A che punto è la Grande Muraglia Verde dell’Africa contro la desertificazione

And why is it necessary to strengthen support for the project, with Italy leading the way.

In the Sahel, where the sand dunes of the Sahara transition into arid savannah, 22 states have joined forces to address recurrent drought and encroaching desertification. Over the past decades, unregulated grazing and changes in precipitation patterns have heightened aridity along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. According to geographers’ analyses, the Sahara now covers 10% more land than it did a century ago when measurements began. To halt the desert’s expansion, the African Union proposed the construction of a Great Green Wall in 2007, stretching 8,000 kilometers from Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east, covering over 780 million hectares.

Initially, the project aimed only to plant rows of trees in the Sahel region, but its scope has expanded to include the restoration of degraded lands and regenerative agriculture, with the goal of halting desertification, restoring 100 million hectares of land, sequestering 250 million tons of CO2, and creating 10 million green jobs by 2030.

To date, the project has covered less than 10% of the 100 million-hectare target, but it is making good progress to meet the 2030 deadline,” explains Moctar Sakande, coordinator of international projects at the FAO’s Forestry Division, in a lengthy interview with Oltremare. He doesn’t hide his optimism: “After all, the project is of vital importance for millions of people and for the stability of the region.” However, criticisms have not been lacking in the past, especially following failures after widespread tree plantations without truly studying ecosystems in depth.

The challenge for optimists is not trivial. At this rate, the Great Green Wall will need to regenerate at least 15 million hectares of land, at a cost of around $8 billion annually, if the deadline is to be met, according to estimates from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

A Cyclopean Project

The Great Green Wall envisages that land restoration initiatives will foster economic prosperity in participating countries, create employment, reduce hunger, and alleviate conflicts related to access and competition for natural resources throughout Africa. A kind of natural superstructure, made up of patches of regenerated land, from savannah to agricultural areas to commercial plant forests.

“The project is of rare complexity,” continues Sakande, “it is enormous given that potentially 162 million hectares could be restored, involving eleven Sahel countries, in an arid and semi-arid territory receiving between 100 and 600 millimeters of rain per year, very little. But enough to grow various food crops.”

In the first 15 years of the project, a lot was spent solely on tree planting, including private initiatives, such as the attempt by the Ecosia search engine. Several attempts, however, did not perform as expected, casting doubt on the project. Today, thanks also to a regenerative and integrated approach promoted by the UNCCD and UN organizations, efforts are being made to restore savannahs, agro-pastoral areas, wetlands, herbaceous plants, and shrubs, working on efficient water management, involving thousands of villages and communities in a networked manner.

The Accelerator: Scaling Up and Mechanization

On January 11, 2021, during the One Planet Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders announced the Great Green Wall Accelerator, an initiative to give new impetus to the project with commitments for $14.3 billion in funding. The accelerator is currently coordinated by the Pan-African Agency for the Great Green Wall (PAAGGW) with the support of the UNCCD and the implementation of various agencies such as IFAD or FAO. Its purpose is to make projects related to the Great Green Wall more efficient, in an attempt to strengthen governance.

“The accelerator has five pillars,” explains Maxime Thibon, senior technical specialist for climate change at IFAD, which promotes the sharing of best practices among partners. “The first deals with creating and promoting value chains and sustainable economic development. The second pillar is dedicated to ecosystem restoration and management. The third is dedicated to climate resilience practices and infrastructure. The fourth concerns governance. Finally, the fifth concerns capacity building.

FAO, for its part, is working on mechanizing processes. Given the scale of the GGGW, traditional regeneration cannot proceed manually, with animal traction, meter by meter. “So we introduced machinery of Italian origin, the Delfino plows, a cutting-edge heavy excavator, with which it was possible to plow degraded and dry land up to more than half a meter deep.” The Delfino loosens the soil, bringing out the most fertile layer, creates large crescent-shaped catchment basins ready for planting seeds and seedlings, multiplying the collection of rainwater and making the soil more permeable for planting compared to the traditional, and laborious, method of digging by hand.

Another solution is the series of micro-dams to be built before the rains. These structures are ten times more efficient than traditional hand-made channels. And with water capture, the planted seeds are helped to sprout, as well as providing a resource for the fields of local farmers.

Financing

Investing in regeneration is a strategy to save on the costs of food emergencies. “Together with the University of Bonn, we have calculated the return on investment in environmental regeneration for the Great Green Wall: for every dollar invested, the return will be between $1.1 and $4 per hectare,” explains Sakande. Like many cooperation projects, resources are always insufficient, and in these cases, it is not easy to find private investors, public finance needs to be activated, public development aid (APs), UN agencies, or funds from the governments involved. “Often, one does not invest directly in the program, confusion is created, and funding is dispersed,” continues the FAO expert. For Thibon, resources are fundamental for the survival of the GGW.

Various experts from NGOs and international organizations, consulted for this article, have reiterated that the Italian government should invest much more in this initiative, also referring to the Mattei Plan. At the moment, it is estimated that almost $20 billion has been planned by 2025, although by the end of March 2023, only $2.5 billion had actually been disbursed. And the projection is to reach $33 billion by the end of the decade. Resources that are not easy to mobilize, and the uncertain global reform of finance for climate and biodiversity, and the convoluted relationship with APs make it even more difficult.

Articolo pubblicato su Oltremare – Autore Emanuele Bompan