Africa plans to build a 8,000-km-long green wall to fight against climate change running across the Sahel region of Africa. 

Called Great Green Wall, the green wall spans the Sahel region from Senegal in the West to Djibouti in the East of Africa, once complete, the Great Green Wall will be "the largest living structure on the planet", three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

In addition, by 2030, the Great Green Wall is expected to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs in rural areas, in line with the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

Due to its extraordinary initiative, the Great Green Wall project already supports an astonishing 15 of the 17 UN's Sustainable Development Goals, as the website states. 

While the wall will fight against poverty and hunger, it aims to build local resilience to climate change, contributing health and well-being, creates jobs, boosting economic opportunities. The wall will create a transitional zone between the arid Sahara desert to the North and the belt of humid savannas to the South. 

An African-led movement was first born in 1970s, when vast swathes of fertile land in a region called the Sahel, has been heavily affected by recurrent periods of drought. 

To restore the degraded lands of the Sahel region and to transform millions of lives in one of the world’s poorest regions, the Sahel, in 2017, 11 African countries signed up the Great Green Wall initiative. 

Today, the Great Green Wall is now supported by more countries and more than 20 African countries have already signed up and more than eight billion dollars have been mobilized and pledged for its support, according to UN's Convention to Combat Desertification. 

As the GGW website explained, in the post-Covid period, Sahelian countries are still struggling with budgets and funding, they hope that a multi-actor Great Green Wall Accelerator, announced by the President of France Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders at the One Planet Summit on January 11th, 2021, will help meet financial requirements and turbo charge the achievement of its goals. 

According to a report of stated in the website that "to complete the GGW, it is estimated that USD 33 billion US dollars of investment – from private, national and international sources will be required in the next decade to achieve the ambitions of the Great Green Wall by 2030.

"The Great Green Wall promises to be a real game-changer"

"The Great Green Wall promises to be a real game-changer, providing a brighter future for rural youth in Africa and a chance to revitalise whole communities," said Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD. 

"It can unite young people around a common, epic ambition: to ‘Grow a 21st Century World Wonder’, across borders and across Africa," Barbut added.

"The Great Green Wall is about development; it’s about sustainable, climate-smart development, at all levels. Each of the 30 countries developed national action plans, that is the biggest achievement, because now they own it," said Elvis Paul Tangam, African Union Commissioner for the Sahara and Sahel Great Green Wall Initiative.

"It’s about ownership, and that has been the failure of development aid, because people were never identified with it. But this time they identify. This is our thing," Tangam added.

The wall will create a mosaic of green and productive landscapes across 11 countries (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti)

A majority of people in the Sahel region of Africa make their living on the land. They depend on the land's productivity to be able to continue their everyday survival – like food production and agriculture, the GGW's report stated.  

"With about 80 per cent of the population relying on rain-fed agriculture for work and 65 per cent of Africa’s land degraded – as a result of climate change, over-farming and other unsustainable practices, urgent action is needed to help manage and restore once fertile land," stated in the report.

The reason of emerging such a big scale project is explained in the GGW's website that the initial focus was first on tree planting to develop a comprehensive rural development, aiming to transform the lives of Sahelian populations. 

The wall will create a mosaic of green and productive landscapes across 11 countries (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti).

"Nearly 18 percent of the Great Green Wall has already been completed"

However, there has been a progress in the second decade of the initiative. So far, the project has restored almost 18 million hectares of degraded lands and created 350.000 jobs created across the Sahel and the Great Green Wall countries. 

The GGW Accelerator also provides a comprehensive mapping of the available funding and monitor and evaluates the impacts of projects - the progress can be followed from here. 

Nearly 18 percent of the Great Green Wall has already been completed so far, according to a fact report of the GGW, and 12 million drought resistant trees have been planted in Senegal, 15 million hectares of degraded land restored in Ethiopia, with 5 million hectares of degraded land restored in Nigeria and 3 million hectares of land have been rehabilitated through local practice used by communities, called Zaï, in Burkina Faso. 

Another progress has been made in Niger; 5 million hectares of land have been restored; delivering an additional 500,000 tonnes of grain per year - which is enough to feed 2.5 million people. 

Video produced by Fernando Meirelles

Executive Producer Fernando Meirelles also created a documentary about Africa's Great Green Wall. Meirelles said that "I first came to hear about the Great Green Wall when directing the Rio Olympics opening ceremony, which had a segment about forests." 

"I was amazed by the scale of the project. The Great Green Wall is an environmental and social project: support for it is very important. This is a hopeful documentary about a positive initiative."

The African Union Commission, Pan-African Agency, European Commission, The World Bank and Global Environment Facility, International Fund Agriculture Development are among international partners of the Great Green Wall project.

The results of the project can also be found in a technical brief report published on 21 September, 2021. 

All images and video courtesy of Great Green Wall.

> via Great Green Wall