The Great Green Wall
04 November 2013
In Africa, scientists are hard at work restoring land once rich with biodiversity and vegetation. Eleven countries in the Sahel-Sahara region—Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Senegal—have joined to combat land degradation and restore native plant life to the landscape.
In recent years, northern Africa [...]
Building the African green wall, piece by piece
18 July 2013
When village people and local authorities in southern Niger won back over one hundred hectares of degraded land, they added one extra piece to a mosaic being laid across the Sahel and the Sahara aimed at tackling desertification and land degradation.Ibrahim Dan Ladi, a 47-year-old farmer from southern Niger, remembers [...]
Behind the rhetoric what is really being done to combat desertification?
16 June 2013
Like most people living along the Sahel – the drylands between Africa’s tropical savannahs and the Sahara Desert – Mustafa Ba is all too familiar with the effects of desertification.
Thanks to a combination of overgrazing and deforestation, he has watched the countryside around his Senegalese village, Mboula, turn into a [...]
"Green wall" to target Sahel terrorism
03 May 2013
Desertification in Africa's Sahel region may be driving a range of problems including terrorism. Gavin Haines investigates whether a project to reforest the region could help.
Since French forces were deployed to Mali earlier this year, the Sahel has emerged as a new battleground in the so-called war on terror.
This semi-arid [...]
Towards global guidelines for restoring resilience of forest landscapes in drylands
19 April 2013
Forests play crucial ecological, social and economic roles in drylands, but in many regions they have become degraded. Worldwide, millions of hectares of dryland forest landscapes need to be restored to help tackle global challenges such as poverty, climate change, soil erosion and desertification. In collaboration with its partners, therefore, [...]
How planting trees can prevent violence in Africa's drylands
31 January 2013
With EU-backed forces advancing across Mali, the need for European and other donors to accelerate the development process in Africa’s poorest regions appears ever more pressing. For development experts a simple, yet unheralded solution exists - planting trees.
“Agroforestry is the future of agriculture in the drylands and sub-humid regions”, Dr [...]
African partnership to halt desertification and land degradation
25 September 2012
Experts presented achievements towards the realisation of the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel, a pan-African initiative to halt desertification, while improving food security and contributing to climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Launched in December 2006 at the Food Security Summit in Nigeria with a view to tackle [...]
The Great Oasis
19 December 2011
In the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman, at the eastern edge of the Arabian Desert, high above the white terraces and minarets of Muscat, rain comes rarely and then in floods. Hajar means “rock” in Arabic, and the mountains are made of little else—a fractal landscape of umber and dusty limestone, [...]
UN project shows how trees help halt desertification
20 June 2011
A UN-led pilot scheme hopes to highlight how trees can help people in arid zone, considered to one of the most hostile habitats on the planet.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Acacia project's goal is to show how trees provide, food, fuel, shelter and income during times of hardship.
So far, [...]
Africa-wide "Great Green Wall" to halt Sahara's spread?
28 December 2009
China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a "Great Green Wall" may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand.
The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said [...]