This goes into details about healing damaged ecosystems (deserts) and making them livable as farms, grasslands or forests. (spoiler: it makes the Chinese look very good.)

"As much as 25% of the worlds landmass has been degraded...we've only just begun to recognize the real value of natural capital. Surely investing in the recovery of damaged environments is a cost effective way of solving many of the problems we face today. The source of wealth is the functional ecosystem. The products and services we derive from those are derivative. its impossible for the derivatives to be more valuable than the source. And yet in the economy we have now, as it stands, the products and services have monetary value but the source, the functional ecosystems has zero... we've created a global institution and economic theory based on a flaw in logic. So if we carry that flaw and logic from generation to generation, we compound the mistake."