This is one of the projects put forward by Emmanuel Macron during his visit, Monday, November 7, to COP27, the annual summit of the international community to fight against global warming. “We must have concrete projects with the most affected areas [par les effets du réchauffement] within the framework of a partnership that brings this justice to life. This is what we wanted to launch with the Great Green Wall, from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa”said the head of state.
While announcements could be made in the coming days on this file, franceinfo explains to you what this Great Green Wall consists of.
What is that ?
Launched in 2007 by the African Union, the Great Green Wall is a project that aims to combat desertification and land degradation south of the Sahara. All while sequestering carbon to fight global warming and providing economic opportunities for the local population. Originally, it was about planting a corridor of trees almost 8,000 km long and 15 km wide, through 11 countries, from Senegal to Djibouti. The visuals used to promote the event show a huge green band bordering the southern Sahara.
The reality of the project is a little more complex. “Today, it’s not just planting trees. This initial idea was not very feasible, they could not plant forests on cultivated and grazed areas”, explains Manon Albagnac, in charge of the Sahel Desertification project at the Cari association. The Great Green Wall encompasses “a whole host of actions to preserve the productive potential of land and agriculture”. Manon Albagnac cites the example of the NGO Tiipaalga, which restores plots and develops fruit and fodder crops in northern Burkina Faso.
Where is the project?
The stated objective is to restore 100 million hectares of land by 2030. In a report published in September 2020 (PDF), the UN Convention against Desertification estimated that only 4% of this area had been effectively restored over the period 2011-2017, half of which was on Ethiopian territory. About one billion dollars (one billion euros) have been mobilized, while financing needs are estimated at 43 billion by 2030. This observation triggered the “Great Green Wall accelerator”, mentioned by Emmanuel Macron in his speech on Monday, with pledges of funding of 19 billion euros.
Insufficient in relation to the objectives, these figures should be taken with a grain of salt. “Nobody is able to have a follow-up of the projects in each territory, it is a real difficulty. We do not know if the spaces considered to be restored are still in good condition”, observes Manon Albagnac. Moreover, according to her, the funds mentioned by Emmanuel Macron are “for most financing lines already programmed” not new investments.
Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS, Gilles Boëtsch, who has been working on the subject for twelve years, finds “a little hard” to summarize the progress of the project at the figure of 4%. “It’s the equivalent of the surface of Belgium, it’s not nothing. And there is everything that accompanies the trees, the people, the projects”, he argues. However, the anthropologist identifies two major obstacles: the climate – “with global warming, the rains are no longer regular as before, this weakens the project” – and the war against the jihadist groups that occupy certain areas of the Sahel. “You can’t plant trees in the middle of people shooting at each other”, he summarizes. The president of the Balanitès Institute, an association that promotes scientific cooperation around the project, finally regrets the lack of investment in research, “essential” to the proper implementation of the Great Wall.
Is this Great Wall effective?
Despite the difficulties, Manon Albagnac does not want to give the impression that “nothing was done”. She mentions the establishment of a political framework, available in each country, with the Pan-African Agency for the Great Green Wall, to coordinate the various initiatives. “There are reasons to hope that it will be a mobilizing and unifying political framework”, explains the project manager of the NGO Cari. Gilles Boëtsch y “also believes”. “People are involved locally, this project has a future”he hammers.
Author of a thesis on this project, the geographer Ronan Mugelé was much more skeptical in 2018 in an article published by the Bulletin of the Association of French Geographers. The Great Green Wall was compared to a “mirage”to the “changing reality according to the distance from which it is observed”. He “is akin either to a modest and umpteenth reforestation operation in the Sahel, or to an institutional platform intended to polarize aid flows, or even to an old environmental utopia revived by a handful of leaders anxious to improve their image “he wrote.
In its special report on land masses published in 2020 (PDF, in English)the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which summarizes the state of scientific knowledge, was skeptical. “In the past, reforestation programs in the Sahel and North Africa launched to combat desertification have been poorly thought out and have cost a lot of money without significant results”wrote the authors of the report, before concluding: “Despite the first concrete actions on the ground, achieving the goals is uncertain and will be difficult without significant additional funding.”