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353 - The Great Green Wall: how to check the advancing desert
June 2010
The desert has been nibbling away at the Sahel’s fertile land for several decades. To halt this advancing desertification, 11 African countries( 1) have come together to build a “Great Green Wall”. This immense project, initiated in 2005, aims to replant with trees a 15 km wide strip stretching 7000 km across the Africa, from Dakar to Djibouti.
A community of international specialists, including IRD researchers, has been mobilized to ensure that this wall of greenery will be as effective as possible. Their objectives are to choose the revegetation techniques and the best adapted species. These experts( 2) are focusing on a natural process which functions in most plant species: symbiosis between the plant and a fungus. Favouring this process would improve plant growth in degraded soils and increase their drought resistance. A tree with remarkable properties( 3) is one of the various recommended species that will be used: the filao tree, which can fix nitrogen from the air and hence colonize impoverished land.
It remains to be determined how the project can be integrated into an environment which is already used and how to enable the local communities to benefit from it.
