This camel came down together with a caravan of camels from Taklamakan Desert which can be seen on the background. This two-hump camel called Bactrian Camel (Camelus bactrianus) is a species presently restricted in the wild to remote regions of the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang.
Environment ChinaThe Great Green Wall: 30 Million Hectares of Trees Planted
A 46-year-old “green belt” project, stretching 3,000 kilometres around China’s largest desert, has just been completed.
The campaign – entitled the “Three-North Shelterbelt” project, but more commonly known as the Great Green Wall – has led to a massive 30 million hectares of trees being planted.
The Great Green Wall project began in 1978 and now fully encircles China’s Taklamakan Desert. When the project started, total forest cover in China hovered around 10 per cent; today, largely thanks to the project, forest cover in the nation is above 25 per cent. The project has not come without difficulty, with decades of experimentation needed to help determine which tree and plant species are hardiest enough to survive the rough conditions. Even today, though the “Green Belt” has been officially completed, China plans to continue to plant the “strongest” tree and plant species along the desert border to prevent further desertification and even to potentially limit sandstorms from reaching Beijing – a pillar of the project that has not yet been attained.
