Emmanuel Siakilo smiles a lot. More than you’d expect for someone who spends his time working on the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change in his native Kenya. And certainly more than you’d expect for someone who had to leave his home in Trans-Nzoia County, on Kenya’s western border, because of flooding caused by the climate emergency. “What can I say? I’m an optimist,” he says on video call from Nairobi, where he now lives.
Siakilo knows firsthand how immediate these issues are. When he was a child, his region would flood perhaps twice in a year. “The houses could be submerged in water. … Crops and livestock would be swept away, and you’d have to start from zero. No food, no farms, nothing to pay school fees with,” he says.
As he grew older, the floods became both more severe and more frequent: up to six or seven per year. “Yet the leadership was still saying that this was a natural phenomenon, that nothing could be done,” he says. That’s when Siakilo decided he had to leave. He went to Nairobi to study, eventually earning his doctorate in climate action at the University of Phoenix in Arizona. He has made it his life’s work to educate lay people and leaders alike, about both the challenges we face and solutions to resolve them.
Today, Siakilo is the senior climate adaptation and resilience advisor for Power Shift Africa,* a non-profit based in Nairobi. Power Shift Africa provides policy papers for leaders across Africa and around the world on what can be done to address the impacts of the changing climate. “It’s about shifting our understanding of what, literally, should power our societies,” Siakilo says. “But it’s also about shifting power dynamics in the global conversation on how to manage climate change.”
It’s unsurprising that some of the best ideas for fighting the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss come from Africa. The continent has had the least to do with creating the global climate crisis we all face, yet its people are grappling with some of the most immediate consequences. While African biodiversity and climate-adaptation initiatives encounter their fair share of obstacles and unintended outcomes, it’s also true that farmers, communities and, yes, even governments are stepping up to meet the challenges with a degree of coordination and success that others could do well to learn from.
This pragmatic approach to addressing climate issues is evident in the evolution of the Africa-led Great Green Wall Initiative, an ambitious plan to combat desertification by planting trees across the Sahel region. The original vision was for a wall 16 kilometres wide and more than 8,000 kilometres long. It was conceived as a line of trees to stop the Sahara from spreading and stretched from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east. Launched in 2007, it required the in-depth collaboration of 11 countries across a territory twice the size of Western Europe.
The initiative aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs by 2030 to support communities across the region.
The number of countries participating has grown to 30. The required budget has also soared from US$8 billion to more than US$40 billion. The need is urgent: temperatures in the Sahel are rising one and a half times faster than the average for the rest of the world, in regions where up to 82% of the population relies on rain-fed agriculture.
But cracks began to emerge in the Wall initiative’s blueprint.
Mending the great green wall
As specific species of trees either died or became invasive, policy-makers and farmers alike soon discovered that the volume of trees planted was not nearly as important as the mix and species of trees deployed, and the way in which communities chose to use them: where trees were placed, in combination with what other vegetation, what value local communities saw from the initiative (and hence whether those communities were on board to sustain the effort) all mattered. Those working on the Wall in countries such as Niger, Senegal and Mali shifted their efforts from simple tree planting to more sophisticated land regeneration: an approach that engages grassroots Indigenous knowledge, species and methods in ways that, in some countries, have measurably improved the quality of the soil over decades.
Farmers in Niger, for example, had laboured for generations under French colonial-era laws that disincentivized the planting of trees on farmland. (Trees were to be kept separate from crops and were considered the property of the government.) Over decades, the tree population sharply declined, and with it the land’s productivity. Topsoil blew away, and rainfall ran off compacted surfaces. By the early 1980s, Niger farmers were producing crop yields of 400 pounds per acre; farms in the United States, by comparison, were producing 5,600 pounds per acre (largely thanks to heavy chemical input, souped-up seeds and expensive farming equipment).
In some communities, the people turned to cultivating trees placed strategically within fields, using root stock on already-cleared land. The trees provided fuel and food and, crucially, started to improve the quality of the soil. By 2004, Smithsonian magazine reported that Niger’s Zinder region had 50 times more trees than it did in 1975. Today, the Wall has been successful in environments such as Mali, Niger and Senegal, places where it was able to build on such local knowledge and grassroots efforts. Wall coordinators link locally led, small-scale initiatives across the country to achieve much larger national goals – literally growing the Wall from the grassroots up. In Senegal, the government, via the Senegalese Agency for Reforestation, has partnered with local farmers practising regenerative agriculture. For example, the Kholy-Alpha natural reserve, in the rural community of Mboula, engages community members directly in cultivating tree nurseries and nurturing the seedlings needed to achieve planting targets each year.
Wall of greenwash?
The Great Green Wall has not been without both its challenges and its critics. African tree-planting efforts made headlines around the world just before the pandemic, when Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million trees on one day in July 2019, toward a claim of four billion planted that year. Achieving four billion trees planted stretches credibility: to do so would require a pace of 40 to 45 million planted per day. The BBC attempted to investigate the claim in 2019, but it’s almost impossible to independently verify the total number of saplings planted in Ethiopia, given there is no free press.
Even in places where the press is free, getting reliable data outside of formal evaluations remains challenging. As per 2014 data from the search engine Ecosia, which partnered with local groups to quantify the success of the initiative to date, the Wall initiative had planted approximately 22.3 million trees and restored 14,284 hectares of land across Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ethiopia. The BBC subsequently reported in 2017 that in Senegal alone, more than 11 million trees had been planted. More recent estimates of success of the whole initiative vary wildly, from 4% to 15% complete, as do survival rates for saplings. A 2019 World Agroforestry study found a survival rate of less than 30% in Ethiopia’s East Shewa zone, in sharp contrast with official Ethiopian government statistics that put the sapling survival rate at 83.4% and 79% for 2019 and 2020 respectively. Reforestation efforts are also hampered by the climate emergency itself: ongoing drought, in particular in Ethiopia, and other extreme weather events that limit the amount of water available to sustain such initiatives.
Regardless, a commitment to “re-greening” through strategic tree planting has since become policy across all members of the African Union. As Babacar Youm, a delegate from Senegal attending COP15 last December in Montreal, explained, “Every country in Africa now has targets to plant trees, from Nigeria to South Sudan.”
Losing the forest for the trees
Governments worldwide have seized on the idea that the rapid planting of trees at mass scale is somehow a catch-all solution to the multi-layered challenges of biodiversity depletion and climate change. In the 2019 election, Canada set itself the target of two billion trees to be planted over 10 years and is already falling behind. Canada had planted 29 million trees in its first two years, a mere 1.5% of the end goal. Obstacles to date include lack of access to land, intermittent disbursement of funding and insufficient seedlings as projects ramp up. In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to plant one billion trees on millions of acres of wildfire-singed federal land in addition to an earlier commitment of 1.2 billion new trees by 2030, but the Americans have also run into serious seed shortages, hampering their efforts to scale up. In the global rush to reach critical mass, the slower, building-from-the-ground-up approach that delivered success in early-adopter countries such as Niger, Senegal and Mali risks being lost.
In January 2020, the Kenyan government evicted 30,000 people from the forest in the name of conservation. “The government was trying to conserve the Mau Forest,” Siakilo explains. “Yet the Ogiek people have been residing there as long as humanity has existed.” Some Ogiek have since partnered with the Kenya Water Towers Agency, the entity leading regeneration efforts, to grow seedlings for the reforestation efforts.
Meanwhile, in Tanzania, a government policy intended to support conservation efforts sparked violent protests in June 2022, when officials started moving the semi-nomadic Maasai people from the Ngorongoro Crater conservation area. The government contended that the expanding Maasai population had become a threat to the habitat; UN experts feared the relocations could cause “irreparable harm to the Maasai pastoralists,” as reported by France 24.
“If we are to do re-greening,” says Siakilo, “the key question to ask is ‘For whom is this project?’ The moment you ask that question you are thinking about justice, fairness, equity, inclusion – bringing on board every stakeholder.”
There’s also another issue: forests are dark, reducing reflectivity and absorbing heat. This quality, some scientists believe, could potentially undermine or even negate the carbon-sequestration benefits that planting trees at scale brings. The re-greening must be done in a way that genuinely restores the local habitat.
Such challenges aside, experts do agree that large swathes of arable land have been regenerated through Great Green Wall efforts. In Ethiopia, a report from the World Bank–affiliated Independent Evaluation Group found that Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, its offshoot of the Wall, had regenerated 45 watersheds. As per the report, 98% of the targets that the project set in terms of improved land management had been met. Target areas recorded an increase on average of approximately 5% in vegetation cover and moisture retention over a minimum seven-year period.
Forest financing done right
So, how to finance the kind of locally led re-greening at the scale needed?
The loss-and-damage fund agreement reached by negotiators at the COP27 climate summit in the fall of 2022 will ask Global North countries, which have contributed the most to the climate problem while generating great wealth from the burning of fossil fuels, to essentially provide funding to Global South countries to mitigate climate “loss and damage.” That funding enables Global South governments to leave fossil fuels in the ground while engaging in biodiversity cultivation, including tree-planting work at scale.
At press time, the UN confirmed that the committee set up to deliberate over the fund’s disbursement was on track to meet at the end of March, as announced at COP27, but did not respond to questions about how much funding had in fact been committed. Whether states actually step up to provide funding will have direct impacts on the capacity of some of the more fragile countries to achieve re-greening targets.
Take South Sudan, whose target is to plant one million trees by 2027. As Lwanga Tiba Charles, South Sudan’s assistant director for biodiversity in the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said at COP15 in Montreal last December, “We will engage village communities across all 10 South Sudanese states to cultivate local species of seedlings in community nurseries.” On designated planting days, everyone will participate. South Sudan’s work is to be funded by the Global Climate Fund, a separate climate fund established in Seoul in 2010, at an estimated cost of under US$5 million.
The cost, complexity and unintended consequences of hastily executed tree-planting initiatives are sobering for those looking to Africa’s experience for lessons to regenerate the biosphere and blunt the impact of climate change. Yet Senegal, Mali, Niger and Ethiopia have also been able to restore sizeable swathes of arable land and regenerate watersheds. And this has been achieved in some of the most cash-poor, politically fragile states on the planet.
In light of these achievements, the global community needs to pay closer attention to the Great Green Wall and invest in Africa-led initiatives that have delivered measurable results for some of the most vulnerable on Earth. After all, as Alison Loat, the managing director for sustainable investment and innovation at OPTrust puts it, “What’s at stake isn’t the future of the planet. What’s at stake is the future of humanity.” Who better to lead that effort than the only continent that, to date, has built a pan-continental consensus on how best to combat climate change – and delivered a track record of success.
*Journalists for Human Rights partners with Power Shift Africa on climate media development work.
Rachel Pulfer is the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.
