In these days, with environmental collapse seemingly lurking around every corner, there is a story of hope to be told by journalists across the world.

The science is clear: Many of the planet’s systems are in decline. The Earth is warming at unprecedented rates. Our aquifers are drying up. The world’s biodiversity is being lost at an alarming pace. And yet, scientists are finding that restoration of large tracts of land can perhaps help with many of these issues, because restoration can have multiple effects for the regional environment, and can even improve the lives of those living in the once-degraded land markedly better. Journalist and ecologist John D. Liu discussed some of these transformative effects during a recent webinar hosted by the Resilience Media Project at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Liu was a journalist in China back in 1994 when he first visited the Loess Plateau. This was the birthplace of agriculture in China, where centuries of deforestation and unsustainable animal management led to erosion, silt overwhelming the Yellow River, and widespread degradation. By the time Liu arrived, he found the region had become a moonscape — hillsides denuded of vegetation, dust clouds blowing across the landscape, and a people hungry and desperate for change.

In the mid-1990s, the Chinese government launched a major restoration project in the Loess Plateau, hoping to return the land to its once-productive state. Lui documented the project for the World Bank, a major funder of the work. “It took them about four and a half years to design the project,” says Liu, because the scale of what they hoped to do was so large. And then the actual on the groundwork began. “After ten years, the results were transformational.” Those results included a return of vegetation. Once-barren hillsides were now green and lush. Dust clouds no longer plagued the region’s residents. Native plants and wildlife were once again in abundance. The soil health was being restored, with a healthy mix of soil microbes. And carbon was once again being taken out of the air and stored underground.