Some stories I heard while living in China. A couple of decades ago farmers in china’s arid regions used to be tasked with planting trees, they would plant them upside down because they knew they didn’t have enough water to feed the trees and their crops. The Gobi was planted with trees a few times to reduce dust storms, but it takes a lot more than just planting trees, so the dust storms would always invariably return as the trees died out. There also used to be a graduation requirement that all students plant trees to graduate, they had farms dedicated to this, and they would dig out the trees planted by the last class so the next class could re-plant them.

I have no idea how effective today’s efforts are compared to efforts of the past. They could have solved the water problem with irrigation or are using more drought resistant trees. It could be that the green belt is going to stick around this time, if the experience is different from the Gobi experience somehow.