Why Africa’s ‘Great Green Wall’ is getting a major makeover

The Great Green Wall is an ambitious initiative launched by the African Union in 2007 to help restore degraded landscapes and boost economic prosperity. The project is getting a major makeover, as expanding desertification in the Sahel region of Africa poses a series of daunting challenges that cannot be addressed by individual states alone.
The Great Green Wall is one way to try to address these challenges, by creating a green belt of vegetation across the Sahel.
The project was conceived to halt the southward spread of the Saharan Desert by planting a barrier of trees 10 miles wide across the Sahel. The Sahel is a region that is already vulnerable to recurrent, weather-induced food crises, and is also beset by extremist violence and disputes between farmers and pastoralists over land use. These problems are expected to intensify as the population of the Sahel region grows rapidly, projected to increase from 83.7 million in 2019 to 196 million by 2050.
The goal of the project is to create a barrier of trees that will help to alleviate some of the pressure on the agricultural production in the region and improve the overall conditions in the Sahel.
The Sahara Desert is expanding, and many experts believe that this is having a major impact on the region’s socioeconomic and environmental challenges. If the problem is not addressed, it could lead to further instability, especially in rural communities where livestock are often the most valuable asset. This would have a significant impact on public health and the social costs incurred by governments in the region.
The Great Green Wall is a vast project that aims to combat the effects of desertification in Africa. The project was initially proposed to target an area of 250 million acres in 11 countries, including some of the poorest countries in the world.
According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, the countries that stand to benefit the most from the project are Niger and Mali, with a total of 116 million and 108 million acres of planted trees respectively.
Land-use problems
The Great Green Wall project was launched with much fanfare in 2007, with the aim of planting a wall of trees across the Sahel region of Africa. But over the first decade of its implementation, the wall produced disappointing results, and some observers increasingly came to view the project as a “white elephant.”
By 2020, with just 10 years left before its planned completion in 2030, UN estimates found that only 4% of the project’s target area had been planted.
The project has faced a number of challenges, including a lack of funding, bad weather, and the fact that many of the areas targeted for tree-planting are already heavily degraded and hard to reforest.
At the time the Great Green Wall was proposed, there was a limited understanding of the climate and land-use problems affecting the Sahel. This restricted the project’s progress from the outset, as some experts argued that the scientific evidence for its feasibility was weak. In addition, large sections of the proposed path of the wall were uninhabited, which meant that there would be no one to care for the saplings struggling to survive in a semi-arid environment.
Early efforts at reforestation were further thwarted by a tree loss rate of up to 80% within two months of planting, due to a lack of water as well as a lack of protection and care for the trees.
The Great Green Wall is a massive continent-wide effort to combat climate change and desertification. However, the lack of consultation with local communities and the failure to anticipate the effects of climate change have doomed the project to failure.
Diegane Ndiaye of the NGO SOS Sahel put it best when he said, “The project that doesn’t involve the community is doomed to failure.” The Great Green Wall was designed without input from the people who would be most affected by it, and as a result, it has not been able to live up to its potential.
In addition to the lack of community involvement, the Great Green Wall also failed to take into account the full extent of the effects of climate change.
The failure of the Great Green Wall initiative in the Sahel region is due in part to the worsening security environment in the region. In the past decade, insurgencies have erupted in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The parts of the region most affected by the violence overlap almost entirely with those worst affected by hunger. The combination of violence, displacement and constraints on humanitarian access aggravates the underlying ecological and demographic stress factors faced by communities in the affected areas.
If these dynamics are not addressed, the Great Green Wall will likely fail.
Drivers of conflict
The Great Green Wall project was initially conceived as a way to combat the encroachment of the Sahara Desert. However, as concerns about its effectiveness grew, the project’s goal evolved to one aimed at restoring agricultural land degraded by decades of overuse and mismanagement across 20 African countries.
In November 2022, the International Drought Resilience Alliance was created to boost international support for the Great Green Wall, and so far it has been a boon to the project. It is now hoped that the revamped Great Green Wall will boost food production and reduce the drivers of conflict. If successfully completed, it is also projected to sequester 250 million tons of carbon and create 10 million jobs by 2030.
The view that desertification is not caused by the expansion of the Sahara, but by poor farming practices that have destroyed the fertile topsoil of the lush grasslands, is gaining ground. This is reflected in the shift of objectives of the Great Green Wall counter-desertification strategy, which now focuses on grass rather than massive tree plantings.
The Great Green Wall project has evolved over time to become a comprehensive sustainable development initiative. It now includes a bottom-up approach that draws on a range of practices tailored to local conditions. By broadening its scope, the Great Green Wall also aims to generate sustainable income for rural populations through activities that work in harmony with local ecosystems and not against them.
The Great Green Wall initiative was launched in order to combat the effects of desertification in the Sahel region of Africa. Using sound agroforestry practices, the initiative has evolved into a “mosaic of sustainable land use practices” that could pave the way for a more effective Great Green Wall, one that might serve as a template for the implementation of similar projects in other parts of the world.
The initiative has had some success in combating desertification, but there is still much work to be done. If the Great Green Wall can continue to be successful, it could serve as a model for other areas of the world that are struggling with similar issues.
The Great Green Wall initiative is a pan-African effort to combat the effects of climate change and desertification. The wall, which is composed of a chain of trees and plants, is intended to stretch across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The initiative has been lauded by the United Nations as one of 10 groundbreaking efforts to restore the natural world, but it faces significant challenges.
The most pressing challenge is the lack of funding. The Great Green Wall is estimated to cost $8-14 billion, and so far only a fraction of that has been raised. Moreover, the project faces political and security challenges, as well as the danger that more urgent, short-term priorities will divert governments’ policy-making attention.
The Great Green Wall’s efforts to localize program ownership will be both a strength and a weakness going forward. On the one hand, local agricultural and habitat-conservation expertise are essential to ensuring that initiatives are supported by the community and create lasting jobs. On the other hand, there have been substantial delays at the local and national levels because of bureaucracy and poor coordination between NGOs and governments, and even among NGOs.
Slow grass
The Great Green Wall initiative, which aims to combat desertification and restore degraded lands in Africa, faces a significant funding shortfall.
Initially, governments, multilateral development banks and aid donors pledged $14.3 billion to fund the rebooted initiative in January 2021. However, several multilateral and bilateral organisations have only raised an additional $19 billion in 2022, leaving a funding gap of $43 billion needed to reach the Great Green Wall’s goals by 2030.
This funding shortfall presents a significant challenge for the initiative, as local economies cannot meet the funding gap on their own. This leaves them almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of high-income countries, international organisations and NGOs to provide the necessary support.
The Great Green Wall is an ambitious effort to combat the effects of climate change and desertification in the Sahel region of Africa. The project, which is estimated to cost around $8 billion, involves the planting of a 15-kilometre-wide strip of trees and other vegetation across the entire width of the Sahel.
The project was first proposed in the early 2000s, and work on it began in earnest in 2007. However, progress has been slow, and as of early 2023, the wall is only around 60% complete. This is due in part to the difficulty of the terrain and the lack of resources, but also to the fact that the project has been beset by political and economic problems.
The Great Green Wall is an ambitious initiative that has the potential to help restore degraded landscapes and boost economic prosperity in Africa. The project is getting a major makeover, as expanding desertification in the Sahel region of Africa poses a series of daunting challenges that cannot be addressed by individual states alone.
The Great Green Wall is one way to try to address these challenges, by creating a green belt of vegetation across the Sahel.
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