Sahel Desertification

The Sahel of North Africa is a semi-arid transition region between the Sahara desert to the Northern and wetter regions of middle Africa near the equator. This area stretches from the Atlantic ocean in the west to the Indian ocean in the east. The Sahel of North Africa has undergone extreme environmental changes over the past eleven thousand years. Due to the extreme climatic changes and social conflict that is prevalent in that region, Sahel has drawn the attention of the global community. The Sahel region has fallen victim to desertification. Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi arid, and dry sub humid areas. Desertification is caused by human activities and extreme climate variations. This region has a high variability of rainfall and has experienced extreme periods of rain followed by extreme periods of drought at intervals of 1,500 years plus or minus 500 years. Recently these changes have correlated with the changes in ocean temperatures in the north Atlantic ocean. In addition poverty, political instability, deforestation, overgrazing, and bad irrigation practice can damage the land's fertility. In addition to these environmental factors, humans have made a substantial impact on the desertification of the Sahel. One of the biggest general impacts has
been the population increase in the area with the population at a rate much faster than that of food production. This in turn heightens the effects of the following factors. The countries that are in the Sahel region consists of some of the poorest on Earth, with the majority of the population working as farmers. With the increasing population and the majority of population farming this results in over grazing and poor farming methods. This leads to soil erosion and continuous degradation of the land. The colonial influence has also made a substantial and lasting impact on the degradation of the Sahel. During the colonization of Africa this region was divided up by different European nations disrupting the borders already established. These new enforced borders set by the European nations disturbed the nomadic lifestyle that a large amount of the population participated in. This forced the nomads into villages resulting in their herds overgrazing, which was particularly harmful when the Sahel region experiencing a dry period. The desertification of the Sahel region has a major negative environmental impact, but economically and socially on the population of this region and surrounding areas.
This has been an issue that has concerned not just local communities, but the global community. The idea has gained traction and support by the global community since it was presented at the African Union in 2005. The Global Environment Facility (GGF) has agreed to allocate $1.15 million to the initiative. This Great Green Wall project has goals to not only improve the desertification, but help the communities in that area economically, improve food production, as well as help them adapt to climate
change. The Great Green Wall is exactly what it sounds like a wall that will stretch across the Sahel region made up of shrubs, bushes, and other forestry. In building the wall the organizations will try to use mostly drought tolerant plants that will survive during drought periods, as well as build in water retention ponds. It will be a living wall acting as a catalyst to help redevelop the degraded land in the Sahel region. This wall will stretch from Djibouti all the way to Dakar in the west, specifically including parts of Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan .