Summary: after decades when very little happened, climate change has pushed a massive project to halt Sahelian desertification to the top of the priority list with Mauritania playing a lead role.
This content is locked
Login or Register To Unlock The Content!
Again! This will never work. It was the greatest scam, loved by Sayf Al Islam Al Qadhafi as an excuse to get green funding. Unless you incentivise the local farmers by offering incentives for the production of non timber forest products, you can plant a billion trees and all that will happen is that they will wither, animals will eat them and people will cut them for firewood.
Not a great green wall but, yet again, the great green scam.
The fact that the One Planet Summit pledged US$14.3 billion and the African Development Bank has pledged US$6.5 billion of that amount underlines the seriousness of the commitment. As well climate change is having a dramatic impact on the Sahel which gives the project a great urgency. I will not speak on behalf of the GGW, but my TAP affiliation is known and I will say that TAP is about water and not only for the GWW but communities and about water for capitals like Nouakchott or major cities such as Port Sudan that are in dire need of potable water. The rural communities along the projected course of the GWW need to be accommodated with their livestock and fire wood needs; on trees I will argue that this should be the traditional tree of the Sahel: the Acacia, in particular the Acacia Seyal and Acacia Senegal that produce the best resin for gum Arabic, as well as the Boabab. The funding pledges are the game changer as that has never happened before and with the involvement of the G5 Sahel there is a potential strong regional oversight body available.