To meet population growth, the excessive abstraction of water resources for irrigating water-intensive crops has become an increasing crisis in arid regions of Northwest China. This dynamic, typical of drylands, contains the perennial contradiction between development and desertification, which we also find within the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), where some interpret it as a developmental convention and others as a conservationist one. Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) concept, has been set up as the primary tool to combat desertification by the UNCCD and is included in SDG 15.3. LDN refers to a state of zero net land degradation, where “the amount and quality of land resources necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security remain stable or increase within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems”.

Under the LDN framework, we apply two of its main pillars, prevention, and land planning. The aim is to understand the underlying biophysical and socio-economic mechanisms of oasis expansion in NW China, a phenomenon known as oasification. The objective is to detect under what conditions oasification tackles desertification and when it triggers land and economic degradation. From this knowledge, it will be possible to propose guidelines of action to balance land use and comply with LDN.