Addressing desertification of land is actually pretty smart. It's not pure charity. The land is actually more valuable when it isn't a desert anymore. If the land can support soil and hold water again, it becomes suitable for farming. If you don that sustainably (i.e. don't allow it to turn it back into desert), that adds to the economy.

There's a lot of degraded land all over the world that with a little bit of focus and attention could be upgraded back to something more valuable.

Some example:

- centuries of overgrazing by sheep and goats has turned much of the middle east into a waste land. Simply keeping sheep off the land with some fences can actually restore land within a few years.

- Places like the UK and Ireland used to be covered in Atlantic Rain forest. Forestry and overgrazing has turned much of both countries into land with very low bio diversity. Restoring forests would be a lot of work. But like the middle east, keeping the sheep from destroying new trees before they have a chance to establish themselves would help. Places like Dartmoor are effectively so barren that the only thing that grows there is a type of grass that even sheep don't like.

- Scotland has a lot of planted pine forests that have drowned out native species. Bio diversity is low.

- Parts of Germany have similar issues with lots of production forests having no bio diversity. There's a crisis in parts of Germany where insects are destroying parts of those forests now. The solution is actually just ripping out the production forests and re-introducing native species.

- Prairies in the US used to be kept in check by herds of bison that no longer exist and are no longer able to migrate around. Continuous cattle overgrazing of the same land destroyed much of the land. It no longer recovers in between grazing. And mono culture of low value crops like corn and soy beans isn't helping either.

There are many more examples around the world. The problems vary from area to area but they have in common that local farmers abuse the land and the land then degrades. Soil erosion, problems with water retention, vastly reduced bio diversity, etc. are the result. The other thing they have in common is that putting a stop to the negative behavior tends to revert some of the effects. In some cases fairly quickly even. And as the Chinese show, putting some effort in can actually work. There's no one size fits all solution. But there are plenty of things that can work.

And most of their carbon dioxide production is due to “developed countries” consumption

That was my thought too

Is it possible the trees can change the climate in the region? Can trees dampen regional water flux, seed clouds down range?

Certain areas can release more carbon than trees bind if there are trees there, for example peats (obviously not a desert) and tundras (more akin to a desert). These have often a lot of carbon bound in the ground which can be released.

There is an interesting effect where deserts help rain forests and oceans grow new life. Winds carry desert sands and dust that are rich in iron and phosphorus into the oceans and act as fertilizer. Even lifeless deserts are important to the global ecosystems.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=desert+sands+fertilize+oceans

Surely deforestation hurt native species as well. Is there any reason to not try to reverse some of that damage? Do you think they are going to make things worse overall?

I’ve never heard this mentioned but it seems like an environmentalist could support increasing total life on a piece of land vs preserving specific sparse species.

I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.

A desert already is a collapsed biome relative to when it was not a desert. As such, it has a huge debt to repay to what was lost due to the desertification. If the desertification is not reversed, it will go only deeper into debt, killing what little life is left there via a continued rise in temperature. As such, what is being done to restore the biome is most appropriate.

Yes. But nobody cares about a few unimportant bugs and mice.

Projects around planting trees have often failed, in part from the choice of tree, in part because it takes more than just planting a tree to restore the habitat. It's generally better to work with the existing flora to promote growth and expansion, and/or help the stumps of trees that have been cut-down grow fresh again (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5g60g9vmlY)

Are you able to find it on Google Maps? Having a hard time locating it.

"Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert, although only around its rim, represents the first successful model demonstrating the possibility of transforming a desert into a carbon sink," Yung said.

Per the article:

> 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.

The main problem with attempts at reversing the damage is that forests aren't fungible.

An old growth forest has a rich, balanced ecosystem. Newly planted forests tend to be susceptible to catastrophic damage by various critters, as the species mix is much less complex, and their fauna and flora is relatively impoverished.

Even if that were true, it'd still be a dumb position to take.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

https://www.sunbeltrentals.co.uk/news-and-blogs/decrease-you...

> Of course, we know that fuel consumption varies drastically from machine to machine, so we’ve looked at an example of a very high utilisation rate too. We found that an 8T excavator that spent 11 hours and 3 minutes working, 1 hour and 6 minutes of which were idle, it used 89 litres of fuel and resulted in 237.4kgs of carbon emissions. 4 hours saved on that machine would be a total of 84kgs of carbon emissions on average.

https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/how-much-co2-does-t...

> To determine the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can absorb, we combine average planting densities with a conservative estimate of carbon per hectare to estimate that the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.

As long as they're not taking all day for one tree, I think they'll be OK.