The “Great Green Wall” Didn’t Stop Desertification, but it Evolved Into Something That Might | Science | Smithsonian
▻http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-green-wall-stop-desertification-not-so-much-180960171/?no-ist
It was a simple plan to combat a complex problem. The plan: plant a Great Green Wall of trees 10 miles wide and 4,350 miles long, bisecting a dozen countries from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east. The problem: the creeping desertification across Africa.
“The desert is a spreading cancer,” Abdoulaye Wade, Senegal’s president and the wall’s standard bearer, said. “We must fight it. That is why we have decided to join in this titanic battle.”
There were just a few problems.
Planting trees across the Sahel, the arid savanna on the south border of the Sahara Desert, had no chance to succeed. There was little funding. There was no science suggesting it would work. Moreover, the desert was not actually moving south; instead, overuse was denuding the land. Large chunks of the proposed “wall” were uninhabited, meaning no one would be there to care for the saplings.
Soon after Wade began touting the tree planting plan, scientists began dissenting.
#grande_muraille_verte #sahel #désert
