Sandy desertification in north China

Along with the development of economy and society, desertification exerts increasingly profound influences on natural environment and social-economic advancement and has attracted widespread attention from the world. China, as one of the countries that suffered from severe desertification problems, has made many efforts to research and combat desertification and has progressed in understanding and combating desertification through many years of hard work. Based on existing experiences and research achievements, this paper briefly discusses the causes, developmental processes, damage assessment and control mechanism of desertification in Northern China so as to provide some basic experiences for the further study of desertification in the future.