China's Great Green Wall: 66B trees growing faster than natural forests
China's Great Green Wall, a large-scale afforestation project aimed at combating desertification, consists of about 66 billion trees that are growing faster than natural forests, according to a new study. Researchers found that the planted trees absorb carbon more quickly, highlighting both the project's success in boosting forest cover and potential ecological trade-offs.
Background
China's "Great Green Wall" (officially the Three-North Shelter Forest Program) is a massive government-led afforestation effort launched in 1978 to combat desertification across northern China. It aims to plant hundreds of billions of trees in a belt stretching some 4,500 km (2,800 miles) across arid and semi-arid regions. A recent study found that trees in these planted forests are growing faster than trees in natural, unmanaged forests, likely due to intensive human intervention (irrigation, fertilization, species selection). This matters because it challenges the assumption that planted forests are always ecologically inferior to natural ones, though concerns remain about water use, biodiversity, and the long-term sustainability of such large-scale tree planting.