Conceived as a symbol of hope in the fight against environmental degradation in the Sahel region of Africa, the Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative aims to reverse the damage inflicted upon the fragile ecosystem through reforestation. However, the project has faced numerous challenges as its progress has been hindered by the complex interplay of environmental, socio-cultural, and political factors prevalent in the region.

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In 2007, the Africa Union (AU) General Assembly adopted a resolution to implement the Great Green Wall (GGW) project across the Sahel region. The GGW – an ecological reclamation – aims to combat desertification and ecosystem degradation by restoring at least 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequestering 250 million metric tons of carbon, and creating 10 million green jobs by 2030. The project is expected to cover a landmass of nearly 8,000 kilometres (4,971 miles) with a width of 15 kilometres (9.3 mi), stretching from Djibouti through West Africa to Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. 

Over the last 60 years, the Sahel region has seen temperatures rise exponentially, owing to more frequent and intense heatwaves. These changes have contributed to famine, poverty, and armed conflicts that have plagued the region for four decades. Rapidly deteriorating natural ecosystems across the Sahel have exacerbated these issues, along with the effects of poor land and water management and unsustainable ecological practices. The region’s growing population, one of the fastest in the world, has also contributed to the problem by intensifying competition for food and water within the ecosystem that supports the lives and species of the region.

Beyond halting and reversing decades of ecosystem degradation across the Sahel, the project also aims to ensure food security, provide jobs, enhance livelihoods, and combat poverty in the region.

Making a Case for the Great Green Wall

The Sahel region experiences annual rainfall patterns that fluctuate between 200-800mm and is increasingly affected by flash and riverine flooding. These conditions results in crop failures for rainfed agriculture, which is catastrophic for the region, since about 80% of the population are subsistence farmers, pastoralists, and fishermen whose livelihoods heavily rely on crops, which, unfortunately, are extremely sensitive to variations in climatic conditions.

In 2020 alone, over 220,000 people were displaced, at least 45 were killed, and 10,000 hectares of cropped farmlands were destroyed in Niger alone due to droughts. The ecological implications of droughts are particularly significant for the Sahel, leading to desertification, reduced plant cover across the region, and the attenuation of key regional water sources such as the Lake Chad basin. The lake has shrunk to one-tenth of its original size since the 1970s, with the surface area contracting from 25,000 square kilometres (9,653 square miles) to just over 3,789 square kilometres in 2017, resulting in the loss of surrounding vegetation cover and rendering the ecosystem desolate.

More on the topic: Desertification in Africa: Causes, Effects and Solutions

Acute food shortages and rising poverty arose in the region in recent years as a consequence of environmental degradation, climate change, and an exponentially growing population. 

According to the World Bank, the population of the Sahel will grow from 200 million to 340 million by 2050, a growth that is seen as the primary driver of armed conflict in the region. Land productivity across the region has decreased, resulting in declining crop yields. Farmers have started seeking new fertile land for agriculture, encroaching on traditional grazing rangelands, and triggering conflicts between farmers and herders. 

Reports by the US Council on Foreign Relations and other researchers have also cited these local conflicts as a plausible alibi for the recruitment of vulnerable local farmers and herders by terrorist groups like the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP), a militant group and administrative division of the Islamic State (IS), and Boko Haram, an Islamist jihadist organization based in northeastern Nigeria but also active in Chad, Niger, northern Cameroon, and Mali. 

Several experts attest that the socio-ecological problems in the Sahel have significantly eroded the ability of local communities to adapt. Against this background, the Great Green Wall initiative was established. 

Initially conceived as a reforestation intervention, the GGW has metamorphosed into a more ambitious strategy for regional ecosystem rejuvenation and a broader ecological, economic, and social enhancement vehicle for the Sahel. The project is now expected to lead to greater precipitation, a cooler surface temperature, and increased ground cover, which will protect the soil from encroaching desertification. 

More on the topic: The Great Green Wall Receives an Economic Boost, But Is It Enough to Save It?

Criticism of the GGW

The idea of the GGW is not entirely novel. A similar afforestation program was initiated in the United States in the 1930s, seeking to plant walls of trees from the Great Plains to Texas to slow the growth of the Dust Bowl. China also launched a Green Wall in the 1970s to halt the spread of sand dunes outside the Gobi Desert. 

Despite the potential of the GGW to restore ecosystems and stop desertification, it has been met with skepticism from several experts. They have raised concerns about the efficacy of this strategy and its capacity to halt and reverse ecological degradation across the Sahel region. The idea that the GGW is solely based on extensive tree planting as a form of ecosystem restoration has been contested by these academics. Critics of the initiative contend that the current complex ecological problems in the Sahel cannot be adequately addressed by a rigid wall of trees, arguing that livelihoods are better served through diversification and dynamic fine-tuning of strategies, as demanded by specific local risks and milieus.

According to Chris Reji, a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute, the 20% survival rate of newly planted trees in the Sahara since the 1980s is evidence of the ineffectiveness and efficacy of the current afforestation approach of the GGW. Experts are also concerned that improperly managed afforestation could potentially result in the variation of biomes and the introduction of non-native and potentially invasive species, depriving local species of their habitats and causing a significant loss of agricultural revenue. 

In a statement to the Indigenous People of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC), Sada Albachir, the head of a local Tuareg organization in Niger, criticized the introduction of non-native species, which led to the distortion of biodiversity and water scarcity in the region. For their part, indigenous pastoralist groups are worried that the GGW is disrupting the historical migration patterns of pastoralists, as they are presently unable to move as freely as they used to on account of this. In a socio-spatial context, growing expansive plantations as part of the GGW could lead to the displacement of people currently living on this land, a source of worry for most indigenous communities.

Scientific arguments have also been made against the initiative. Recent studies suggest that the project will significantly impact the regional climate and beyond. Palaeoclimatologist Deepak Chandan explained that the presence of thick vegetation in the Sahel region will result in a darker land surface instead of the blinding desert sands. This will cause the ground to absorb more heat. Moreover, denser vegetation affects the amount of dust in the atmosphere, reducing available dust particles’ ability to reflect sunlight into space. As a result, more solar radiation reaches the surrounding land, causing more heat and humidity relative to the ocean. This leads to larger differentials in atmospheric pressure, resulting in stronger monsoon winds.

Another major failing of the GGW, as indicated by another analysis, is the erratic monitoring of already implemented initiatives. The GGW initiative has been criticized for inadequate monitoring of already implemented initiatives. Experts have found that the metrics designed for monitoring progress do not fully grasp the specific socio-ecological frameworks and vulnerabilities of the communities involved.   

More on the topic: The Great Green Wall Is Failing, But its Legacy Could Still Be A Success

Progress 

Despite widespread criticism against the GGW, the project has achieved varying measures of success across participating countries: Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan and Chad.

.Unlike other ecological interventions in the region that often rely on international NGOs and civil society for traction, the GGW has maximized local knowledge to drive this ecosystem reclamation process. The initiative has grown beyond a mere tree planting campaign to one centred around sustainable indigenous land use practices. 

A 2020 report by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) showed that the project has been split into smaller initiatives, promoting greater autonomy and biodiversity. This has allowed for a wider range of plant and tree species to be used in various sub-projects that are adapted to local social, economic, and environmental conditions. For example, subprojects in Burkina Faso and Niger have helped local farmers transform over 300,000 hectares of previously unproductive lands into arable land for food production. They achieved this by building deep planting pits (“zai”), which help retain water during the dry season, and stone barriers around planting fields to prevent runoffs.

However, in spite of this progress, the project has been encumbered by a paucity of funds, a reality that is presently hampering its ability to reach its target of covering 100 million hectares across the Sahel by 2030. GGW member states and their indigenous communities need to plant over 8 million trees annually, which requires funding of US$4.3 billion per year. 

Additionally, the socio-ecological concerns of the indigenous people living in this region need to be addressed and traditional land management systems incorporated into the GGW to avoid negatively impacting local livelihoods.

Furthermore, the perennial climate of instability in the Sahel region raises questions about the feasibility of completing the project. Presently, the Sahel region has earned the epithet of the “Coup Belt” of Africa due to the prevalence of military coups that have occurred in at least one-third of the countries in the area. At least one-third of countries in the region are led by military juntas that forcefully seized power from democratically elected governments. The most recent being Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which have been suspended from the regional bloc – ECOWAS, further complicating the political situation in the region.  Additionally, there are swathes of ungovernable spaces being held by terror groups across the region. This political instability is a major obstacle to initiatives like the Great Green Wall project. In some areas, work has come to a halt, while in others, progress is shrouded in uncertainty, making it difficult to ascertain work progress.

Overall, while the GGW presents a novel and plausible strategy for the implementation to restore the degraded ecosystem of the region, its implementation has been slow and the pace of deforestation in the region remains alarming, risking it may overtake any meaningful remediation action taken to address it. Therefore, to ensure that the project is successful, a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation framework should be developed. Additionally, it is important to involve local communities in the planning and implementation of the project. Finally, regional governments across the Sahel must increase their efforts in both adaptation and mitigation measures to contain the effects of climate change and to ensure its long-term sustainability.

Featured image: Mission de l’ONU au Mali – UN Mission in Mali/Flickr

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Over the last decade, there has been growing awareness about climate change as communities around the world come to terms with the devastating effects of this phenomenon. Regrettably, this ubiquitous awareness hasn’t evoked long-term sustainable actions from most indigenous communities, especially in the Global South, where people often struggle to understand the basic tenets of climate change in relation to local realities. This pervasive ignorance about the causes and effects of climate change has resulted in an erroneous characterisation of what climate change is and isn’t, largely because contemporary climate change advocacy often fails in contextual climate storytelling.

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While conventional climate change storytelling models could be influential in their own way, they are subject to varying interpretations, dependent on individual circumstances, which often differ from place to place and person to person. Hence, most indigenous communities lose the opportunity to deploy pre-existing local knowledge to create corresponding local climate change actions. This is because contemporary climate change discourses are often unilaterally framed within Western contexts with unintelligible niche semantics and outright climate change scaremongering; these discourses rarely acknowledge the place of native belief systems in climate change storytelling, where customs and age-old traditions are the key artefacts around which everyday life revolves.

For these societies in the Global South, indigenous native belief systems reinforce the dynamic interplay between human psychology and local culture and their mutual influence on each other. For instance, traditional African societies are beholden to the native humanist socio-cultural ideology of Ubuntu, an African collectivist ideology that advocates communal well-being over individual wants. Ubuntu prescribes that every individual be responsive to the needs of their communities and that the community is in turn obligated to look after his or her needs. Therefore, every issue is primarily viewed through the altruistic prism of communal well-being before anything else. Contextually, climate change actions, when viewed through the ideological lens of Ubuntu, offer a narrative of meeting society’s collective needs while protecting a shared patrimony: Earth.

In this context, an effective climate change storytelling approach would be one that is creatively woven around the moral tapestry of appropriate doctrines within local cultures, taking advantage of the power of inherent social influences within each native culture to inspire communal agency and spur impactful climate change action from all members of the society rather than a few outliers. 

Indigenous climate storytelling also acknowledges local customs and beliefs and lucidly establishes how communities could be advancing their collective advancement by protecting the environment as a common patrimony, demonstrating the adjacency of climate risks to members of the society rather than an abstract event that happens elsewhere.

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For instance, the native concept of Umuganda in Rwanda aptly captures the place of indigenous ideology in climate change advocacy and actions. Umuganda is a traditional practice whose raison d’être is to ensure communal well-being. Here, members of each community organise themselves into sub-groups of about 50 households (Umugundu) to carry out interventions within their immediate community. Today, the Rwandan government has institutionalised Umuganda, and its citizens come together on the last Saturday of each month to undertake interventions that include environmental sanitation, the laying of sandbags against erosion, tree planting, rehabilitation of stormwater channels, or any other task the community deems necessary. The economic and socio-ecological impact of Umuganda is significant; it reinforces social harmony and fosters behavioural change that benefits the environment. It has also become an opportunity for climate change information dissemination in each community. Umuganda evokes active participation from everyone across different social strata of local communities, including the Rwandan President and his cabinet members.

Indigenous cultural ideologies like Ubuntu and its equivalence are so entrenched in nearly every indigenous community in the Global South that they are often seen as the principal symbol of authority and power in these communities, one so potent that all members of each community are by default bound by its ‘invisible’ bands of communalism. They stir emotions that birth corresponding actions and behaviour within their respective societies. 

Although the goal of climate change storytelling might be the same across different cultures, these stories told through the lens of indigenous cultural artefacts like Ubuntu have the potential to enthrone and sustain a culture of collective agency and inspire long-term action – one that’s easily transferrable across generations. This is exceedingly probable when these stories are told in a peculiar language that speaks to the behavioural and cognitive peculiarities of each local culture, customs, and beliefs; this has the potential to pass the message across faster, and the beliefs and behaviours within each society offer members the levers with which to navigate and achieve pre-set collective environmental goals. 

While the concept of climate-positive dissonance might inspire a few people, the idea of individualism is considered self-serving in most indigenous communities, which advocate mutually supportive behaviour that prioritises group agency over individual enterprise. Consequently, socio-ecological realities like climate change are best appreciated when linked to core pre-existing indigenous belief systems, that guarantee cognitive consistency; while avoiding the tension, conflicts, and psychological imbalance that come with the sort of dissonance, climate activists often preach.

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The post Indigenous Climate Storytelling Holds the Key to Climate Change Solutions in the Global South appeared first on Earth.Org.

In the past 30 years, Nigeria’s major cities have been rapidly urbanising, attracting hordes of people in search of a better life. According to the World Bank, the population of Lagos grows by 77 people every hour, which is a significant increase by any metric. A similar population growth pattern is also seen in other major cities like Abuja, Ibadan, and Port Harcourt. As a result, there has been a significant increase in the volume of waste generated, which has put city authorities under immense pressure to develop more efficient solid waste management systems, especially in low-income neighbourhoods.

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The Issue of Solid Waste Management in Nigeria

According to the World Bank, Nigeria currently generates at least 32 million tonnes of solid waste annually, and this number is projected to rise to 107 million tonnes by 2050. However, only 30% of the waste generated is efficiently collected and disposed of, mainly because two-thirds of urban households in low-income neighbourhoods lack formal waste management services, unlike middle-class and affluent neighbourhoods where waste is regularly collected. This reality portends a very dire future for city residents in low-income areas, who are unable to manage the volume of waste they presently produce, resulting in a plethora of health and environmental challenges for these residents.

In the absence of an efficient waste management system, solid waste is typically dumped in illegal makeshift landfills, gathered in heaps and incinerated in situ, or abandoned by highways and street corners, while others end up in open drains and nearby streams and water channels, littering streets and clogging drainage channels. Sometimes, water leaches through the landfill, carrying contaminants into the groundwater aquifer or adjacent water bodies, potentially ending up in the food chain or drinking water sources. Inappropriate disposal of batteries and other hazardous chemical waste results in the leaching of dioxins into the surrounding soil, thus contaminating it. In addition, burning organic waste on the open streets releases carcinogens into the atmosphere, which could potentially cause respiratory problems in humans.

The recent World Bank report ‘Detox Development: Repurposing Environmentally Harmful Subsidies’, ranked Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and India as the top three countries exposed to the most unsafe levels of pollution and environmental hazards, accounting for nearly 50% of the global population of people exposed to very unsafe levels of pollution. 

The multi-level failure in solid waste management in low-income neighbourhoods in Nigeria, particularly, has a direct correlation with the spread of diseases in low-income neighbourhoods, as improper disposal of household waste offers a fertile breeding habitat for mosquitoes, rodents, and other vector-carrying germs and diseases, thus posing a risk to public health. The 2021 World Malaria Report confirms that Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, remains the most malaria-endemic country in the world, accounting for 27% of cases and 32% of all deaths caused by malaria globally.

Over the years, the culture of poor waste management in Nigeria’s low-income neighbourhoods has been enabled and sustained by two key factors.

Firstly, waste collection in urban centres across Nigeria has been outsourced to commercial entities; consequently, these service providers typically view low-income neighbourhoods as unprofitable turfs, hence the reluctance to deploy the requisite agency and resources required to effectively collect and dispose of waste in these neighbourhoods. Yet, neglecting waste management in one area often results in a disastrous ripple effect on the entire city, due to the adjacency of all neighbourhoods to one another. Therefore, prioritising waste management in low-income communities is an absolute necessity to prevent potential health hazards and guarantee a healthy environment for all. Consequently, it behoves city authorities to ensure that waste management in these neighbourhoods is socially driven, anchored on the premise of environmental justice and social equity rather than profits; therefore, the responsibility and cost of managing domestic waste should be borne by municipal authorities as a social service for the greater good of each city.

The second challenge is that most people in low-income neighbourhoods have very low environmental literacy and are unaware of the hazards of improper waste disposal and other harmful environmental practices they presently engage in; therefore, continuous sensitisation of residents of low-income neighbourhoods to better environmental awareness is very essential. Prodding citizens to fulfil their obligations to maintain a clean environment and adopt eco-friendly practices is crucial to promoting social responsibility by providing succinct, accurate, and hands-on information on the hazards of poor waste management, to deter delinquent behaviour while promoting and incentivising behavioural change that promotes waste segregation at source rather than lumping everything together to send to landfills. Consequently, citizens must be incentivised to sort their waste into compostable, reusable, recyclable, and non-biodegradable components. This small but significant shift in behaviour patterns will ultimately lead to a healthier environment. 

What Should Policymakers Do?

Although numerous endeavours are currently being undertaken to combat diseases like malaria in Nigeria, considering the scarcity of resources, it would be more impactful and sensible to utilise resources judiciously, by amalgamating and implementing them with the shared objective of eradicating waste and preventing diseases concurrently. Presently, existing domestic waste management laws are not far-reaching enough because they ignore the socio-economic peculiarities of the constituent communities across towns and cities by specifying a uniform domestic waste management guideline across all neighbourhoods. Therefore, to ensure efficient waste management in these neighbourhoods, policymakers and city administrators must develop a multi-level strategy and blueprint for the collection, management, recycling, and disposal of domestic waste in low-income neighbourhoods that guarantees a healthy environment, access to clean air, and protection of water sources and groundwater aquifers.

Action Points for Policymakers

To address these challenges, policymakers must:

1. Classify low-income waste collection and disposal as a social service.
2. Promote environmental literacy in low-income neighbourhoods through mass education and behavioural change campaigns.
3. Incentivise waste segregation at the source, encouraging residents to sort waste into compostable, recyclable, and non-biodegradable components.
4. Enforce anti-littering laws and crack down on indiscriminate waste dumping.
5. Conduct periodic sanitary inspections to enforce baseline environmental benchmarks in all neighbourhoods.

Featured image: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung/Rainer Wozny/Flickr

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