How to Stop the Sahara's Spread? Build a Great Green Wall

Today in Chad, 11 African leaders collected $119 million dollars — to plant trees.

The money, pledged from the Global Environment Facility, is intended to help Saharan countries go green. Literally.

The plan, according to the BBC, is to build a "wall" of drought-resistant flora 15 kilometers wide, from Senegal to Djibouti. Chadian President Idriss Deby, who hosted the leaders, says the Great Green Wall is "a project conceived of by Africans for Africans and for future generations." (Pay no attention to China's own green belts and walls and whatnot, which are far older.)

But no matter who first invented the concept, countries along the Saharan belt hope that reforesting the continent could help slow the spread of the Saharan desert. Such a spread threatens the livelihoods of farmers and herders and — depending on who you talk to and how you feel about root or mono causality — is behind some nasty conflicts like the one in Darfur.

There's definitely a lot to be said about this latest project. Can it work? What environmental effects, positive or negative, might it have? I'm not an environmental expert. But here's something for the process people to chew on: as Ecolocalizer notes, the Great Green Wall has been in the works for awhile, and the longer it's been incubating, the more complicated, slower and multilateral it's gotten. The lesson of African and European Union involvement? "We manage to delay the actual action by systemising project development," blogger Dave Harcourt says.

And here's something for politics junkies: Leaders from these 11 African countries sat down to hammer out some details this week. Among the countries represented? Sudan and Chad and Eritrea and Ethiopia, to name two surprising pairs of delightful bedfellows. Is it too much to hope that 'going green' isn't the only slap-happy literalism here? Might we really have seeds of peace on our hands, too?

Photo Credit: rayced