Environmental issues in Africa have been linked to everything from civil war to witchcraft, but one area that has crushing significance is the more than 60 percent of the continent that is covered in drylands - areas exposed to arid, semi-arid or dry-sub-humid climate and threatened by desertification.

Due to unsustainable policies and poor land management practices, the negative impacts on both human lifestyles and the environment have been devastating.  Once these areas were the main source of livelihood, now they are becoming barren and unproductive.

One of the largest tracts of drylands lies in West Africa and includes the countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauratania, Niger and Senegal. The region is known a Sahel and has the dubious honor of being one of the poorest and most environmentally degraded areas on earth.

Despite the devastation that has plagued the region for decades, positive initiatives are beginning to make headway in this world of sand. Over an eight-year period locals planted more than 200 million trees, in the process reforesting 5 million hectares of parched terrain. Now surfaces that resembled barren foreign planets are sprouting trees, due in the main to educating farmers and a planting method called zai – developed by a local farmer from Burkino Faso. This involves digging planting pits which are plugged with manure and other organic residue. The manure attracts insects which dig networks of tunnels and aerate the soil.

Zai has helped restore the Sahel land from a dustbowl to forest. Interestingly a similar program was used in China. The barren lands of the Loess Plateau in north central China, stretching for more than half a billion square km, were grazed and stripped of vegetation through unregulated development but have now been reforested in what is seen as nothing short of a miracle. Locals have planted millions of trees there after being shown the benefits in a project run by the World Bank between 1994 and 2005 and which continues to this day.

What emerges from these planting efforts is that local farmers and stakeholders in barren lands are more than willing to go green after they are educated on the benefits of their actions.

Farmers now realize the loss of the trees also meant their time honored traditions, knowledge and practices, an integral part of keeping the region fertile for centuries, disappeared.

This is being replaced through taught sound land management, which improved livelihoods and food security, while at the same time regenerating forests. Forest management is proving to be more effective when it is in the hands of green educated farmers and not controlled from some central government office. 

These greening efforts both in Africa and China have a ripple effect on the economy of the region where they take place, as farmers become aware that soil erosion and poor soil management is directly related to poverty.

The challenges of these greening initiatives are enormous and while it is apparent that the giant hand of global warming could destroy all that is being done in Sahel, what is encouraging is that the people on the ground are getting it – their destiny is in their own green fingers and what they do about it today is what counts.

The Editor