These are the findings of a report by a joint team of scientists from Tianjin University, China Agricultural University, and their colleagues from Utrecht. The study, published last year in the scientific journal “Earth’s Future,” reveals the hidden costs of mass plantings.
According to Wirtualna Polska, the scale of Beijing’s initiative is comparable to the size of Algeria. Since the 1980s, approximately 78 billion trees have been planted in the country, increasing the share of forests from 10% in 1949 to 25% by 2024. The key program began in 1978, and state media announced its formal completion in 2025.
The intensive development of vegetation cover between 2001 and 2020 triggered significant side effects. The eastern monsoon and arid northwestern macroregions, covering 74% of the country’s area, recorded a decline in available water resources.
Experts attribute this anomaly to a sharp increase in evapotranspiration—the combined effect of physical soil evaporation and plant moisture release. Air currents began to more actively transport water toward the Tibetan Plateau. As a result, the hydrological balance there improved, while other territories began to rapidly lose moisture.
The authors place special emphasis on the mechanics of land transformation. Converting agricultural land to pasture or planting trees on meadows produces different effects. Thus, artificial groves on former steppes increase local precipitation levels, but due to high evaporation, they ultimately deplete groundwater.
The fundamental problem lies in the historical geography of resource distribution. China’s northern provinces account for approximately 46% of the population and more than half of the arable land, but contain only 20% of the nation’s water reserves. Under these conditions, tree planting, which effectively blocks the advance of deserts, can trigger severe moisture shortages in already arid regions.
As with management decisions made by local khokims when planning cropland patterns, any macroecological projects require strict alignment with the hydrological cycle. Landscape change inevitably entails water migration between regions, so sustainable land management is impossible without a comprehensive assessment of these risks.