← Terraforming · Desert greening
Great Green Wall (Africa)
An 8,000-kilometre Sahel restoration idea. The “wall of trees” branding faded. The hectare maths, and the money, are still behind the 2030 slogan.
Jurisdiction: African Union / Sahel and Sahara states (UNCCD-supported)
Years / status: AU initiative 2007. Mosaic-restoration reframing in the 2010s. 2030 targets: 100 million hectares, 250 Mt CO₂, 10 million jobs. Status: partial, off the 2030 pace.
The plan
First sold as a belt of trees from Senegal to Djibouti. Practice shifted toward restoring mosaics of farms, grassland and woodland with local species and livelihoods. The 2030 package is land restored, carbon and jobs: not a single planted palisade.
Construction / status
National programmes differ. Ethiopia reports large seedling numbers; Senegal has better-documented plots; several states have thin monitoring. The UNCCD’s 2020 status report put restored area on the order of 4 million hectares (about 4 percent of the 100 million target) with uneven survival data. A 2021 “Accelerator” pledged new finance; disbursement lagged pledges.
What went wrong, or only partly worked
Later programme briefings have cited on the order of 30 million hectares restored: about 30 percent of the 2030 goal, and have said the deadline would be missed. Survival rates are still poorly and inconsistently monitored outside a few countries. Three million jobs have been claimed in later briefings; treat jobs and hectares as programme figures, not a field census.
Lessons
A wall was the wrong metaphor for a rainfall gradient. Restoration that pays local users lasts longer than ceremonial planting. Do not equate “hectares reported” with “trees alive in 2030.” Finance that is pledged and not spent is not a canopy.
Sources
UNCCD Great Green Wall initiative pages; UNCCD 2020 implementation status and way ahead to 2030.