When the Great Green Wall initiative began in 2007, it was simply a vision of a large, beautiful wall of green stretching across the width of Africa to prevent the Sahara Desert from encroach on the rest of the continent. Despite years of successes and failures, celebrations and criticisms, we can look to the progress made as an inspiring example of how local and global collaboration can help counter the effects of climate change.
Just a few years ago, the Sahel region on the northern edge of Senegal was a “barren wasteland” where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and local villagers have teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economies of the people who live there and preventing the climate migration that ultimately leads to desertification.
How to retain the largest hot desert in the world?
According to Andrew Millison, a permaculture designer and instructor at Oregon State University, the Sahara Desert has expanded by about 10 percent over the past 100 years. The idea behind the Great Green Wall is to build a vegetation barrier to stop this expansion, which threatens the ecosystems and economies of the Sahel, the region south of the Sahara that separates the desert from the savannah.
In a February 2024 video, Millison shared the collaborative nature and progress of a Great Green Wall project in Senegal, including the rejuvenation of 300,000 hectares (roughly the equivalent of 600,000 football fields) of land apparently unusable.
– YouTubewww.youtube.com
“The process started with community-based participatory planning,” explains Bakalilou Diaby, WFP program policy manager, in the video. “At the end of this process, it was agreed that one of the major actions would be the land reclamation or land reclamation project.”
At first, it took some time to convince the community that regreening the degraded landscape was even possible, but after learning how to improve the land, “people believe and are convinced, and they are also committed,” says Diaby. .
The “forgotten” half-moon water harvesting method
One of the keys to this particular regreening project is the use of long-forgotten water harvesting techniques. When the soil is crusted, sun-baked and hard like cement, rainwater does not penetrate and it is impossible for plants to take root. The solution? Half-moon shaped ditches dug so that water flows into them on the right side with an embankment built on the rounded side to retain the water. Each half-moon is 4 meters in diameter and takes about a day for one person to access. dig.
Local vegetation domesticated in the Sahel thousands of years ago, such as sorghum and millet, are planted in these half-moons, rehabilitating the land and at the same time feeding the local community.
“It’s not new, we didn’t invent technology here,” explains Sebastian Muller of the WFP’s resilience team. “Half-moon technology is actually an endogenous technology in the Sahel and has been forgotten over time. We saved it from the past.”
Not only does capturing water in the half-moons help meet the immediate need to grow food and contribute to the Great Green Wall, but 10-15% of the water will seep into the ground to replenish the water table, creating a more sustainable environment. agricultural process.
“In this way we achieve a water balance. We do not deplete water resources, but we ensure that enough water is preserved in the soil for future generations,” explains Müller.
Other crops such as okra and tomatoes are grown in horizontal horticultural beds, and between these ditches are trenches containing fruit trees.
Mobilizing indigenous wisdom for sustainable agriculture
“This is just a very first step in this pilot project,” adds Muller. “We will also use other native species that will be planted in the pits, which will help rejuvenate and protect the soil as the system begins to grow in abundance and produce food and life for people from here.”
According to Muller, the “syntopic agriculture” methods used were developed in Brazil and are based on global indigenous practices that mimic the way natural forests grow and thrive. These natural growth dynamics make agriculture more sustainable, continually replenishing land rather than continually depleting it – a true testament to global collaboration led at the local level with the support of local communities.
“This project was really interesting because the World Food Program wanted to demonstrate how to transform the most devastated areas into resilient, food-producing sites,” says Millison. “And they specifically placed their project on a very degraded landscape that had been reduced to bare, compacted earth.”
If this desertified “wasteland” can be rejuvenated so successfully, it offers hope of reclaiming other lands that many people might consider useless or barren. As climate change continues to literally alter the Earth’s landscape, we will need to continue to work together, both locally and globally, to find solutions like the Great Green Wall and support their implementation.
You can learn more about successful permaculture practices on Andrew Millison’s YouTube channel.
Gn headline
News Source : www.upworthy.com