The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative as an opportunity to enhance resilience in Sahelian landscapes and livelihoods

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, a large number of development initiatives have addressed the diverse social and ecological challenges in the Sahel, often focusing on a single entry point or action, resulting in only a limited degree of success. Within the last decade, the international development discourse has evolved to incorporate resilience thinking as a way to address more complex challenges. However, concrete examples as to how to operationalize resilience thinking are lacking. The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGW), a pan-African program with a strong reforestation focus, is the latest and most ambitious of these development programs to date. The GGW represents an ideal opportunity to apply resilience thinking at a large scale, but in order to do so, it must intelligently gather and centralize pre-existing interdisciplinary knowledge, generate new knowledge, and integrate knowledge systems to appropriately navigate future uncertainties of the diverse social-ecological systems along its path. Herein, after a brief description of large-scale reforestation history in the Sahara and Sahel and the conceptual evolution of the GGW, we propose a transdisciplinary research framework with resilience thinking at its core. It includes analysis of complex social-ecological systems, their temporal and spatial cross-scale interactions, and outcomes focused on the supply of abundant, diverse, equitable, and durable ecosystem services to support livelihoods in the region. If the research areas that comprise the framework were to be properly addressed, they could conceivably guide GGW actions in a way that would contribute to desirable future pathways.

Assessment of Soil Erosion at Multiple Spatial Scales Following Land Use Changes in 1980–2017 in the Black Soil Region, (NE) China

“…Similar programs also appeared in other countries. For example, the Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel (GGW), which covers 21 countries in Africa [ 54 ], the First Ten-year Forest Rehabilitation (TYFR) in South Korea, and the Five Million Hectare Reforestation Program (5MHRP) in Vietnam. In NEC, impacted by the GTGP, farmland shelterbelts and sand fixation forests were constructed, and conversion of farmland to forest occurred on steep slopes [ 11 , 12 , 36 ].…”

Global guidelines for the sustainable use of non-native trees to prevent tree invasions and mitigate their negative impacts

“…Within a country or region, native tree species rather than NNTs, should be used, in planning and establishing large-scale plantings, afforestation or reforestation projects, planted forest, and agroforestry (Douglas et al 2014;Peltzer et al 2015) wherever possible. This approach is particularly important in massive and global projects such as the Trillion Trees campaign, the African Green Wall initiative (Goffner et al 2019), the China's Grain-for-Green Program (Hua et al 2016), and the Bonn Challenge (Temperton et al 2019) (Table 1).…”

The best strategy for using trees to improve climate and ecosystems? Go natural

“…Historically, big-ticket tree-planting projects, not natural regeneration, have reaped most of the attention and support globally. In the mid-1980s, Burkina Faso's president Thomas Sankara proposed planting a line of trees 7,000 kilometers long across Africa in a "Great Green Wall" to hold back what was thought to be relentlessly spreading sands, and the Green Wall idea was resurrected by Olusegun Obasanjo, president of Nigeria, in 2005 (1). In June 2019, Ethiopia's minister of innovation and technology, Getahun Mekuria, claimed that his country had set a new record for the number of trees planted in one day, 353 million, garnering headlines (and skepticism) around the world (2,3).…”

“…The regreening brought "spectacular" results in terms of crop yields and farmers' incomes, reports a 2019 article (1), and the idea was used in other regions such as northern Ethiopia, where, over the course of several years, long-dormant springs bubbled to life and living standards climbed as nascent forests captured water, improved soil fertility, and boosted crop yields. The collective effort has been one of the most effective responses to the growing problem of the degradation of the world's drylands (those limited by water scarcity but capable of supporting some vegetation), such as the Sahel region of Africa, says Tim Christophersen, head of United Nations (UN) Environment Programme's Freshwater, Land, and Climate Branch.…”