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The Great Green Wall: Warding Off Desertification in Africa

2021-08-12T09:56:13.117Z


Africa is suffering from increasing heat and droughts, even though the continent itself plays a very small role in causing climate change. Environmentalists are working on a massive project that will see the planting of a green belt leading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.


On a hot morning in July, and a man with a graying beard is crawling through the grass of the Sahel in northern Senegal. He joyfully picks up the seed of a zachun tree, then that of a baobab. Tiny seedlings are emerging from the ground in one of the poorest and most drought-stricken regions on Earth. "It's working," says Haïdar el Ali. Then he kneels down in front of the sapling of an acacia tree and emits an almost childlike laugh. "Without us, this grass and these young trees wouldn't be here."

They are also el Ali's trees.

Based on his advice, the communities here near the village of Kodiolal have enclosed large areas of land, with the fences stretching for several kilometers.

They are there to prevent large herds of cattle from eating up the grass and the saplings, thus expediting desertification.

Overgrazing is an important factor in the desertification of the Sahel.

"People have far more cattle than they need," says El Ali.

"They're status symbols."

He wants to protect the small shoots from the voracious animals, because the trees, he believes, can save this land.

El Ali is one of the best-known environmentalists in Africa. He once served as the head of the Green Party in Senegal and has his country's environment minister, in addition to planting millions of mangrove trees. He has had a new role since 2019: His job is to get the Senegalese part of the continent's largest environmental project up and running again. It's called the Great Green Wall.

The idea is simple:

A gigantic green belt south of the Sahara is supposed to stop the desertification and degradation of the land and help make the effects of the devastating droughts more bearable. The Great Green Wall is to extend from Senegal in the west of Africa to Djibouti in the east, a length of around 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles) and about 15 kilometers wide. The belt is expected to sequester 250 million tons of carbon dioxide and create 10 million green jobs. The majority of the planting is to be completed by 2030. For years, the project had been plagued by a lack of money, but in January, the international community pledged around $ 14 billion, nearly half of the $ 33 billion the African Union says will be needed to complete the wall by 2030.

African governments are increasingly recognizing the need to take action on climate policy and abandon their victim role. South Africa, for example, continues to rely on coal-fired power plants, but introduced a promising carbon tax for industrial plants in 2019. The Noor Power Station, set to become the world's largest solar power plant, is currently under construction in Morocco. And Nigeria aims to generate almost one-third of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2030.

But agriculture plays the decisive role on the continent.

Many farmers are suffering from the increasingly long periods of heat and drought, but they are also contributing to the crisis.

According to the World Bank, agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of water consumption in the Middle East and Africa, which is another reason that reforestation projects are so important.

There are quite a number of success stories.

In Niger, for example, farmers have found an inexpensive and effective way of greening the Sahel: They don't plant new trees, they simply protect the saplings that sprout from existing root networks.

The farmers take care of the trees that then grow on their farmlands.

This method is called farmer-managed natural regeneration.

Around 5 million hectares

have already been greened in this way across the country.

Through their roots, the trees ensure a rising water table.

They also provide shade, improve the quality of the soil by fertilizing it with their decaying leaves and offer farmers an additional source of income with their fruits.

The soil also stores more carbon.

Agroforestry, the name given for the combining of agriculture and reforestation, is one of the most promising methods of combating land degradation and the effects of drought, according to Chris Reij, a researcher at the World Resources Institute.

In Ethiopia, terracing has shown great promise.

Water is used more effectively, and soil erosion is stopped.

The groundwater level in the valley also rises as a result, making irrigation possible even during the dry season.

The traditional "Zaï" planting method has been further developed in Burkina Faso. Deep holes are hacked into the hard soil, seeds are planted and then covered with manure, leaves, ash and soft soil. Small stone dams are used to store rainwater, which is then diverted and used for irrigation. This has allowed extensive, dense vegetation to develop. It tends to be the simple things that work.

But it is questionable whether new irrigation techniques and water recycling can be applied on a mass scale, given how costly and technology reliant they are. In the Sahel, especially, the problem is becoming more pressing. The region is suffering more than almost any other from climate change, with the air is warming up here one-and-a-half times faster than the global average. The weather is becoming more extreme, with prolonged droughts and unpredictable rainfall, with occasional torrential downpours eroding the soil. Around 155 million people live in the countries of the Sahel, a figure that could rise to 340 million by 2050. The population is dependent on agriculture, but a wall of trees to help these people seemed unfeasible in many of parts of the Sahel.

"We had to change the plan," says Haïdar el Ali, the environmentalist from Senegal. Instead of planting a real wall of trees at the edge of the desert, as originally planned, it will now be more of a green mosaic. The measures implemented, he says, have to be compatible with the lives of the people who live in the region. More than anything, though, he says, it's a matter of making up for a lost decade.

El Ali's idea for the area around the village of Kodiolal in northern Senegal looks as follows: Instead of just letting their herds freely roam the land, the cowherds fenced it in, cut the grass themselves and gave it to their cattle as food. This protects the tree saplings. And more trees mean better soil and lower temperatures, and thus more food for the animals in the long run. "This is something people can see," says el Ali. "They can recognize the added value right away." He says that simply giving out seedlings is of little help, because without protection, they usually die.

In Kodiolal, the elders share their memories of how dense the trees used to be in their youth, how large the leaves were, how cool the shade they provided. How abundant the rain had been and how robust the cattle were. And how this changed already in the 1970s and how dusty wind has now become a part of their everyday lives. "This used to be a paradise, but now it's becoming hell," says Haïdar el Ali. Without the Green Wall, the mayor explains, many people would already have fled. But now, many cattle herders are staying on permanently. As a consequence, their children are able to attend school regularly.

"In the beginning, the shepherds thought their land was being stolen. It took years of discussions before they accepted the project," el Ali says as he walks through the grass. "But now they see that they can also sell the fruits from the trees." At the same time, it's also clear that he cannot stretch the fences like the ones he has built around protected areas here in northern Senegal from the west of the continent to the east. Fencing of land is only scalable to a limited degree.

He is also aware that the Green Wall is growing more slowly than hoped.

The project has been suffering from corruption, mismanagement and bad planning for years.

In addition, the fight against climate change isn't particularly high on the list of priorities for people living in poor and often war-torn and unrest-ridden countries in the Sahel zone.

Experts consider the large-scale planting of trees to be unrealistic, especially in sparsely populated areas.

Indeed, nine years before the scheduled deadline

for completing the Green Wall, the challenges remain daunting.

So far, 4 million hectares of land have been reforested, only 4 percent of the area planned.

If reforested areas outside the official Green Wall corridor are included, the total comes to around 18 million hectares.

Haïdar el Ali knows he needs to apply pressure.

"Time is the big problem," he says.

He drives past a trampled fence, where a herd of several hundred cattle is grazing in an area that is actually designated for protection.

His companions drive the cattle off the site.

The shepherd grins when el Ali confronts him, saying the grass looked better behind the fence.

In the past, people used to always drive their cattle wherever they wanted, says el Ali.

"It's not easy to change centuries-old habits."

But that, too, is an essential part of the battle against climate change.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-08-12

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