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Africa’s great green wall has become a $33 billion test of climate ambition
Nearly two decades after the African Union launched one of the world’s most ambitious land restoration schemes, the Great Green Wall is running out of time. With 2030 fast approaching, its planners still need to find billions of dollars to keep history’s boldest climate promise from unravelling.
By Nympha Ozougwu
Africa’s drylands have long been described in terms of what they lack – rainfall, soil fertility, jobs. The Great Green Wall, launched in 2007, was meant to supply what was missing by stitching together an 8,000 kilometre corridor of trees running from Senegal on the Atlantic coast to Djibouti near the Red Sea.
Land degradation, desertification and the mounting effects of climate change in the Sahel were the problems it set out to solve.
Since then the project has outgrown its original metaphor. What began as a line of trees has become a sprawling effort to restore forests, grasslands, farmland and water systems, while shoring up the livelihoods of the people who depend on them. Its ambitions have grown too.
By 2030 the initiative aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, create 10 million green jobs and draw 250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Such targets do not come cheap. The Great Green Wall Accelerator, the body that coordinates financing for the programme, puts the bill at $33 billion. That figure has become one of the initiative’s biggest obstacles.
International partners announced $19 billion in commitments in 2021 to support land restoration and climate resilience efforts across Africa, yet turning those pledges into accessible funding, at the pace the programme needs, has proved difficult.
Implementation still depends on converting those commitments into finance that restoration projects, local institutions and communities can actually draw on.
A 2024 assessment cited by Reuters highlighted continuing concerns over implementation and financing.
Alain Richard Donwahi, president of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s 2022 summit, said the initiative faced “substantial challenges” and warned that the 2030 targets would be difficult to achieve without faster progress.
Despite these challenges, countries involved in the initiative are moving ahead with restoration programmes linked to the Great Green Wall.
In Nigeria, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched the Scaling Up Resilience in Africa’s Great Green Wall.
For OPA News Agency | One Planet Agency