THE GREAT GREEN WALL’ – HOW TREES ARE BEING USED TO COMBATE CLIMATE CHANGE

Jessica Bryce (WHS)

Trees play an important role in our ecosystem, especially for combatting climate change, as they are a natural way of taking carbon dioxide (the compound with the highest impact on overall greenhouse gas effects) and producing valuable oxygen. A good example of this is ‘The Great Green Wall’ initiative in Africa, which has a strong political base with plenty of funding that is attempting to restore land which has lost its biodiversity and vegetation in 11 countries in the Sahel-Sahara Region. The need for this project has been made apparent in the huge decline in quality of arable land in Northern Africa, as well as the poor land management in that area. This has been caused by both human and natural factors, with over-farming, over-grazing and extreme weather contributing the most. The initiative hopes to help these areas achieve food security and improve quality of life and agricultural productivity by improving the quality of the soil, the reasoning behind planting a ‘belt’ of trees across the continent. The importance of trees can be seen in this project on both a local and global scale. At a local level, the trees will improve the quality of the soil by improving the nutrient cycle, which in turn improves crop yield, increasing the incomes of the 500 million people living on land undergoing desertification, hugely improving their quality of life. Due to the number of people affected by this, these local benefits will result in global benefits as well, increasing global food security as a human impact, and creating another large carbon sink as an environmental one.

Many in the media have presented it as purely a treeplanting initiative, however trees and forests are only a part of the focus. The initiative is much more nuanced than this, the end goal is for a variety of different landscapes, not just a large forest, and beyond that the project would not succeed if not for the focus on social impacts. The countries involved have been provided with a $2bn budget, largely from the World Bank, to ensure they are all able to see the project through the whole way, and there is an integrated landscape approach which focuses on individual countries and what they need from the project for it to have the best results. For example, the improvements in land quality and economic opportunity in Mali may help curb terrorism in the country, caused by famine and poverty resulting in religious extremism. The trees are only a part of the solution and would not make a difference if the context of the areas involved was not taken into account.

The impact of trees in a geographical context to combat climate change is critical and should not be underestimated – however, the focus on trees as a solution should not take attention away from other solutions to the problem of a changing climate. The importance of social and political influence over projects such as ‘The Great Green Wall’ must be recognised for trees to really make a difference and to increase the likelihood of similar schemes being started up elsewhere in the world.