Desertification is a form of land degradation principally in semi-arid and arid areas influenced by climatic and human factors. As a country plagued by extensive sandy desertification and frequent sandstorms and dust storms, China has been trying to find ways to achieve the sustainable management of desertified lands. This paper reviewed the impact of climate change and anthropogenic activities on desertified areas, and the effort, outcome, and lessons learned from desertification control in China. Although drying and warming trends and growing population pressures exist in those areas, the expanding trend of desertified land achieved an overall reversal. In the past six decades, many efforts, including government policies, forestry, and desertification control programs, combined with eco-industrialization development, have been integrated to control the desertification in northern China. Positive human intervention including afforestation, and the rehabilitation of mobile sandy land, and water conservation have facilitated the return of arid and semi-arid ecosystems to a more balanced state. China’s practices in desertification control could provide valuable knowledge for sustainable desertified land management on a global scale.

Core Ideas: The QLBCZO is an observatory to study carbon–water processes on the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau. Multiscale, multi‐interface, and multi‐process studies investigate the CZ in the alpine region. Models predict carbon sequestration and water resources in the Qinghai Lake Basin. The surface–subsurface architecture of the critical zone (CZ) regulates the hydrologic and geochemical processes that drive the CZ function. Due to the complex heterogeneity, highly coupled processes, and the dynamic controlling mechanisms across scales, CZ science faces grand challenges on interface coupling, process integration, and scaling. Carbon–water cycles are important physical‐geochemical processes in the CZ. However, the key factors that govern the carbon–water processes across spatiotemporal scales under natural conditions are poorly understood. Especially, such research in the CZ of the alpine region, e.g., the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau (QTP), has not been reported yet is challenging to conduct. The Qinghai Lake Basin Critical Zone Observatory (QLBCZO) is being established to study alpine hydrology, carbon–water processes, and ecological functions on the northeastern QTP. Previous studies in the QLBCZO mainly focused on ecohydrologic processes and the water budget. Currently, the QLBCZO is designed to integrate state‐of the‐art observation techniques (such as including deep coring, ground‐penetrating radar, electrical resistance tomography, isotope technique, and remote sensing) and frontier modeling approaches to investigate: (i) the three‐dimensional architecture of the subsurface environment (vegetation–soil–rock–microbial community) as well as the carbon and water storage, (ii) multiscale carbon–water processes and carbon–water budget, (iii) interactions between freeze–thaw and carbon–water processes, and (iv) carbon sequestration and water resources. The establishment of the QLBCZO and its associated research would be crucial for advancing both theory and methodology for the CZ and Earth system science research on the QTP and alpine regions in general.