Afforestation is a widely accepted practice to build terrestrial carbon sinks, but its applications are limited by climatic conditions. Recently, Noor et al. (2026) demonstrate that ecological restoration (China’s Three-North Protective Forest Program, TNP) is transforming hyperarid environment into a carbon sink, providing an encouraging projection for carbon sink built up through afforestation, and extrapolating it to the entire Taklamakan Desert. However, given extremely limited effective water to plants in the region, potential ecohydrological processes derived from nonfield data could easily misinterpreted real field cases…
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) | Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Topics: Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences- Mapping ammonia emission plumes using shortwave infrared imaging spectroscopy
- Correction for Ajourlou et al., Upper mantle temperatures illuminate the Iceland hotspot track and understanding of ice–Earth interactions in Greenland
- Concerns on the human-induced biospheric carbon sink in the Taklamakan Desert
- Reply to Gao et al. and Xu: Greening the Taklamakan: Human efforts to convert desert into a carbon sink
- Misattributed biospheric carbon sink to the Three-North Program in the Taklamakan Desert may lead to an impractical policy: A commentary
- Driven by climate change, sudden swings between wet and dry create “hydrologic whiplash”
- Amazon deforestation reduces precipitation and soybean yields across Southern Brazil
- Canadian wildfires are losing their climate-cooling influence from postfire snow albedo
- Impacts of future sea level change on Greenland from community knowledge, coastal mapping, and glacial isostatic adjustment models
- Enhanced global storm surges by tropical cyclone poleward migration
