Desertification is caused by the interaction between climate change and human activity. Therefore, a win-win strategy that both restores the environment and ensures a sustainable livelihood for those who are affected by the restoration project is the most desirable solution. However, because researchers in the natural sciences and the humanities rarely cooperate, few researchers have simultaneously studied the combination of environmental and socioeconomic factors during ecological restoration. As a result, previous ecological restoration programs have typically benefited one group of factors at the expense of the other group. Because of the complexity of the interactions between humans and ecosystems and a lack of previous research on these interactions, it is difficult to simultaneously improve ecological restoration and socioeconomic development. To achieve such a solution, we suggested and tested a new approach that we call A Win-win Path for Ecological Restoration. In this approach, we calculated the contribution of the key ecological and socioeconomic factors for vegetation cover change during historical ecological restoration projects; we also accounted for the effects of climate change and land degradation to design suitable ecological restoration measures. To confirm that this approach works, we tested it in Yan'an City, a region of China where the national Grain for Green program has been implemented since 1999 to identify weak links and find ways to improve them. We found that vegetation cover increased by only 41% at the level of Shaaxi Province from 1982 to 1999, and 195% from 1999 to 2016. The new approach accounted for a 74.0% increase in vegetation cover since 1999. The Grain for Green Program accounted for the remaining 26% of the increase. Policy developers and ecosystem managers must remember that despite the importance of ecological restoration, residents of project areas have a right to survive and achieve an acceptable standard of living. Our win-win approach permits this by accounting simultaneously for ecological restoration and poverty alleviation. Another advantage of our approach is that it emphasizes methods that encourage natural recovery of a degraded ecosystem instead of replacing it with a new ecosystem thatis less appropriate for the project area. Our results suggest that our method will help people who live in ecologically fragile areas to deal with the simultaneous effects of climate change and human activities.