‘Sand warriors’ halt encroaching desert with checkerboards
Print Edition
Fifty-nine-year-old Wang Youde remembers the hard days in the 1970s when his family was forced to abandon their village because of the encroaching Maowusu Desert.
Three decades later, Wang has built a 47-kilometer shelterbelt with his team in Lingwu City in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
At the Baijitan Nature Reserve, Wang and other “sand warriors” are combatting desertification by placing large straw checkerboards on sand dunes and burying them a bit to keep sand from blowing away.
Every August after the wheat harvest, Wang and workers collect straw, fashion 1-meter-square checkerboards and partially dig them into the sand.
“We work in pairs: one places the straw on the sand, while the other fixes the straw into the sand with a spade,” said worker Wu Fang. “In this way, we make our work more efficient.”
Easy to build, the checkerboards break the wind, deep dunes in place and allow soil to form. After enough soil is in place, drought-resistant plants can be grown.
“Once the sand is fixed, we plant grass, shrubs or trees. Eventually, the sand dunes stop advancing and vegetation can be restored,” said Ping Xuezhi, vice head of Ningxia’s Forestry Bureau.
Located on the fringes of the Maowusu Desert, the Baijitan Nature Reserve protects thousands of hectares of farmland as well as the nearby airport.
The reserve is also home to rare and endangered birds such as the black stork, great bustard and whooper swan.
The reserve covers 70,000 hectares, of which 70 percent was desert when it was established in 1985. The figures has been reduced to 50 percent with the straw checkerboards.
Devised in the 1950s, the checkerboard technique has been used widely around China. The technique has been honored by the UN Environment Program’s Global 500 Roll of Honor for its achievements in sand control.
Over the years, many foreign experts have also come to Ningxia to learn the technique. Last year, experts from the Middle East attended a forestry bureau forum on sand control using the checkerboard technique.
Since 2006, authorities in Ningxia have offered sand control training courses for foreign researchers and technicians. Last August, 16 trainees from Yemen, Sudan, Morocco, Palestinian territories and other countries attended a month-long training course.
Ningxia is one of 13 provincial-level desert areas in China, a country where 27 percent of the total land area is desert.
To combat desertification, a national forestation program was launched in north, northeast and northwest China in 1978. It aims to boost forest coverage to about 4.07 million square kilometers by 2050, accounting for 42.4 percent of the total land area of China. Statistics indicate that forest coverage in the three areas increased from 5 percent in 1977 to 12.4 percent at the end of 2012.
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