Countries in the Sahel region of Africa have made little progress on the “Great Green Wall,” a 5,000-mile-long band of trees planned for the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Even where communities are planting new trees, few seedlings actually survive, new research shows.
The African Union launched the project in 2007, planning to create a 10-mile-wide strip of trees that would stretch from coast to coast, across 11 countries in the Sahel. By stopping desertification, the project aimed to protect farmers, help shore up the supply of food, stem migration, and even fight extremism. But as of last year, the project was estimated to be only 30 percent complete.
While wealthy nations have promised more than $20 billion to support the project, very little of that money has been put toward the Wall. Before grants can be disbursed, they must go through a lengthy approval process. And even when money reaches countries in the region, governments often lack the means to distribute funds at the local level.
Still, “after nearly two decades, even taking into account that not all the money pledged has materialized, results should be visible,” write researchers Annah Lake Zhu, of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and Amadou Ndiaye, of Amadou Mahtar MBOW University in Senegal.
And yet, in a recent study, the researchers found that even in Senegal, one of the countries most dedicated to the Great Green Wall, only one out of 36 areas planted is greener than it would have been naturally. The likely reason, they say, is that many seedlings are dying off when rainfall is meager, or they are being trampled or eaten by cattle in areas without fencing. The findings were published in the journal Land Use Policy.
Researchers say that countries must stop looking at the number of trees planted as a measure of success and instead use satellite data to determine where the Sahel is actually greening. Governments must “reward success generously,” they say, writing in The Conversation. “This is the model for the future. It moves beyond symbolic pledges to focus on actual changes on the ground.”
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