Trees don’t make water come on it’s own. A lot of the planting is intrinsically unsustainable.

That is the problem with top down authoritarian directives, execution is lacking. Follow through is lacking as the government declares success after they sign the order and then forget about it after patting themselves on the back.

While this is true, forests do hold a lot of water. One of the problems with dry places is not so much that there is no water, but that the water is inconsistent and only available for a short period of time. Forests act like a sponge and hold water for long periods of time, which can literally transform ecosystems.

That said, I know literally nothing about the Gobi desert ecosystem and whether planting a forest will have the desired effect. Interestingly (to me at least), right at the time that the Edo period in Japan was starting, Japan had cut down most of its trees. One of the effects was that the runoff from mountains was much faster and carried less mineral content. This, in turn, reduced the ability for algae to grow in the shallow regions of the sea around Japan, leading to a very real possibility of mass starvation. Somehow somebody realised this and convinced the Shogun to put a moratorium on logging. Despite the really huge hardship this had on the people, it's likely to have saved Japan. By the 18th century Japan had developed fairly advanced silviculture. Some historians in Japan consider this to be a practical miracle given the very limited knowledge that people had about ecology in the Edo period.

I'm hoping that our cultures will enter a new period where we start to understand that this kinds of "ecological engineering" is necessary for the health of our societies. Whether or not the planting of trees in the Gobi desert is effective or not (I have no idea), the idea that we need to do these kinds of things is very promising and I hope that whatever successes and failures there are will be fed back into a system of refinement for the next try.

You have to do this very carefully. I’ve heard stories about farmers intentionally planting required trees they were given upside down because they thought they would do more harm than good to the soil.

It is interesting to consider the effect of authoritarian power systems and collective land ownership on that kind of initiative. Just after I posted my reply I started to wonder if the Japanese miracle would have succeeded if illegal wood usage didn't result in execution. As you say, social systems are complex and it's important to take that into consideration when implementing any large scale project.

Trees do make rain. Part of what trees do is take water from the ground and expire it from their leaves increasing humidity and thus making rain. This is not the same as making water, but it means a forest will get more rainfall than the desert it replaces.

Trees however require a certain amount of water to function. You can do better by planting grass which can survive better on less rain long term by going dormant. However eventually there isn't enough water for grass to grow either.

Of course everything depends on location. Different locations have different soils, rainfall, temperature... You cannot treat every location on earth as the same.

A lot of planting is unsustainable.

Pls provide proof. I've seen a list plant 8k trees across a state. I've seen anNgo plant bio diverse forest where I live. So I'd like to know the context that you are talking about