China’s Desertification Is Causing Trouble Across Asia

Creeping desertification in China is swallowing thousands of square kilometers of productive soil every year. It’s a challenge of gigantic and unprecedented proportions.
China’s Desertification Is Causing Trouble Across Asia
A villager plants trees to try and keep the sand from shifting to other areas in the Hobq Desert in Hangjin County, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, northern China, on May 5, 2006. Desertification in some western and northern regions has accelerated in recent years due to drastic water shortage, destruction of grassland resources, pollution, and other reasons, according to state media. (China Photos/Getty Images)
5/17/2016
Updated:
5/17/2016

Creeping desertification in China is swallowing thousands of square kilometers of productive soil every year. It’s a challenge of gigantic and unprecedented proportions.

The rate of desertification increased throughout the second half of last century and, although this trend has since stabilized, the situation remains very serious.

Sand dunes in the Gobi desert, some 1250 miles northwest of Beijing, on April 20, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)
Sand dunes in the Gobi desert, some 1250 miles northwest of Beijing, on April 20, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

More than a quarter of the entire country is now degraded or turning to desert, thanks to “overgrazing by livestock, over cultivation, excessive water use, or changes in climate.” The Gobi desert alone gobbles up 3,600 square kilometers of grassland each year. China’s own State Forestry Administration has identified land desertification as the country’s most important ecological problem, and climate change will only make things worse.

Ecological disasters have social effects. Desertification threatens the subsistence of about a third of China’s population, especially those in the country’s west and north, and could pose serious challenges to political and economic stability. It costs China roughly $6.9 billion per year.

Research shows that “for seriously desertified regions, the loss amounts to as much as 23.16 percent of … annual GDP.” The fact that one third of the country’s land area is eroded has led some 400 million people to struggle to cope with a lack of productive soil, destabilized climatological conditions and severe water shortages. Droughts damage “about 160,000 square kilometers of cropland each year, double the area damaged in the 1950s.”

Chinese women lay hay in a grid to prevent the sand from floating with the wind in the desert of Baijitan Conservation Area, near Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China, on July 17, 2010. The women then try to push back the sand by planting bushes. Almost 800 million hectares of farmland have been turning into desert over the past few decades; many people including the government have been trying to reverse this trend. (Feng Li/Getty Images)
Chinese women lay hay in a grid to prevent the sand from floating with the wind in the desert of Baijitan Conservation Area, near Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China, on July 17, 2010. The women then try to push back the sand by planting bushes. Almost 800 million hectares of farmland have been turning into desert over the past few decades; many people including the government have been trying to reverse this trend. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

Blaming the desertification on overgrazing and bad cultivation, the state has since 2005 started to reallocate millions of people from dry and barren territories under its controversial and hotly-contested “ecological migration” program.

Deforestation has only made things worse. Greenpeace writes that only 2 percent of the country’s original forests remain intact, of which “only 0.1 percent is fully protected.”

Despite extraordinary efforts by the government to reduce the rate of erosion, culminating in the largest reforestation project ever undertaken, the government itself conceded in 2011 that the “desertification trend has not fundamentally reversed.”

Sand dunes in the Gobi desert, some 1250 miles northwest of Beijing, on April 20, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)
Sand dunes in the Gobi desert, some 1250 miles northwest of Beijing, on April 20, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

Stormy Geopolitics

Dust and sand storms have intensified and now pose provocative geopolitical challenges. The Gobi desert which spans China and Mongolia is the world’s second largest dust source, after the Sahara. Whirling soil sediments are an annual plague in western China but also move all the way across the Pacific and beyond. Traces of China’s deserts have been found as far away as New Zealand or the French Alps, and “yellow dust” costs the Korean and Japanese economies billions of US dollars each year. Even worse off is Mongolia, which itself is facing desertification, and will be particularly affected by global warming.

Inhaling this dust has devastating effects on the health of animals and humans alike. Asian dust has in the past decade been linked to both cardiovascular and respiratory diseases while more recent research discovered “a statistically significant association between Asian dust storms and daily mortality.”

Dust storms also transport toxic pollutants, bacteria, viruses, pollen and fungi. Microbiologists looked at a dust storm in South Korea and found big increases in aerial bacteria.

Skyscrapers in downtown Seoul, South Korea, on March 13, 2006, are shrouded by yellow dust storms blowing in from China's Gobi desert. (Kim Jae-hwan/AFP/Getty Images)
Skyscrapers in downtown Seoul, South Korea, on March 13, 2006, are shrouded by yellow dust storms blowing in from China's Gobi desert. (Kim Jae-hwan/AFP/Getty Images)

Working Together to Fight the Dust

Dust and sand storms don’t respect international borders, so it’s no wonder they have become a big worry for multilateral governance. Back in 2005 the Asian Development Bank, together with several U.N. agencies and regional countries, drew up a master plan to promote cooperative solutions.

More recently, dust was on the agenda at a 2015 trilateral summit attended by South Korea, Japan and China. Environment ministers from the three countries meet each year and have established special working groups to “improve forecasting accuracy and to develop measures of vegetation restoration in source areas in China.”

Sand dunes in the Gobi desert, some 1250 miles northwest of Beijing, on April 20, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)
Sand dunes in the Gobi desert, some 1250 miles northwest of Beijing, on April 20, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

These are positive steps. China can’t pretend its desertification is its own problem as the effects on other countries are too obvious. Swirling dust storms have forced other states to take a direct interest in China’s desert sands.

Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Teaching Fellow in International Relations and East Asia, University of Warwick in the U.K. This article was originally published on The Conversation. A version of this article also appears on the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute Blog.