China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert that this vast sandy desert now absorbs more CO₂ than it emits.
Feb 18, 2026, 1:43 p.mFeb 18, 2026, 1:43 p.m
The Taklamakan is the second largest sand desert in the world after the Rub al-Khali in Arabia. It extends over more than 220,000 km² in the Tarim Basin, which is located in the far west of China in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Because the desert is surrounded by high mountains that keep moist air out most of the year, there are extreme conditions that are too dry for most plants. However, China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan in recent decades that the desert has now become a carbon sink.
World’s largest reforestation project
This is shown by studies published in the specialist journal PNAS were published. The research team of University of California San Diego attributes this success to the largest reforestation project in the world, the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, also known as “China’s Green Wall”. Under this program, China has planted more than 66 billion trees around the edges of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts since 1978. Around the Taklamakan alone, 30 million hectares were reforested – that’s roughly the size of Italy.
The program was originally aimed at slowing desertification and protecting the capital, Beijing, from sandstorms. The latter has not been successful so far: Beijing is still hit by huge sandstorms, especially in spring, primarily from the Gobi Desert. The spread of desert since the 1950s, against which the Three North Protected Forest Program was designed, was a consequence of the country’s massive urbanization and the expansion of agricultural land. This created the conditions for increased sandstorms that blew away soil and deposited sand.
Heavy machinery is being used to level sand dunes where China plans to plant trees and bushes along the edges of the Taklamakan Desert.Image: Future Publishing
Desert becomes a carbon sink
The massive reforestation program aimed to plant billions of trees by 2050. The country’s forest cover increased from 10 percent in 1949 to more than 25 percent today. The reforestation around the Taklamakan will be completed by 2024. But now another positive effect is becoming apparent: reforestation is transforming the desert – 95 percent of which is covered by shifting dunes and is therefore considered a “biological void,” as the researchers write – into a kind of giant CO₂ absorber that absorbs more carbon than it emits.
Huge-scale ecological engineering around the edges of one of the world’s largest and driest deserts has turned it into a carbon sink that absorbs more CO2 than it emits, research suggests. https://t.co/FmxPAevfzO
— Live Science (@LiveScience) February 11, 2026
As the researchers write, the results show “that even the most extreme deserts can be ecologically restored and used to store carbon, thereby helping to mitigate climate change.”
The research team analyzed data from ground observations of various vegetation types and satellite data on precipitation, vegetation cover, photosynthesis and CO₂ fluxes in the Taklamakan over the last 25 years. They also used the Carbon trackers the American one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); a tool that models CO₂ sources and sinks worldwide. The result was a long-term trend towards the spread of vegetation and increasing absorption of CO₂ along the edges of the desert. This coincides with the development of the Green Wall in time and space.
Improvement of vegetation cover
Precipitation during the rainy season from July to September was 2.5 times higher than that during the dry season in the Taklamakan Desert during the study period; it averaged about 16 millimeters per month. This led to an improvement in vegetation cover, green cover and photosynthesis along desert edges. As a result, CO₂ levels over the desert fell from 416 ppm in the dry season to 413 ppm in the rainy season.
Previous research had already suggested that the Taklamakan could be a CO₂ sink. However, these studies had focused on CO₂, which is absorbed by the sand. However, sand is unlikely to represent a stable carbon sink due to climate change, as rising temperatures can cause the air in the sand to expand, releasing additional CO₂.
“Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert represents, albeit only at its edge, the first successful model that demonstrates the possibility of converting a desert into a carbon sink,” Yuk Yung, study co-author and professor of planetary science at Caltech and senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Live Science. The Green Wall’s potential to slow desertification remains unclear, he added. But its role as a carbon sink “could serve as a valuable model for other desert regions.” (dhr)