The Chinese government has spent half a century, and continuing today, working to restore degraded environments.
China began by greening the Loess Plateau, a formerly productive forest and grassland ecosystem turned into a sandy wasteland by centuries of exploitative farming. The government work with villagers on the ground to change farming practices, build dams and terraces, plant trees, and more. Altogether, the project restored 4 million acres and lifted 2.5 million people out of poverty.
See more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2G79sIJ97w
China then applied these same practices to greening the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts, stopping sandstorms, halting the growth of the deserts, and restoring former desert into productive grassland:
Caption says forest coverage increased from 8% to 73%.
The problem with China is that they make this shit look way too easy. What they did with the Loess Plateau is actually unbelievably hard to pull off, even for a socialist government, because it's not just a matter of pouring money/manpower into the problem. You have to work with the local community, educate them but also give them economic incentives to want to restore the environment rather than engage in destructive use of the land.
Some things just can't be purely imposed top-down. So you actually have to design really competent policies that approach the entire human+environment system holistically. And you have to have the discipline to see the project through for decades even if you don't get a return on investment for many years.
And it's hard to convey all of the the work and planning and expertise that went into this when you just show these before and after pictures where some people might be tempted to conclude "oh they just went and planted a bunch of trees, what's so impressive about that?".
Well there are reasons why these areas became as damaged as they did, and unless you address the underlying causes, the ingrained habits and traditional practices, the economic incentives, and so on, you're gonna just have the same happen again.
So yeah, massive props to them for pulling this off. This is really an inspiration for the whole world and a model for other places that are struggling with environmental degradation.