On Tuesday morning, President Xi Jinping visited a state forestry area in Linhe District in the city of Bayannur, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and learned about progress in the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program (TSFP).

China's "three-North" areas--the northwest, north and northeast regions, are home to deserts, including the Gobi and a lot of desertification. To tackle desertification problems like sandstorms and soil erosion, China launched the "Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program" in 1978, which is also dubbed "China's Green Great Wall." Over the past four decades, the program has increased the forest area by 3.014 million square kilometers, according to 2018 data, and the total area of the project has reached 4.358 million square kilometers, accounting for 45 percent of the country's land area based on the data released by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration of China.

Based on the contribution of the program, China's efforts on afforestation have seen remarkable progress, with the nation's forest coverage rate more than doubling from 12 percent in the early 1980s to 24.02 percent last year, the fastest in the world. According to data released by NASA, about a quarter of the newly added green areas in the world from 2000 to 2017 came from China, and China's contribution ranks first in the world.

In the past decade, a total of 188 thousand square kilometers of sand prevention and control tasks, along with 3,590 square kilometers of rocky desertification control tasks, have been completed with the help of TSFP. After over 40 years of unremitting efforts, China has made remarkable achievements in preventing and controlling desertification, and realized a historic transformation from "sand forcing humans to retreat" to "trees forcing sand to retreat" in key areas, according to a speech by President Xi on Tuesday.

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Data editor: Sun Yiwen
Graphics designer: Mukesh Mohanan