Fighting desertification -- a crisis affecting a third of the Earth's land surface and threatening a billion livelihoods -- has rarely lacked goodwill or planted saplings. The hurdle has always been taking proven solutions to scale.
Billed as a "COP of implementation," the 17th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) aims to bridge that gap, bringing governments together in Mongolia with a central focus on elevating successful restoration models to a global level.
Leveraging decades of domestic restoration and a long-standing commitment to sharing its expertise abroad, Beijing is using the "China Corner" at the ongoing COP17 to showcase its environmental playbook -- an effort UNCCD chief Yasmine Fouad called "one of the clearest large-scale examples of how land degradation can be reversed."
CHINA'S SOLUTIONS
Along the southeastern edge of China's Tengger Desert, grids of straw woven into the shifting sands are holding back dunes that might otherwise creep southward.
Pioneered in the 1950s, the technique helped Ningxia, a landlocked region hemmed in by deserts on three sides in northwestern China, become the country's first provincial-level region to reverse desertification.
China's fight against desertification is waged on a staggering scale. One of the countries most severely affected by desertification, China has vast arid heartlands spanning the northwest, north, and northeast, leading Beijing to launch the "Three-North" Shelterbelt Forest Program in 1978 to curb the spread of deserts and restore degraded land.
Today, China has brought 53 percent of its treatable degraded land under management, accounting for roughly a quarter of the world's newly added green areas in recent years.
Moreover, across the desert fringes, ecological restoration is being married to commercial pragmatism.
In Ningxia, barren dunes now host solar arrays and desert tourism hubs. In neighboring Gansu Province, sand-dwelling crops like Cistanche and desert onions anchor a commercial ecosystem of more than 100 agricultural enterprises.
"China's experience demonstrates that when restoration is integrated into broader development planning, environmental action becomes an investment in people and prosperity," Fouad said.
"As we move toward COP17, the priority is to translate practical experience like this into stronger cooperation, greater investment and faster implementation, because the scale of land degradation and drought today requires stronger and more coordinated action," she said ahead of the conference.
SHARING KNOW-HOW
As one of the earliest signatories to the UNCCD, China has been exporting its technologies and expertise worldwide.
Along the southern edge of the Sahara, China's experience with the Three-North program has helped shape the African Union's Great Green Wall Initiative, launched in 2007 to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land across the Sahel-Sahara region and create 10 million green jobs by 2030.
Established in 2024, the China-Africa Green Technology Park in Mauritania has carved a two-hectare oasis out of the desert.
Dark blue solar panels power an efficient irrigation system, while belts of forage grasses, palm trees and bougainvillea shield fruit trees and vegetable seedlings from wind and sand, yielding its first harvest -- peppers, cabbage, watermelons and tomatoes -- in February 2025.
Beyond building the park, China has also helped train 45 local technicians in greening technologies and created 120 jobs for the local community.
Messouda Baham Mohamed Laghdaf, Mauritanian minister of environment and sustainable development, hailed the project as "a green revolution in the making," calling China an "irreplaceable" partner.
Chinese ecological expertise is reaching beyond Africa's green belts.
In Kazakhstan, trial crops of Chinese-developed quinoa have reclaimed saline land while slashing water use by over 30 percent. Meanwhile, Chinese experts are supporting Mongolia's "Billion Trees" movement and exporting solar-powered sand-stabilization techniques to Saudi Arabia, merging ecological restoration with energy transition across the region.
Noting that Egypt loses critical land every year to drought and creeping dunes, Hosam Shawky, president of Egypt's Desert Research Center, said, "This makes cooperation with China in green belt and reforestation projects vital, not only to protect the environment but also to safeguard investments in new urban and agricultural areas."
