File photo taken on September 7, 2020 shows desertification control workers making straw-checkerboard barriers in the Tengger Desert, along the construction site of the Qingtongxia-Zhongwei section of the Wuhai-Maqin highway in Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. [IMAGE: XINHUA/Feng Kaihua]

A strong wind blew over Zhongwei, a city near the Tengger Desert in Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and one of the driest places in the country, covering everything in a thin layer of dust.

Zhao Yang, an associate fellow at the Shapotou Desert Research and Experiment Station (SDRES) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), was working in a lab culturing a kind of cyanobacteria key to new desert-control technology.

The station was the birthplace of the use of vast stretches of artificial straw-checkerboard, a technique used to stop sand encroachment which was implemented in China over 60 years ago.

Today, Chinese researchers at the SDRES are dedicated to developing new techniques in combating desertification in China, and have contributed massively to the world’s largest greening areas over the past 20 years.

Combating desertification

Zhao is happy to see the progress taking place using the new desert-control technique.

According to Zhao, it naturally takes around 10 years for a cyanobacteria crust to form on the surface of the sand, which helps prevent it from moving. However, by hybridizing a special bacterial strain, extracted from biological soil crust in the Tengger Desert, with the cultured cyanobacteria, researchers at the SDRES have successfully cut the crust formation time to just one year.

“The new technique has now been implemented. The experimental field under my supervision alone is a huge 33.3 hectares, not to mention the fields supervised by my colleagues in other parts of China,” said Zhao, who has been working at the SDRES for 11 years.

Zhao’s work is a microcosm of China’s efforts to combat desertification, which dates back to over 60 years ago.

When China’s first railway through the Tengger Desert began operation in 1958, foreign experts invited to design the railway predicted that it would likely be buried in sand in just 30 years.

A researcher examines plants at CAS’s Shapotou Desert Research and Experiment Station (SDRES) in Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, June 16, 2021. [IMAGE: XINHUA/LU YING]

However, the wisdom of Chinese researchers has provided a way out. Straw structures, which resemble checkerboards, proved to be the most convenient, environmentally friendly and cheapest way of stopping sand encroachment. Within the checkerboards themselves, the surface of the sand forms a hard crust over time and prevents the sand from moving.

With ample sand-control experience, Ningxia is building its first highway crossing the Tengger Desert, which is expected to be completed in 2021.

In recent years, China has pushed ahead in its greening efforts across the country. Official data shows that in 2020 alone, the country improved the ecology of 2.83 million hectares of grassland, having carried out desertification prevention-and-control work on over 2.09 million hectares of land.

Sharing experience with the world

While making headway in combating desertification over the past several decades, China has shared its techniques and experience in sand control with other countries.

In 1977, China shared the anti-desertification technique used in Shapotou at the UN Conference on Desertification in Nairobi. Since then, dry straw-checkerboards have been used in many parts of the world as an effective way to combat desertification.

“Chinese experience can benefit the world,” said Iraqi agricultural engineer Sarmad Kamil Ali, who was in China in 2013 to learn about sand control.

“The Chinese always surprise the world with creative methods to overcome the difficulties they face. They have different methods to fix the dunes, and I found out recently that they are using more advanced technologies in fixing the sand dunes,” he said.

Since 2005, the research team from CAS’s Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) has been exporting mature desertification control technologies to Central Asia and Africa.

Demonstration bases have been built in many countries, such as those for the ecological restoration of shrub grasslands in Ethiopia, desert plant breeding and the mechanical desertification control in Mauritania, according to Zhang Yuanming, head of the XIEG.

Noam Weisbrod, Director of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, was impressed by the sand control efforts during his trip to North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region several years ago.

The impact of climate change is very similar across different drylands around the globe, Weisbrod said. “I’m a great believer in international cooperation. There is a lot of room for Israel-China cooperation on these topics.”

Desert biodiversity

Despite China’s achievements in desert-control, researchers believe that the country’s anti-desertification methods still need to prove that they can withstand the test of time.

“We should not be complacent with what we have found in desert control,” said the SDRES director Li Xinrong. “We need to do more theoretical research in the field.”

For Li, the ultimate goal of sand control is not to eliminate deserts, but to improve the biodiversity of desert ecosystems and find a way for humans and deserts to live harmoniously.

“Deserts are an indispensable part of nature and a valuable resource,” said Li. “The Earth would not be a beautiful place without them.”

Source: Xinhua