The “Great Green Wall”, has helped raise total forest coverage to nearly 25% of China’s total area, up from less than 10% in 1949. In the remote northwest, though, tree planting is not merely about meeting state reforestation targets or protecting Beijing. When it comes to making a living from the most marginal farmland, every tree, bush and blade of grass counts – especially as climate change drives up temperatures and puts water supplies under further pressure.

2022-02-04: Apparently people are really bad at naming, since there’s another Great Green Wall project in Africa:

In the mid-2000s, African leaders envisioned creating a huge swath of green that could help combat desertification and land degradation. The project, called the Great Green Wall, began in 2007 with the aim of planting a 15 km wide belt of trees and shrubs that would extend from the coast of Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The World Bank has poured over $1b into this endeavor, and the initiative’s scope has grown to include efforts to fight poverty, reduce inequality and build climate-resilient infrastructure. In ecological terms, the program has been a huge success. As of 2020, nearly 4000 km2 of land has been restored to arability in Niger alone.

2023-05-13: As always, projects in developing countries that are declared “huge successes” are not, on closer look

The pace of financing is too slow to achieve this target. As of 2020, 20% of degraded land (200k km2) had been restored and 350k of the promised 10m jobs had been created. That is mainly, although not solely, because just US$2.5b of a required $30b has been spent since the project began. Donors have committed $15b to a pipeline of 150 projects. It’s not clear how much of this is grants, how much is loans and how much is existing funding relabelled as Great Green Wall money. Moreover, coordination between Great Green Wall countries and donors is weak. Trust between the African Union and international donors is in short supply. Donor nations seem to be picking and choosing which countries to invest in, with a preference for those in relatively stable regions.

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