A project to plant a wall of trees stretching across Africa aims not only to halt desertification, but also to improve food security, create jobs, and offer young people an alternative to migration and extremism, environmental experts said on Thursday.
The planned Great Green Wall would see a 7,000km strip of vegetation reaching from Senegal in West Africa to Djibouti in East Africa, designed to trap the sands of the Sahara, halt the advance of the desert and restore 50 million hectares of land.
About 60 million Africans could be forced to leave their homes within five years as their land turns to desert, while two thirds of the continent’s arable land could be lost by 2025 due to growing desertification, according to the UN.
This could drive young people across Africa into joining militant groups, such as Boko Haram, or attempting to cross the Mediterranean to seek work in Europe, UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) spokeswoman Camila Nordheim-Larsen said.
“The Great Green Wall is about more than just planting and counting trees, it is about building resilience in communities and developing sustainable projects to give young people reasons to stay,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Dakar.
“A lack of opportunity is driving them away,” she said on the sidelines of a global conference where countries signed up to the initiative are presenting their national action plans.
Presented to the African Union in 2005 by the then-Nigerian president, the Great Green Wall initiative received US$4 billion of funding from signatories to the UN climate deal agreed in Paris last year, and has received pledges from France and the World Bank.
Critics of the project say it is a top-down approach to development, dependent on external funding and management, yet organizations such as the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS) say the initiative has the backing of local communities.
“This project comes from African countries, and there is a will from affected communities,” OSS executive secretary Khatim Kherraz said.
About 15 percent of the wall of trees has been planted, mainly in Senegal, while villages in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have made progress in planting vegetation to be used in medicine and for food, according to the UN.
“There is a mobilization of local people, who are at the heart of restoration work and choosing what they want to plant,” UN Food and Agriculture Organization spokeswoman Nora Berrahmouni said.
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