- The Great Green Wall is a project to restore degraded land in nearly two dozen African countries.
- Deforestation, agricultural expansion, and drought have caused desertification across the continent.
- The $36-billion-plus project aims to generate 10 million jobs and sequester tons of carbon by 2030.
Over the past several decades, deforestation, agricultural expansion, and drought have all contributed to desertification in parts of the African continent. Once-fertile soil has become drier and less productive.
More than a dozen African countries have been fighting this desertification with an ambitious project to grow trees and other vegetation on 247 million acres of degraded land, an area roughly 2.3 times the size of California.
The goals of the 17-year-old Great Green Wall project — estimated to cost between $36 to 49 billion — also include generating 10 million jobs and sequestering 250 million tons of carbon by 2030.
Countries from Senegal to Djibouti are trying to regreen the semiarid Sahel bioclimate, a band stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
