UNCCD Chief: China's Desert Reversal Is a Global Model

From Gobi Sands to Global Blueprint

When Yasmine Fouad, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), sat down with China Media Group for an exclusive interview this week, her message was pointed: artificial intelligence is becoming an essential tool in the fight against land degradation, and China's record of reversing desertification offers a working blueprint for a planet that is losing productive land at an alarming rate.

The interview landed in the middle of COP17, the 17th session of the UNCCD conference of parties, which runs from August 17 to 28 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Dubbed a "COP of implementation" by organizers, the summit is focused less on new declarations and more on taking proven restoration models to scale. Fouad described China as "one of the clearest large-scale examples of how land degradation can be reversed," a remark that framed Beijing's decades-long greening campaign as a central exhibit of the conference.

A 'COP of Implementation' in Ulaanbaatar

The choice of host country is deliberate. More than 70 percent of Mongolia's territory suffers from desertification, concentrated most severely in the southern Gobi region, and spring cyclones regularly lift massive dust clouds that drift across East Asia. For the UNCCD, holding the summit in the heart of one of the world's most affected regions is a reminder of the human and economic stakes.

Those stakes are enormous. According to the UNCCD, addressing land degradation and drought requires roughly US$355 billion in annual investment, yet current funding stands at only about US$77 billion per year. Land degradation already affects a third of the Earth's land surface and threatens the livelihoods of a billion people. Fouad has warned that degradation is not merely an environmental problem: it drives displacement, forced migration, and conflict over scarce resources, with risks that extend to human health and food security.

China's Reversal: 53 Percent and Counting

China's own history makes its current position striking. One of the countries most severely affected by desertification, with vast arid heartlands across the northwest, north, and northeast, Beijing launched the "Three-North" Shelterbelt Forest Program in 1978 to curb the spread of deserts and restore degraded land. The program remains active today, a rare example of policy continuity across nearly five decades.

The results are measurable. 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. Along the southeastern edge of the Tengger Desert, grids of straw woven into shifting sands hold back dunes that might otherwise creep southward; pioneered in the 1950s, the technique helped Ningxia become China's first provincial-level region to reverse desertification.

Restoration has also been married to commerce. In Ningxia, barren dunes now host solar arrays and desert tourism hubs, while in neighboring Gansu Province, sand-dwelling crops such as 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 ahead of the conference.

Exporting the Playbook: From the Sahel to Saudi Arabia

As one of the earliest signatories to the UNCCD, China has spent years exporting its techniques. Along the southern edge of the Sahara, experience from 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.

Concrete projects are multiplying. The China-Africa Green Technology Park in Mauritania, established in 2024, has carved a two-hectare oasis out of the desert, with solar-powered irrigation protecting fruit trees and vegetable seedlings; it yielded its first harvest of peppers, cabbage, watermelons, and tomatoes in February 2025, trained 45 local technicians, and created 120 jobs. In Kazakhstan, trial crops of Chinese-developed quinoa have reclaimed saline land while cutting water use by more than 30 percent. Chinese experts are also supporting Mongolia's "Billion Trees" movement and exporting solar-powered sand-stabilization techniques to Saudi Arabia.

Mongolia: Beijing's Key Regional Partner

Nowhere is China's cooperation more direct than in Mongolia, its neighbor across the Gobi. Mongolia faces a critical shortage of sapling nurseries, a bottleneck China has moved to fill. Drawing on geographic proximity and decades of seedling cultivation know-how, China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has become Mongolia's primary sapling supplier; by early June this year, it had shipped more than 11.7 million saplings across the border.

Institutional ties run deep. In September 2023, the China-Mongolia Desertification Prevention and Control Cooperation Center was inaugurated, run by Beijing Forestry University, to oversee demonstration bases and environmental monitoring stations. Meteorological cooperation has followed: on April 1 this year the two countries held their first joint video briefing on spring dust risks, and at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China donated its AI-powered meteorological warning system MAZU to Mongolia. Chinese enterprises contribute on the ground as well; a China Railway Resources Group mine in Dornod Province has planted more than 12,000 trees and restored more than 25 hectares of ecological land under Mongolia's billion-tree program.

Why Japan Watches the Gobi

For Japanese readers, the desertification story is not a distant environmental dispatch; it is a matter of air quality. Kosa, or yellow dust, is composed of mineral particles lifted from semi-arid areas of the Asian continent, particularly the Gobi Desert, and transported by westerly winds to Japan. The Japan Meteorological Agency monitors kosa at stations and via satellite, running an aerosol model that issues forecasts each morning.

This year's spring season was severe. On April 21 and 22, 2026, a major kosa event blanketed Japan from Kyushu to Tohoku after a cold front swept dust across the country; visibility dropped below 10 kilometers in many areas and below 5 kilometers in some, raising concerns for traffic and flights. NASA's Earth Observatory captured the plume from orbit. For Japan, then, Mongolia's desertification is not abstract: the dust that darkens Japanese skies in spring originates in the same degraded grasslands and Gobi fringe that COP17 is trying to restore. That gives Tokyo a direct stake in the success of regional greening cooperation, including the China-Mongolia projects unfolding across the border.

What to Watch For

COP17 enters its second week with several threads to track. Fouad's emphasis on artificial intelligence points to a growing role for smart technologies in restoration; AI-powered robots are already being deployed to plant vegetation in China, and she has called for greater international cooperation on AI and desertification control. Her office is also preparing the third edition of the Global Land Outlook, which will set the scientific baseline for future negotiations, with Chinese experts participating actively in the work.

For Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific, the summit's real test is whether the "COP of implementation" can convert pledges into hectares restored across Mongolia, the Sahel, and Central Asia. The funding gap between the US$77 billion currently invested and the US$355 billion needed remains the central obstacle. If China's model proves transferable at scale, the payoff extends far beyond Beijing's borders - to the farmers of Ningxia, the herders of the Gobi, and the commuters of Tokyo breathing cleaner spring air.

By Kenji Tanaka, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: CGTN, Xinhua, Qiushi, The Diplomat.