No abstract

The Sahel region is confronted with a severe problem of land degradation, which is jeopardizing livelihoods and stymieing efforts to eradicate food insecurity. The Great Green Wall programme is a colossal initiative designed to improve communities' resilience and restore degraded ecosystems by planting locally suitable native trees and grasses. We evaluated the economic costs and bene ts of land restoration under this programme. The results show that the average annual costs of land degradation due to land use and land cover changes in the entire Sahel region during 2001-2018 period were equal to 3 billion USD. Every USD invested into land restoration is found to yield from 1.7 USD to 2.9 USD. About 10 years are needed for all land restoration activities to reach positive bene t-cost ratios from the social perspective. The amount of investments needed for land restoration across the Sahel is estimated to be between 18-70 bln USD.

In this work we demonstrate that restoration interventions in arid to semi-arid landscapes can be independently assessed by remote sensing methods throughout all phases. For early verification, we use Sentinel-1 radar imagery that is sensitive to changes in soil roughness and thus able to rapidly detect disturbances due to mechanised ploughing, including identification of the time of occurrence and the surface area prepared for planting. Subsequently, time series of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from high-resolution imagery enabled tracking and verifying of the increase in biomass and the long-term impact of restoration interventions. We assessed 111 plots within the Great Green Wall area in Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal. For 58 plots, the interventions were successfully verified, corresponding to an area of more than 7000 ha of degraded land. Comparatively, these computerised data were matched with field data and high-resolution imagery, for which the NDVI was used as an indicator of subsequent biomass growth in the plots. The trends were polynomial and presented clear vegetation gains for the monthly aggregates over the last 2 years (2018–2020). The qualitative data on planted species also showed an increase in biodiversity as direct sown seeds of a minimum of 10 native Sahel species (six woody mixed with four fodder herbaceous species) were planted per hectare. This innovative and standardised monitoring method provides an objective and timely assessment of restoration interventions and will likely appeal more actors to confidently invest in restoration as a part of zero-net climate mitigation.

No abstract

The Sahel region is confronted with a severe problem of land degradation, which is jeopardizing livelihoods and stymieing efforts to eradicate food insecurity. The Great Green Wall programme is a colossal initiative designed to improve communities’ resilience and restore degraded ecosystems by planting locally suitable native trees and grasses. We evaluated the economic costs and benefits of land restoration under this programme. The results show that the average annual costs of land degradation due to land use and land cover changes in the entire Sahel region during 2001–2018 period were equal to 3 billion USD. Every USD invested into land restoration is found to yield from 1.7 USD to 2.9 USD. About 10 years are needed for all land restoration activities to reach positive benefit-cost ratios from the social perspective. The amount of investments needed for land restoration across the Sahel is estimated to be between 18–70 bln USD.