China’s effort to build large solar power “bases” in and around the desert is a major part of its current renewable plan.
What is less known is that the initiative – which has expanded rapidly in the country’s arid north and northwest – is also a part of China’s campaign to combat desertification, an issue increasingly exacerbated by climate change.
For more than four decades, Beijing has been trying to prevent sand from degrading its land and forming dust storms with an afforestation programme called the “Three-North Shelterbelt” (三北防护林).
Over the past two years, the programme – described as China’s “war on sand” by the media – has been boosted by the development of large-scale solar bases in far-flung regions, such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.
Installing solar panels in the desert can not only generate power, but also help prevent sand dunes from moving, according to Dr He Jijiang, executive deputy director of the Research Center for Energy Transition and Social Development at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
Energy companies’ investments also provide financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns – an apparent obstacle in the past – Dr He tells Carbon Brief at a side event in the China pavilion at the ongoing 16th session of the conference of parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Taming of the sand
China is one of the worst-hit countries by desertification, which essentially means land degradation in dry lands. When land degrades, it becomes less healthy and productive.
Nearly 18% of China’s landmass – roughly seven times the size of the UK – is affected by the issue, according to statistics reported by Guan Zhi’ou, director of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration and the head of the Chinese delegation to COP16, in November.
China’s effort to combat desertification has a strong link with its – and the world’s – climate actions.
Soil is the second largest natural carbon sink on Earth after oceans and stores a large amount of carbon. When land degrades, not only does it lose the ability to store as much carbon, it can also release carbon into the atmosphere, driving further climate change.
On the other hand, climate change accelerates land degradation and China is on the front line. The country has seen the largest total area shift from non-dryland into drylands over the past three decades, according to a major scientific report published by the UNCCD at COP16. This means more parts of China are now prone to land degradation.
Since the introduction of the Three-North Shelterbelt programme in 1978, China has adopted a series of measures to fight desertification, from planting sand-blocking vegetation to laying straw on the ground in the shape of checkerboards to prevent its vast deserts from expanding. These solutions have enabled the country to protect about 360,000km2 of desertified land and to rehabilitate 79,000km2 of it, Guan said.
The ancient Chinese people built the Great Wall and Beijing now intends to build a “Green Great Wall”. According to the plan, the Three-North programme will see a total of 350,000km2 of trees planted in northern regions over the space of 73 years – until 2050 – to block out dust storms, stabilise the soil and improve land fertility.
Research by the Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that emissions averaging 213m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent were absorbed by forest, land and the environment every year between 1980 and 2015, due to the Three-North Shelterbelt programme, according to a release published by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
Solar solution
China’s plan for renewable energy from 2021 to 2025 calls for the “large-scale development” of its sand-plus-solar anti-desertification method, a concept Beijing started promoting around two years ago.
The concept centres around managing arid areas via building and maintaining solar farms. It stems from years of experience accumulated by Chinese solar developers, which have built solar farms in the desert for more than a decade – with varying degrees of success.
“Building solar farms needs a lot of space. China has vast deserts, so [companies] wanted to take advantage of it,” Dr He explains.
But to operate solar farms in such harsh conditions, these companies must first take various protective measures – and these measures helped combat desertification, too.
For example, companies need to put up fences around their solar farms to stop animals from entering, install anti-dust nets to prevent sand from gathering on equipment and make straw checkerboards around their bases to prevent nearby sand dunes from shifting, Dr He says.
Solar panels also bring benefits to the ground underneath. For example, they can reduce water evaporation by blocking out direct sunshine, according to Dr Chen Siyu, a professor at the college of atmospheric sciences at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, a city situated on the edge of the Gobi desert in China.
Solar panels can “significantly increase” the soil moisture of dry regions and, therefore, help plants to grow, Dr Chen tells Carbon Brief. A 2021 study conducted in northwest China projected that the soil moisture would increase by up to 113.6% when it is sheltered.
“Solar panels can also form a natural barrier, helping to shed wind speed and prevent dust storms from occurring and spreading,” she says.
Ramping up transition
The construction of solar farms also injects financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns, providing incentives for them to carry on, Dr He notes.
“In the past, planting trees only brought ecological benefits, not economic returns,” he says. “Now, if a company wants to build a solar power station, it needs to cover all related costs, from hiring equipment to growing plants.”
Ramping up the solar-plus-sand method can scale up China’s renewable deployment, as well as improving soil conditions by bringing greenery, vegetable plots and livestock to the desert and barren land. Because of this, dryland has become “a type of resource”, Dr He says.
The Chinese government has been pushing the concept as a way to upscale the development of desert-based solar.
But there are concerns over whether the country’s grid is ready to transport such a large amount of solar power from remote areas to big cities on the eastern coast thousands of kilometres away.
Dr He recognises the challenge. “We don’t have enough long-distance transmission lines, but we are building many,” he says.
A shorter version of this article appeared in Carbon Brief’s China Briefing newsletter on 12 December 2024.
The post Explainer: How China’s renewables rollout boosts its ‘war on sand’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Explainer: How China’s renewables rollout boosts its ‘war on sand’
The case shows that climate change is a fundamental human rights violation—and the victory of Bonaire, a Dutch territory, could open the door for similar lawsuits globally.
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Greenpeace Netherlands campaigner Eefje de Kroon.
A Tiny Caribbean Island Sued the Netherlands Over Climate Change, and Won
Climate Change
Greenpeace organisations to appeal USD $345 million court judgment in Energy Transfer’s intimidation lawsuit
SYDNEY, Saturday 28 February 2026 — Greenpeace International and Greenpeace organisations in the US announce they will seek a new trial and, if necessary, appeal the decision with the North Dakota Supreme Court following a North Dakota District Court judgment today awarding Energy Transfer (ET) USD $345 million.
ET’s SLAPP suit remains a blatant attempt to silence free speech, erase Indigenous leadership of the Standing Rock movement, and punish solidarity with peaceful resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace International will also continue to seek damages for ET’s bullying lawsuits under EU anti-SLAPP legislation in the Netherlands.
Mads Christensen, Greenpeace International Executive Director said: “Energy Transfer’s attempts to silence us are failing. Greenpeace International will continue to resist intimidation tactics. We will not be silenced. We will only get louder, joining our voices to those of our allies all around the world against the corporate polluters and billionaire oligarchs who prioritise profits over people and the planet.
“With hard-won freedoms under threat and the climate crisis accelerating, the stakes of this legal fight couldn’t be higher. Through appeals in the US and Greenpeace International’s groundbreaking anti-SLAPP case in the Netherlands, we are exploring every option to hold Energy Transfer accountable for multiple abusive lawsuits and show all power-hungry bullies that their attacks will only result in a stronger people-powered movement.”
The Court’s final judgment today rejects some of the jury verdict delivered in March 2025, but still awards hundreds of millions of dollars to ET without a sound basis in law. The Greenpeace defendants will continue to press their arguments that the US Constitution does not allow liability here, that ET did not present evidence to support its claims, that the Court admitted inflammatory and irrelevant evidence at trial and excluded other evidence supporting the defense, and that the jury pool in Mandan could not be impartial.[1][2]
ET’s back-to-back lawsuits against Greenpeace International and the US organisations Greenpeace USA (Greenpeace Inc.) and Greenpeace Fund are clear-cut examples of SLAPPs — lawsuits attempting to bury nonprofits and activists in legal fees, push them towards bankruptcy and ultimately silence dissent.[3] Greenpeace International, which is based in the Netherlands, is pursuing justice in Europe, with a suit against ET under Dutch law and the European Union’s new anti-SLAPP directive, a landmark test of the new legislation which could help set a powerful precedent against corporate bullying.[4]
Kate Smolski, Program Director at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “This is part of a worrying trend globally: fossil fuel corporations are increasingly using litigation to attack and silence ordinary people and groups using the law to challenge their polluting operations — and we’re not immune to these tactics here in Australia.
“Rulings like this have a chilling effect on democracy and public interest litigation — we must unite against these silencing tactics as bad for Australians and bad for our democracy. Our movement is stronger than any corporate bully, and grows even stronger when under attack.”
Energy Transfer’s SLAPPs are part of a wave of abusive lawsuits filed by Big Oil companies like Shell, Total, and ENI against Greenpeace entities in recent years.[3] A couple of these cases have been successfully stopped in their tracks. This includes Greenpeace France successfully defeating TotalEnergies’ SLAPP on 28 March 2024, and Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace International forcing Shell to back down from its SLAPP on 10 December 2024.
-ENDS-
Images available in Greenpeace Media Library
Notes:
[1] The judgment entered by North Dakota District Court Judge Gion follows a jury verdict finding Greenpeace entities liable for more than US$660 million on March 19, 2025. Judge Gion subsequently threw out several items from the jury’s verdict, reducing the total damages to approximately US$345 million.
[2] Public statements from the independent Trial Monitoring Committee
[3] Energy Transfer’s first lawsuit was filed in federal court in 2017 under the RICO Act – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a US federal statute designed to prosecute mob activity. The case was dismissed in 2019, with the judge stating the evidence fell “far short” of what was needed to establish a RICO enterprise. The federal court did not decide on Energy Transfer’s claims based on state law, so Energy Transfer promptly filed a new case in a North Dakota state court with these and other state law claims.
[4] Greenpeace International sent a Notice of Liability to Energy Transfer on 23 July 2024, informing the pipeline giant of Greenpeace International’s intention to bring an anti-SLAPP lawsuit against the company in a Dutch Court. After Energy Transfer declined to accept liability on multiple occasions (September 2024, December 2024), Greenpeace International initiated the first test of the European Union’s anti-SLAPP Directive on 11 February 2025 by filing a lawsuit in Dutch court against Energy Transfer. The case was officially registered in the docket of the Court of Amsterdam on 2 July, 2025. Greenpeace International seeks to recover all damages and costs it has suffered as a result of Energy Transfers’s back-to-back, abusive lawsuits demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from Greenpeace International and the Greenpeace organisations in the US. The next hearing in the Court of Amsterdam is scheduled for 16 April, 2026.
Media contact:
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
The Trump administration’s relentless rollback of public health and environmental protections has allowed widespread toxic exposures to flourish, warn experts who helped implement safeguards now under assault.
In a new report that outlines a dozen high-risk pollutants given new life thanks to weakened, delayed or rescinded regulations, the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency staff, warns that the EPA under President Donald Trump has abandoned the agency’s core mission of protecting people and the environment from preventable toxic exposures.
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Greenpeace organisations to appeal USD $345 million court judgment in Energy Transfer’s intimidation lawsuit
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