The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative as an opportunity to enhance resilience in Sahelian landscapes and livelihoods

Deborah Goffner,Hanna Sinare,Line J Gordon

doi:10.1007/s10113-019-01481-z

Deborah Goffner, Hanna Sinare + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-019-01481-z

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Abstract

Over the past 50 years, a large number of development initiatives have addressed the diverse social and ecological challenges in the Sahel, often focusing on a single entry point or action, resulting in only a limited degree of success. Within the last decade, the international development discourse has evolved to incorporate resilience thinking as a way to address more complex challenges. However, concrete examples as to how to operationalize resilience thinking are lacking. The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGW), a pan-African program with a strong reforestation focus, is the latest and most ambitious of these development programs to date. The GGW represents an ideal opportunity to apply resilience thinking at a large scale, but in order to do so, it must intelligently gather and centralize pre-existing interdisciplinary knowledge, generate new knowledge, and integrate knowledge systems to appropriately navigate future uncertainties of the diverse social-ecological systems along its path. Herein, after a brief description of large-scale reforestation history in the Sahara and Sahel and the conceptual evolution of the GGW, we propose a transdisciplinary research framework with resilience thinking at its core. It includes analysis of complex social-ecological systems, their temporal and spatial cross-scale interactions, and outcomes focused on the supply of abundant, diverse, equitable, and durable ecosystem services to support livelihoods in the region. If the research areas that comprise the framework were to be properly addressed, they could conceivably guide GGW actions in a way that would contribute to desirable future pathways.

Highlights

The Great Green Wall as a potential game-changer in the SahelThe Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel (GGW) is a reforestation effort to halt land degradation across the African continent
When examining the capacity of GGW actions to build resilience, we focus on combinations of actions that build general resilience, i.e., resilience in relation to any predictable and unpredictable disturbance or stress, rather than specific resilience, which is the capacity to deal with a specific disturbance (Folke et al 2010)
Its continental geographic scope means that large-scale benefits are possible

Summary

Introduction

The Great Green Wall as a potential game-changer in the SahelThe Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel (GGW) is a reforestation effort to halt land degradation across the African continent. We develop a framework identifying the research needed, as well as the systemic thinking about the links between restoration efforts and resilience building required in implementation, in order to facilitate the GGW to reach its objectives and provide long-lasting, equitable positive impacts for communities.

Results

Conclusion