Gazing at tourists sitting on the camels disappearing into the distance, the 62-year-old man working at the scenic desert location wondered how long he could retain his job.

"If the lake is dried up, there will be no tourists and I will lose my job," said Yang Ming from Dunhuang, a famous tourism city and major stop on the ancient Silk Road in northwest China's Gansu Province.

The lake he referred to was called Crescent Lake. Together with the Echoing Sang Mountain, it draws more than 1 million tourists each year. At this unique site, the lake has been encircled by the desert for thousands of years.

As a cleaner, 62-year-old Yang Ming could earn 700 yuan a month to support his family.

However, the lake is now dramatically shrinking.

The water surface has dropped more than 3 meters in the past 60 years, and even dried out 3 years ago.

According to Zhang Hua, former deputy director of the Dunhuang Water Authority, the oasis was supplied by the Shule River, which brought water from melting glaciers and snow. However, the river has been cut for decades, and 1 billion cubic meters of water was drained in the upper and middle reaches.

The Danghe River, another water source for the oasis, has proven not to be enough to meet the need of the lake, Zhang added.

As the river source shrinks, the underground water level drops. Then the forest, meadow, and marsh alongside the oasis which keeps out wind and sand, began to retreat.

"Each year, the Kumtag Desert pushes back forests for three or four meters. About 1,33.3 hectares of land have become desert," said Gao Hua, director of the Forestry Bureau of Dunhuang. "This is a big threat to the ecology of Dunhuang city."

Dunhuang is just one example of the threat of water shortages to the vulnerable ecology in northwest China, where about 1.7 million square kilometers of territory in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia, or 17.7 percent of China's land space, had been covered by desert.

"The weak ecology system of west China is a result of the overuse of limited water resources," said Wang Jihe, the former director of the Gansu Desertification Control Research Institute.

Measures were taken to check the spread of desert.

China has spent nearly 1 trillion yuan on ecological conservation and environmental protection during the past decade.

A total of 27.7 million hectares of cultivated land has been converted into forest, with farmers in 2,279 counties of 25 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions receiving compensation and subsidies from the government, said Wu Lijun, an official with the State Forestry Administration in charge of the project.

Also, an additional 200 billion yuan is to be earmarked to continue the project during the following ten years, he said.

Additionally, China has kicked off an ambitious project to plant a green belt between the country's third and fourth largest deserts to stop them from converging.

"It is the first time in China that a green belt is being planted between two deserts," said Wang Xiaodong, a forestry official in the Araxan League of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

A strip of vegetation 202 kilometers long and five to 15 kilometers wide was to be completed between Badain Jaran Desert and Tengger Desert within five years.

To maintain water levels in Crescent Lake, local government has taken artificial recharges from an underground aquifer project since 2001. Further, on the east and west ends of the lake stand two pools with 6 million cubic meters of water injected every year from the adjacent Danghe River.

"Water levels began to rise, obviously", said Ma Shengkai, the chief of the Crescent Lake and Echoing Sang Mountain scenic site administration.

Water-saving irrigation is also to be promoted, with 124 wells to be closed and 23.4 kilometers of channels to be built.

But neither measures seemed to effectively resolve the problem of Crescent Lake and Dunhuang, which drew attention from Premier Wen Jiabao.

Wen had previously worked in Gansu for 14 years.

"Ecological conservation is vital," he said. "It is China's responsibility to keep Dunhuang from vanishing."

(Xinhua News Agency October 5, 2010)