The Great Green Wall's one of the world's most ambitious eco-projects. Is it working? | tldr: no
2026-04-11 13:45 UTC
Replies (4)
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@BillyClark@piefed.social 2026-04-11 15:00
There are some youtube creators who frequently cover the great green wall, like Andrew Millison. I've noticed that lately the videos seem to cover the failures more. You need tons of local buy-in to make anything work. One problem is that in many places, they have a culture of herding animals, and if nobody is there to stop them, they see these areas growing grasses and saplings, and what do you think they're going to do? Of course they send their animals in to graze and end up destroying all progress. Part of the original reason for desertification is because humans are always actively killing everything green. To make any progress against migratory grazing wild animals and herders, they need to create systems especially with them in mind, so that they have somewhere they can graze without causing great harm, and they need locals to enforce it. That being said, they've spent tens of billions on this problem, and although the article is pessimistic, the truth is that you can't give up just because it's harder than expected. Even the article estimated something like 10% success iirc. It's not impossible, and failure will be devastating in the long term. If you believe in protecting the environment, then you have to keep spending and learning through failures until you succeed. If it was easy to fix, we'd have already fixed it.
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@Oofnik@kbin.earth 2026-04-11 14:42
Not the main point at all of this article, but: "The price tag was also massive: the United Nations estimated that $33 billion would be needed to complete the Wall." Still less than the US spent on the Iran War in less than a month.
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@someguy3@lemmy.world 2026-04-11 14:35
This is Africa's green wall. >Eighteen years later, vast amounts of money have been spent, yet most of the planned Wall remains no more green than Abdi Guelleh's barren field. What began as one of the world's most ambitious ecological undertakings has in many ways devolved into a cautionary tale of poorly planned projects, lacking in local participation and entangled in a labyrinth of opaque financing.
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@marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today 2026-04-11 14:30
alt tl;dr: unlike china's very similar plan that is working, nearly all the funding was wasted on executive salaries and none was saved for the necessary follow up, and the idea was worse off from the start as they did not actually do any ecosystem research on what native plants would thrive. or Green Capitalism fails once again to be either green or capitalism but gave various companies, governments, and capitalist entities good PR for a while.