Senegal begins planting the Great Green Wall against climate change – ‘The dust is coming. The sand is going to cover us all.’

By Bobby Bascombe, www.guardian.co.uk
12 July 2012 Senegal’s capitol city Dakar sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean on a peninsula. It’s at least a thousand miles to the Sahara desert yet the air today is so thick with sand that the tops of buildings disappear in a sandy haze. It’s the worst sand storm in a year and people here are worried that climate change will cause these events to be more common. Seasons are shifting across the region. In Senegal the rainy season used to start in July or August but now it doesn’t start until September. Decreased rain – along with over grazing of land – is causing an increase in deserts across the Sahel. Roughly 40 per cent of Africa is now affected by desertification and according to the UN, two-thirds of Africa’s arable land could be lost by 2025 if this trend continues. Senegal is one of 11 countries in the Sahel region of Africa looking towards the same solution to the desertification problem: The Great Green Wall. The goal of the project is to plant a wall of trees, 4,300 miles long and 9 miles wide, across the African continent, from Senegal to Djibouti. African leaders hope the trees will trap the sands of the Sahara and halt the advance of the desert. […] Four hours northwest of Dakar, the village of Widou sits next to one section of Senegal’s Great Green Wall. The acacia trees here are just four years old, waist high and thorny. The trees are surrounded by a firewall and a metal fence to keep out tree-eating goats. All of the trees were chosen carefully. Sarr says, “When we design a parcel we look at the local trees and see what can best grow there, we try to copy Nature.” Two million trees are planted in Senegal each year; but all of them must be planted during the short rainy season. Labourers plant acacia saplings in the sand along with animal manure for fertiliser. Sarr points to a three feet tall tree. “This one is Acacia nilotica. It produces Arabic gum used in local medicine and a fruit that can be eaten by animals.” For the project to succeed, it was crucial to plant trees that would also provide benefits for people living here. The government has ambitious plans for planting more trees but the Great Green Wall is also a development project, aimed at helping rural people. […] Everyone involved in the Great Green Wall agrees that the end goal is to help rural communities. But opinions vary on how the project will best manage to do that. African leaders envision the Great Green Wall as a literal wall of trees to keep back the desert. But scientists and development agencies see it more as a metaphorical ‘wall,’ a mosaic of different projects to alleviate poverty and improve degraded lands. The Great Green Wall has received a total of 1.8 billion dollars from the World Bank and another 108 million dollars from the Global Environment Facility. Jean- Marc Sinnassamy is a programme officer with the Global Environment Facility. “We do not finance a tree planting initiative,” he says, “it’s more related to agriculture, rural development, food security and sustainable land management than planting trees.” The 11 countries involved with the project are committed to making progress but there are many challenges: abject poverty, shifting seasons, and political instability are top among them. The entire region is in the middle of a food crisis. The United Nation’s Food Program estimates that as many as 11 million people in the Sahel do not have enough to eat and Mali recently had a military coup. Senegal is currently the furthest along with the Great Green Wall. They’ve planted roughly 50,000 acres of trees in addition to protecting existing trees. It’s been successful so far in Senegal but not everyone believes it can work across the entire Sahel region. Gray Tappan is a geographer with the United States Geological Survey. He says, “There’s been a long history of one failure after another in external projects that come in and try to plant trees.” Tappan explains that there are many reasons these projects fail. Sometimes projects plant non-native species that can’t survive in the dry climate, or local people don’t support the project and allow their goats to eat the newly-planted trees. In the village of Widou those concerns don’t appear to be an issue but Tappan is skeptical as to whether the Widou model can be emulated through 4,300 miles of varying ecosystems and communities. He believes a better model can be found in Niger. Historically, farmers there removed any trees or bushes that sprouted up in their fields. But following a devastating drought in the 1980s farmers decided to allow the natural vegetation to grow and planted food crops around it. The result was a surplus of food and 12 million acres of trees, an area the size of Costa Rica. Tappan has spent 30 years working in the region and admits he was shocked by the transformation: “In 2006 we did a big field trip across Niger and were just blown away by the vastness of this re-greening.” Scientists like Tappan believe that type of natural regeneration is much more likely to succeed than planting trees. But political leaders in Senegal are committed to their vision. Djibo Leyti Ka is the Minister of the Environment. He’s in charge of the Great Green Wall project for the entire country. He says, “We have a lot of desert from Senegal to Djibouti. A wall of trees will stop the wind.” Ka dismisses critics who say it isn’t practical. “They are crazy! The dust is coming. The sand is going to cover us all and we need to stop it. There are many many environmental projects in Senegal but this is the most important.” […]

Senegal begins planting the Great Green Wall against climate change