Sometime in my childhood one of my brothers explained desertification to me. The thought of deserts spreading was equal parts fascinating and ominous to me. For people living near the Sahara Desert in Africa it's a dreadful reality, as arable farmland is overtaken by the sands. For many years, though, efforts have been underway to turn back the desert and even recover lands that were formerly taken. As CNN explains it:
The world's largest desert is growing. In the last century, the Sahara Desert expanded by more than 10%, now covering an area of more than 3.3 million square miles (8.6 million square kilometers) and spanning 11 countries in the north of Africa.
The Sahel region, a semi-arid belt that acts as a buffer zone just south of the desert, is most affected. Water, already scarce, is becoming scarcer. Soil quality is deteriorating, and a lack of vegetation is leading to food insecurity. The UN estimates roughly 135 million people who depend on these degraded lands are at risk.
But an ambitious plan, launched by the African Union in 2007, could help to hold back the hot sands and protect the Sahel communities. Within the next decade, the Great Green Wall initiative hopes to restore 100 million hectares of land between Senegal in the west and Djibouti in the east, creating a 15-kilometer-wide (9 miles) and 8,000-kilometer-long (5,000 miles) mosaic of trees, vegetation, grasslands and plants.
They also provide a map to help visualize what this means in terms of scale.
For comparison, the Great Wall of China is 13,171 miles long. If you think that makes the Great Green Wall seem more doable, keep in mind that the former was built over the course of centuries in parts by successive dynasties. What the African Union is doing is truly ambitious.
To be clear, this isn't about simply planting trees along the edge of the desert. It's a fundamental rethinking of land and water use techniques. From a 2016 Smithsonian Magazine article:"If all the trees that had been planted in the Sahara since the early 1980s had survived, it would look like Amazonia," adds Chris Reij, a sustainable land management specialist and senior fellow at the World Resources Institutewho has been working in Africa since 1978. "Essentially 80 percent or more of planted trees have died."
Reij, Garrity and other scientists working on the ground knew what Wade and other political leaders did not: that farmers in Niger and Burkina Faso, in particular, had discovered a cheap, effective way to regreen the Sahel. They did so by using simple water harvesting techniques and protecting trees that emerged naturally on their farms.
Slowly, the idea of a Great Green Wall has changed into a program centered around indigenous land use techniques, not planting a forest on the edge of a desert. The African Union and the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization now refer to it as "Africa’s flagship initiative to combat land degradation, desertification and drought." Incredibly, the Great Green Wall—or some form of it—appears to be working.
"We moved the vision of the Great Green Wall from one that was impractical to one that was practical," says Mohamed Bakarr, the lead environmental specialist for Global Environment Facility, the organization that examines the environmental benefit of World Bank projects. "It is not necessarily a physical wall, but rather a mosaic of land use practices that ultimately will meet the expectations of a wall. It has been transformed into a metaphorical thing."
The answer to all of the environment's problems isn't "plant more trees," as much as it would be nice to have such a simple solution. Instead, we need to reconsider how we manage the land, and work together to make it better for everyone, and especially for those yet to be born.
