China has launched a new offensive on desertification in western Xinjiang Uygur autonomous area, deploying the identical technology used on the moon to assist safeguard meals safety.
Last month, a number of initiatives involving sand management, desertification prevention, and wind erosion and salinity administration have been launched at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG).
The initiatives are supposed to assist the area construct an ecological barrier to guard the area’s arable land from erosion and desertification, in accordance with a report final month by Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Xinjiang is one of the foremost websites of China’s “great green wall”, a large mission to forestall desertification or the degradation of fertile land into arid desert-like land resulting from local weather variations and human exercise.
This consists of surrounding the Taklamakan Desert – China’s largest desert and the second-largest sand-shifting desert in the world – with a inexperienced belt that features drought-tolerant vegetation and sand-fixing applied sciences akin to straw grids.
Among the new applied sciences being deployed to battle desertification at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert are six environmentally pleasant supplies for sand management.