I'm really interested to learn more about how you use AI to create this global map. Do you work with FAO data at all? I had an idea for a similar AI tool that would also incorporate FAO's land suitability index, and human population distribution data.

I disagree. Many desert areas have been greened by doing things as simple as making a swale. Animal husbandry techniques like mob grazing, which mimics natural systems, have also greened deserts. The Lus valley in China was greened by terraces, lakes, and massive replanting. What was a yellow silt desert is now lush and fertile. Farmland can be created and is being created. Soil can be built instead of lost and it doesnt take centuries to do it. Ive built several inches of soil in my garden by nit tilling it, and by adding mulch. I can grow 300lbs of tomatoes on a 3ft by 8ft hugelbed, (a garden bed with rotting wood underneath it) without any fertilizer and very little watering. How does this desert greening and soil building happen? Is it by irrigating; pumping huge amounts of fossil water out from deep wells? No, it works because people have a better understanding of the biological component to soils and how to help that component instead of killing it with salt based fertilizers and lots of tilling. These practices release CO2 from the soil because the over oxygenation of the soil causes heterotrophic bacteria to bloom which consume the humic acids turning them into CO2. Soil is destroyed and the carbon in those soils is released when the soil microbiota is not helped. When people set up natural growing systems like food forests, more calories, and nutrients are created per acre than in the best monocropped chemiculture farms. There are lots of examples, for instance a 12 acre food forest in Thailand that has fed dozens of families in that community for centuries. It might have been Vietnam. Its been a long time since I read about it. The soil biota and the plants they are in symbiosis with, are natures way of taking CO2 out of the air, and storing it in the soil. In regenerative agriculture based farms, the carbon content of the soil increases by 1/2% to 1% per year. This amounts to 30 to 60 tons of CO2 removed from the air each year, per acre of soil that is regenerating. If 17% of the worlds deserts were greened, then that would offset the total human emisions of greenhouse gases each year going forward. The available food producing land would increase, And... it would produce more food per acre than chemiculture farms, without the runoff of fertilizer salts into the oceans or erosion to happen. It would also re empower the small farmer by making this kind of no input farming the most profitable kind of farming, without the need for expensive equipment. Big Ag, and big food companies don't like this though, and have been working to suppress info on it.