On 15 April 2026, the Comment Article “Can China’s Great Green Wall shape efforts to keep the world’s deserts at bay?” by a team led by Professor Ruishan Chen of the School of Design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University was published online in Nature. The article was also highlighted by the Nature editorial “What China’s Great Green Wall can teach the world.” Lilin Zheng, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Design, is the first author, and Ruishan Chen, Deputy Dean and tenured professor of the School of Design, is the corresponding author. Co-authors include Annah Lake Zhu, Associate Professor at Wageningen University; Qiuxia Dong, postdoctoral researcher at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Michael E. Meadows, Professor at Nanjing University, former President of the International Geographical Union (IGU), and Fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa; David S. G. Thomas, Professor at the University of Oxford; Xin Gao, Senior Research Fellow at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Jiaojun Zhu, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Xiaobo Wang, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Zilong Xia, Lecturer at Nanjing Agricultural University; and Alex de Sherbinin, Geographer at and Director of the Center for Integrated Earth System Information and a Senior Research Scientist in the Columbia Climate School.
Against the backdrop of global warming, drylands continue to expand worldwide. Desertification, land degradation, and dust and sand hazards have become major constraints on regional sustainable development. At the same time, many anti-desertification projects worldwide continue to face shared challenges, including low vegetation survival rates, inadequate long-term maintenance, unstable funding, and weak project continuity. Drawing on China’s long experience in sand control, Professor Chen’s team argues that desertification governance should move beyond simply planting more trees and instead adopt a systems-based pathway centered on reducing sand and dust risks, maintaining ecological stability, and improving livelihoods.
Building on decades of practice under China’s Three-North Shelterbelt Programme, the team identified a range of governance models, highlighted representative cases in Horqin, Kubuqi, Babusha, and Kekeya, and compared these experiences with desertification-control efforts in Africa, India, and the Gulf states. On this basis, the authors identified four key lessons of broader international relevance.
Figure1. The Three-North Shelterbelt Programme and Representative Desertification Control Highlights
First, countries need to rethink how success in desertification control should be defined. The paper argues that effectiveness should not be judged only by how many trees are planted. More meaningful criteria include whether sand and dust hazards have weakened, whether dunes still threaten roads, villages, and infrastructure, whether ecological functions have improved, and whether local income sources have become more stable and diversified. China’s policy approach has gradually shifted from maximizing afforestation area toward coordinating ecological restoration, infrastructure safety, regional development, and livelihood improvement. The team’s stage-by-stage comparison shows this transition clearly: in the first phase of the Three-North Programme (1978–1985), about 10.1 million hectares were afforested and about 5.3 million hectares were preserved, whereas in the fifth phase (2011–2020), about 6.2 million hectares were afforested and roughly 5.2 million hectares were preserved, indicating a shift from scale-driven expansion to more targeted planting and improved retention.
Figure 2. Changing Strategies for greening in China.
Second, desertification control requires locally tailored combinations of technologies rather than a one-size-fits-all template. The paper emphasizes that what is transferable from China’s experience is not a single universal technique, but the logic of combining tools according to local environmental conditions. In Xinjiang, for example, the Taklamakan Desert Highway shelterbelt relies on drought- and salt-tolerant shrubs, drip irrigation, and locally available saline groundwater to protect transport and energy corridors while avoiding extra pressure on scarce freshwater resources; the system later shifted from diesel to solar power, linking sand control with green energy transition. In the Kubuqi Desert, photovoltaic-based sand-control practices combine renewable-energy infrastructure, under-panel vegetation restoration, and local income generation. The paper notes that one large photovoltaic base there can generate 4.1 billion kWh of electricity annually, and is expected to support the ecological restoration of about 6,700 hectares of land, and reduce annual sediment inflow to the Yellow River by 2 million tonnes. Meanwhile, the low-cost straw-checkerboard method has been used in China for more than 50 years to stabilize shifting sand by increasing surface roughness and reducing near-surface wind speed. The paper also highlights digital public-participation mechanisms such as Ant Forest, which connect low-carbon behavioral incentives, ecological restoration, and online fundraising, as a potentially useful model for regions with limited fiscal capacity but fast-growing mobile-payment systems.
Third, long-term effectiveness depends on stable institutions and sustained investment. The study argues that many “green wall” projects lose momentum after an impressive start because they lack reliable long-term funding and maintenance mechanisms. One major lesson from the Three-North Programme is that desertification control has been embedded in national and local development planning as an ongoing governance task rather than treated as a one-off campaign. Under China’s Desertification Control Law, governments at or above the county level are required to incorporate sand-control work into development plans. In places such as Kubuqi, enterprises and herders can also participate through mechanisms such as low-interest loans and tax incentives. According to the paper, these arrangements have attracted more than RMB 3 billion in investment in the Kubuqi area since 2010. Nature’s accompanying editorial likewise stresses that land-restoration efforts around the world require stable funding and time to learn from failure.
Fourth, large-scale ecological programmes require continuous monitoring, evaluation, and correction. Desertification control is not a one-off engineering project, but a long-term process of intervention, assessment, and adjustment. Since 1994, China has carried out six national surveys on desertification, and the latest round integrates high-resolution satellite imagery, UAV surveys, and ground verification to make it possible to judge quantitatively whether improvement has occurred, where it has occurred, and why. On this basis, the authors recommend that countries establish measurable and accountable indicators aligned with national goals—such as changes in desert boundaries, gains in productivity, seedling survival rates, and reduced infrastructure risk—and link follow-up funding to restoration outcomes so that persistently weak-performing projects automatically trigger technical review, redesign, and resource reallocation.
The article argues that the international significance of the Three-North Programme does not lie in exporting a ready-made model for direct replication. Rather, its real value lies in translating a full governance methodology—reframing goals, matching technologies to local conditions, securing long-term investment, and building dynamic monitoring and correction mechanisms—into an action framework that different dryland regions can adapt to their own ecological and socioeconomic realities. In other words, the value of the “Chinese approach” lies in being instructive without being copied mechanically. For long-term and complex desertification governance, institutional guarantees, localized technological pathways, community-aligned implementation mechanisms, and continuous monitoring and evaluation are more important than short-term tree-planting campaigns alone.
This work was supported by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region–Shanghai Jiao Tong University Special Program for Science and Technology Cooperation under the “Science and Technology for Inner Mongolia” Shanghai Jiao Tong University Action Plan (No. 25Z970300314) and National Social Science Fund project (No. 25BJL012).
Article information
“Can China’s Great Green Wall shape efforts to keep the world’s deserts at bay?” Nature 652, 565–568 (2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01102-w
“What China’s Great Green Wall Can Teach the World.” Nature 652: 542 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01195-3.
About the authors
Ruishan Chen is Deputy Dean and a tenured professor at the School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has long been engaged in research on territorial spatial development and ecological-environmental governance, and has led multiple major research projects, including projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, the National Key R&D Program of China, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. As a lead author, he has participated in the writing and review of the IPBES global assessments on land degradation and restoration and on transformative change. He is also Head of the East Asia Center of the Urban Climate Change Research Network and an expert for China’s Fifth National Climate Change Assessment.
Lilin Zheng is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research focuses on land degradation and desertification.
