In 2005, One Dam Brought Back a Dying Sea: 10 Places That Turned Green Again

A NASA-led study of satellite data, published in February 2019, found that the world’s green leaf area grew by about 5% from the early 2000s to 2017. That added an area equal to all of the Amazon rainforests.

China and India account for one-third of the greening, though they hold only 9% of the planet’s land covered by plants. In China, about 42% of its share comes from programs to protect and plant forests. NASA notes that the gain doesn’t make up for natural forests lost in places such as Brazil and Indonesia.

Mangroves are salt-tolerant trees that grow along tropical coasts and river mouths. A study published in Science on June 4, 2026, based on Landsat satellite images from 1984 to 2023, found that global mangrove cover shifted from long-term decline to expansion, starting around 2010.

Gains in the last decade have nearly made up for the earlier losses. New mangrove forests formed on their own along river deltas and muddy coasts in northern Australia, South Asia, the Middle East and parts of the Americas. Losses continue in some places, especially in West and Central Africa.

Centuries of grazing had erased almost all the trees in the Carrifran valley near Moffat, in southern Scotland, except one rowan. About 600 people donated a few hundred pounds each to buy the 1,600-acre valley, and on Jan. 1, 2000, the founders planted the first 100 saplings.

Nearly a quarter of a century and 750,000 planted trees later, native woodland is coming back. The lone rowan, known as the Survivor, was named Scotland’s Tree of the Year in 2020.

The Aral Sea in Central Asia was once one of the largest lakes on Earth, and it shrank for decades after the rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate farmland. In 2005, Kazakhstan finished the Kok-Aral dam, an $85.8 million project that keeps water in the northern part of the sea from draining south.

NASA satellite images from April 2005 and April 2007 show the water level rising all around the North Aral Sea. By the spring of 2006, the town of Aralsk was close to the water again.

Coastal Louisiana has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of land over the past 80 years. But at the mouths of the Atchafalaya River and the Wax Lake Outlet, new land first rose above the water in 1973, after a severe flood, and it has kept growing.

By one Louisiana State University estimate, the two deltas grow by about 1 square mile a year. From space, the two deltas look like green fans spreading into the bay, with reeds and willows taking root on the higher sandbars.

Sebkha el Melah, in the Algerian Sahara, is usually a dry salt flat. In September 2024, a storm dropped heavy rain on the region, and the lake began to fill.

By Oct. 16, 2024, water covered 74 square miles to a depth of 7.2 feet, and a researcher estimated the lake was about one-third full. Since 2000, only two other rain events, in 2008 and 2014, filled it more. After the 2008 fill, it took until 2012 to dry out completely.

After the last dams on the Klamath River came down in 2024 and the reservoirs drained, plants moved onto the bare lake beds. A NASA map of vegetation change from 2024 to 2025, made from Landsat 8 and 9 data, shows the land around the river glowing bright green.

By spring 2025, flowers were blooming on the new riverbanks.

Instead of planting seedlings, farmers in Niger and elsewhere in West Africa began protecting and pruning the roots and stumps of old trees that were still alive under their fields, a method called farmer-managed natural regeneration. By 2018, the Guardian reported, it had regenerated more than 6 million hectares with about 240 million trees.

In Niger, Scientific American reported, the trees helped raise water tables by 15 meters, about 49 feet, between the early 1990s and 2005.

In the 1940s, about 75% of Costa Rica was covered in rainforest. By 1987, somewhere between a third and a half of that forest had been cleared, much of it for cattle pasture. In 1996, the country made it illegal to cut down forest without approval, and in 1997 it started paying landowners for the environmental services their land provides.

Today almost 60% of the land is forest again, CNN reported in 2020, and old, original forest makes up around a quarter of it.

Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has planted saplings and seeds on a bare sandbar of the Brahmaputra River, on Majuli in India’s Assam state, the world’s largest river island. The Hindu reported in 2019 that his forest covers about 550 hectares, around 1,360 acres.

It is visited by about 120 species of birds and by elephants, rhinos and tigers from Kaziranga National Park, and a herd of 50 to 150 elephants stays for about three months a year. The photo is an astronaut’s view of Majuli from the International Space Station.