies and highlights the Taklamakan Desert as a model for climate change mitigation through nature-based solutions and ecological engineering.”
A drop of 3 ppm is marginal and there is no reference to the costs of planting 66 billion trees or the opportunity costs of doing something else (smarter such as planting higher CO2 absorbing trees)) – but still using Nature looks like a winner!
My ‘3 trillion trees’ article estimated that Chia was a net emitter of 9.2 billion tons of CO2 – which would require around 3 times the CO2 absorbed by China’s 140 billion trees.. Maybe China will double or quadruple the 68 billion trees planted in the Taklamakan Desert and move closer to (an unnecessary) ‘Carbon Neutral’ goal.
Onwards!!!
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