New partnership to green Silk Road

1.3 billion trees to be planted along the Silk Road in 10 years under new partnership

The UN Convention of Combating Desertification (UNCCD) and the China Elion Foundation announced a new partnership to combat land degradation and climate change on Tuesday in Sydney at the 6th World Park Congress, according to Xinhua News Agency.

The "Greening Silk Road Partnership" will see a total of 1.3 billion trees planted along the Silk Road in 10 years, and is expected to rehabilitate more than 130,000 hectares of land in the ecologically vulnerable regions along the Silk Road, and contribute dramatically to carbon reduction.

Statistics show that 500 million hectares of degraded land need to be rehabilitated in order to absorb one third of global greenhouse gas emissions today.

The UNCCD is the world's leading organization addressing the issues of desertification and land degradation. The Elion Group is a leading Chinese company specializing in land remediation and ecological rehabilitation based in the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, China's seventh largest desert.

The world today has 36 million square kilometers of land classified as deserts, and the area is spreading at a rate of 50,000 to 70,000 square kilometers every year.

More than 2 billion people live in desert regions. At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2012, the UNCCD set a global goal of zero growth of desertification by 2030.