Vegetation greening drives long-term dust mitigation in Eastern Asia

Dryland vegetation dynamics play a fundamental role in dust mitigation. While weaker winds have driven recent dust decline in Eastern Asia, the long-term influence of vegetation remains overlooked. Here, using a physically based modeling approach that partitions the drivers of dust emissions across timescales, we reveal that surface wind dominates interannual variability, negatively correlated with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. On a multidecadal scale, however, vegetation cover emerges as the key driver, reducing dust emissions by 32.5% since the early 2000s—a trend projected to continue through 2100. Without these vegetation gains, dust emissions would increase under various CMIP6 projections. Vegetation contributions are uneven: greening of perennial dryland vegetation in sparsely vegetated regions (<15% cover; responsible for 95% of dust emissions) offers the greatest mitigation by stabilizing the land surface and suppressing long-term emissions. These findings highlight priority areas for ecological restoration to sustain dust reduction and advance regional sustainability goals. In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.