As a result of climate change and poor land-use practices, much of the Global South is plagued by the problem of landscape degradation.Impoverished villagers turn to whatever short-term solutions they can find, including the harvesting of valuable local resources. Because many of these resources are not easily replenished, this ultimately leads to deforestation and desertification. In this battle for subsistence, both local villagers and international development organizations are mired in the old ways of doing things, planting seeds that simply will not sprout into a sustainable future.

But there is hope. Plant varieties that were once poorly understood by the scientific community are now being developed and tested by Chinese scientists from the Kunming Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with some species showing incredible promise for global poverty alleviation. One of the plants is Calotropis, commonly known as milkweeds. Native to the Sahel Africa, and other semiarid tropics in Asia, Calotropis is a fast-growing and drought-resistant plant that adapts to diverse soil conditions. Naturally suited to grow where other plants fail, Calotropis may globally transform the way we think about ecological restoration in arid and semiarid regions.

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