A plan to green 7,000 kilometres of Africa’s drylands is struggling to take off. Researchers must help.

The Great Green Wall of Africa, a plan to restore a 7,000-kilometre-long stretch of degraded land from Senegal in West Africa to Djibouti in the east, is a bold and ambitious idea intended to help combat drought and desertification, which currently affect around 45% of Africa’s land area. Proposed 13 years ago by two of the continent’s elder statesmen, Nigeria’s then president Olusegun Obasanjo and Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade, it is even more important now, given the threat from climate change and the reliance of the continent’s people on agriculture for their livelihoods.

African countries, for example, are signatories to the Aichi Bio-diversity Targets, which include a goal to reduce habitat loss and degradation. Countries have also signed up to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which include a target of combating desertification and restoring degraded land and soil. And they are also members of the UNCCD, which has pledged to reach what it is calling “land degradation neutrality” by 2030. The UNCCD report suggests a single trust fund could be the answer. That would work if countries and international agencies agree to pool their resources and create harmonized reporting requirements.