More than 65 employees from the South Korean flagship carrier Korean Air headed for the Kubuqi desert in China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region to carry out large-scale forestation, Oct 16, 2012. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

More than 65 employees from the South Korean flagship carrier Korean Air headed for the Kubuqi desert in China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region in October to carry out large-scale forestation.

Korean Air announced that it will plant 80,000 trees annually on 240,000 square meters of land in the Kubuqi desert during the next five years.

This year is the sixth consecutive year Korean Air is planting trees in the desert and signals the beginning of a second round of a program aimed at improving the environment of the area to curb further desertification.

"Korean Air has always attached great importance to development of the charitable programs for ecology issues. This is the duty of a corporate citizen to fulfill a social responsibility," said Chi Chang-hoon, president of Korean Air, who came to Inner Mongolia for this year's tree-planting.

The company also invited 55 students studying to be flight attendants from Inner Mongolia Normal University, as it has done in past years.

The Green Ecology Park program, which started in 2007, targets the Kubuqi desert, China's seventh-largest. The desert covers about more than 1 million hectares and is 400 kilometers in length. Being the closest desert to Beijing, it is regarded as the source of much of the city's spring dust invasions.

Due to excessive deforestation and rapid industrialization, soil erosion in the desert has long been a serious problem. It is estimated that the desert is expanding annually at a scale of five times the size of South Korea's capital, Seoul.