China fights desertification

WATCH VIDEO

Wang Youde, Project manager of Baijitan Forestry Farm, said, "Right now, we are managing to contain desertification here. More energy is being spent here to help the land than is going into damaging it. Now the momentum is being pushed in a positive direction."

The anti-desertification team is irrigating land and setting up "green belts" - desert buffer zones. Grids of straw are planted on the dunes tohelp stabilize the shifting sands long enough to plant drought-resistant plants.

So far, efforts to hold back the desert have been fruitful, and some 24,000 hectares of former desert land in Ningxia is now green.

Thanks to the efforts made by Wang Youde and thousands like him, regular spring sand storms are not as severe as they once were. But as Wang says, they can never do enough work, and the battle to push back the deserts is just beginning.