Saihanba: Turning a Dust Bowl into a Man-Made Forest for Beijing

By the 1950s, logging and drought had stripped Saihanba, on the edge of Inner Mongolia north of Beijing, down to bare ground that fed sandstorms into the capital. Starting in 1962, generations of foresters at the state-run Saihanba Mechanized Forest Farm hand-planted trees across the plateau's harsh, high-altitude terrain, raising forest cover from 11.4% to about 80% today across the farm's roughly 92,000-hectare area. The farm, named a 2017 UN Champion of the Earth, now supplies an estimated 137 million cubic meters of clean water a year to the Beijing-Tianjin region. It is frequently cited by Chinese authorities as the flagship model for the country's broader anti-desertification campaigns.