By planting over 1 billion trees since the 1990s, China has slowed desert expansion and restored degraded land

The first time you stand on the edge of a desert, it feels a little like staring at the ocean. The land just… stops. Grass gives way to gravel, shrubs thin to nothing, and ahead of you the ground blurs into a pale, trembling horizon. That hard line between “living country” and “nothing” carries a quiet threat, an unease that’s hard to name until the wind picks up and you taste dust in the back of your throat. Now imagine that line is moving towards you, year after year. That’s the reality millions of people in northern China grew up with—until a bold idea took root, one tree at a time.

The Great Green Barrier: A Desert Meets Its Match

Back in the 1990s, large parts of northern China were turning to dust. Decades of overgrazing, deforestation, and poor land management had left soils exposed and exhausted. The Gobi Desert, already one of the largest in the world, was creeping steadily south and east. Villages were being buried. Croplands were blowing away. Dust storms grew so fierce that, on some days, the sky in Beijing went the colour of rust and the air tasted metallic.

Across the sea, Australians watched those dust storms on the news and felt something familiar. We know what it’s like when soils lift and fly. From the Dust Bowl–style storms that rolled across the Mallee in the 1930s and 40s, to the eerie red storm that swallowed Sydney in 2009, we’ve lived our own version of that fragile line between healthy land and degraded country.

China’s response was audacious in scope and almost simple in concept: plant trees. Lots of them. Enough to blunt the force of a continent-sized desert. Since the 1990s, China has planted over a billion trees as part of what’s often called the “Great Green Wall” or the “Three-North Shelterbelt Program”—a vast arc of forests stretching thousands of kilometres along the country’s northern frontier.

From the air, this new green belt looks like veins threading through pale, parched skin. On the ground, it feels different: the air calmer, the soil denser underfoot, the wind muffled to a whisper rather than a roar. It is not perfect, and it is far from finished. But in many places, it has slowed the march of the desert and brought life back to land most had written off as lost.

Listening to the Land: How Trees Change a Harsh Place

Walk with a local farmer in Inner Mongolia or Ningxia on a cool morning and the changes are almost tangible. Where loose sand once shifted like water, there’s now a crust held together by roots and fungal threads. Small shrubs cling to the spaces between the trees. Insects move through leaf litter that didn’t exist a decade ago. Birds that once bypassed this landscape altogether now pause, nest, or stay.

The trees are more than a line of defence; they’re a quiet engineering project, reworking the landscape from beneath the soil upwards. Roots anchor the ground, breaking up compacted layers and drawing moisture into the earth. Shade reduces evaporation. Fallen leaves build a thin skin of organic matter, slowly inviting back the microscopic communities that make soil alive rather than inert.

Where wind once raced unhindered across bare plains, it now hits roughness—rows of trunks, leaves, and branches that slow it, break it, and drop its load of dust and sand. It’s a small shift with enormous consequences. Fields in the lee of shelterbelts become more productive. Right on the margins of planting zones, satellite images show a faint but steady thickening of vegetation. In many places, the desert’s advance has stalled; in some, it has retreated.

For locals, the difference shows up in the most practical ways. Wells don’t dry quite as quickly. Crops survive wind events that would once have wiped them out. Children grow up with a horizon that’s a little less hostile.

What China’s Green Wall Means for a Dry Continent Like Australia

From an Australian perspective, China’s tree-planting story is not just an environmental curiosity; it’s a kind of desert mirror held up to our own future. We, too, live on a dry continent with long memories of shifting sands. Large parts of inland Australia walk the same fine line between resilient arid scrub and outright desertification.

We’ve already experimented with shelterbelts and revegetation—from the old farm windbreaks snaking across wheat fields in South Australia and Victoria, to large-scale landcare efforts in the Murray–Darling Basin. But the pace of climate change and the pressure on our continent’s soils pose a hard question: how far are we willing to go, and how fast, to protect them?

China’s project is not a perfect blueprint for Australia. Our ecosystems are wildly different. Much of Australia’s semi-arid and arid country is naturally open, evolved under a rhythm of drought, fire, and flood that doesn’t need to be turned into forest to be healthy. But the Chinese experience does offer several lessons that translate powerfully to our context.

For Australians, perhaps the most striking part of China’s story is not the sheer number of trees, but the political and social decision behind them: a choice to work with the land at massive scale, over decades, with the expectation that genuine change would be slow, incremental, and uneven—but still worth pursuing.

The Challenges Beneath the Canopy

It would be comforting to imagine that planting a billion trees is an unqualified triumph, a straight line from idea to success. The reality, as Chinese ecologists and local communities readily admit, is far messier—and that’s where the really useful lessons lie for Australia.

Early stages of the Great Green Wall relied heavily on fast-growing, often non-native or poorly matched species planted in dense rows. These trees looked impressive at first: a sudden green blaze against formerly bare land. But as years passed, problems emerged. Many species struggled in dry conditions and shallow soils. Some plantations became stressed monocultures—trees surviving, but not thriving; roots shallow, biodiversity low, water demand high.

In some regions, especially where rainfall was marginal, water use by dense plantations began to compete with other needs. Ecologists warned of “green deserts,” where trees stood in rows but the understory and broader ecosystem were thin and lifeless. Policy slowly shifted towards more diverse plantings, the use of native or better-adapted species, and integrating shrubs and grasses instead of pushing for wall-to-wall trees.

For Australia, this is a timely caution. On a continent as dry and fire-prone as ours, the wrong kind of tree planting can backfire—draining local water tables, adding fuel loads, or displacing the native grasses and shrublands that our wildlife rely on. China’s course corrections remind us that restoration is a conversation with place, not a one-size-fits-all template you can roll out like carpet.

From Dust to Story: People at the Heart of Restoration

The real power in China’s story is not just ecological; it’s human. You see it in the faces of villagers whose houses no longer half-disappear under dunes each spring, in the small businesses that sprang up around nursery work, tree-planting brigades, and the management of new forests.

Farmers who once watched their topsoil vanish into brown sky now walk between young shelterbelts, measuring yields that have climbed back from the brink. Schoolchildren in dusty northern towns grow up planting saplings on “Tree-Planting Day,” returning years later to rest in their shade. These trees, fragile as they are, have become markers of memory and identity as much as instruments of land repair.

Australians understand this connection between land and story deeply. From Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander custodians whose songlines bind country, water, and life into a single narrative, to farming families with three, four, or five generations on the same paddocks, our relationship with land is intimate and emotional. When we restore it—whether by fencing off a gully to let native vegetation return, or replanting a corridor along a creek—we’re not just fixing a problem. We’re renewing a relationship.

China’s billion trees are a reminder that environmental restoration isn’t mainly about numbers: it’s about belonging. It is about people choosing to stay and to care for a place rather than giving it up to the sand and the wind.

Imagining Our Own Green Stories

So what happens when Australians look at China’s slow, stubborn victory against desert expansion and ask, “What could this look like here?” The answers won’t be measured only in hectares or seedling counts. They’ll be written in smaller, more local scenes: farm kids in South Australia helping plant native windbreaks; elders in remote communities guiding the return of culturally important species; volunteers traversing a dry creek line, tucking tube stock into waiting soil before the first autumn rains.

On the edge of an outback town, a new line of native acacias may never make international headlines. But over ten or twenty years, those trees could knock the edge off the dust storms that used to roll in every summer. They might offer shade for a travelling stock route, habitat for small birds that have been missing for decades, or simply a more hopeful horizon for the next generation.

China has shown that even in the face of a desert that seems unstoppable, human action can bend the trend line. Not perfectly. Not without missteps. But enough to change the lived reality of millions of people and to coax life back into tired ground. On a continent like Australia, with its wide skies, thirsty soils, and long memory of damage and repair, that lesson matters.

The edge of the desert, whether in Inner Mongolia or inland New South Wales, does not have to be a surrender line. It can be a meeting place: boots in sand, hands in soil, a sapling held at the awkward angle between hope and uncertainty. The wind still blows. The horizon is still wide and harsh. But in that small pocket of shade, in that slow accumulation of leaves and roots and stories, the land begins to remember how to hold itself together again.

FAQs

Has China really planted over 1 billion trees?

Yes. Since the late 1970s and especially from the 1990s onward, China’s large-scale programs—most notably the Three-North Shelterbelt—have resulted in the planting of billions of trees. Estimates vary, but over a billion individual trees is a conservative figure within those broader efforts.

Has the Great Green Wall actually stopped the desert?

In many regions, desert expansion has slowed or partially reversed, and soil erosion has decreased. However, results are uneven. Some areas show strong recovery and improved vegetation cover, while others still struggle due to poor species choice, water limits, or harsh conditions.

Could Australia copy China’s Great Green Wall?

Not directly. Our ecosystems, climate, and fire regimes are very different. But we can adapt the principles—strategic tree and shrub planting, native species, shelterbelts, and long-term planning—to protect vulnerable soils and support biodiversity in ways that fit Australian landscapes.

Are there risks to large-scale tree planting?

Yes. Planting dense monocultures or water-hungry species in dry areas can stress water resources, reduce biodiversity, and create “green deserts.” Poorly planned forests can also add to fire risk. Careful design, local knowledge, and diverse native species are essential.

What can ordinary Australians do to support land restoration?

People can get involved through local Landcare groups, community planting days, and supporting projects led by Traditional Owners and regional conservation organisations. On private land, even small actions—like planting native shelterbelts, protecting remnant vegetation, and managing stock pressure—add up across the landscape.