COP15 Announces:  Great Green Wall to span African countries

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer

#Africa, May 14, 2022 – An 8000km long and 15 km wide mosaic, made completely of trees, grassland and vegetation; this Great Green Wall, (GGW) which is the brainchild of the African Union, is only one of the objectives of  COP15, as it sounds the alarm about desertification.

The lesser known, but no less important twin conference  to COP26 is now ongoing in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. Like COP26, focus is on climate change for the 15th Conference of the Parties.  The plan is to slow desertification of arable land worldwide.  Desertification as the name suggests is, “the process by which fertile land becomes a desert typically as a result of drought deforestation or inappropriate agriculture.”

Launched in September 2020 and projected to take 10 years once the GGW is complete it will, amazingly, stretch across the entire width of the continent Africa,  the second largest continent,  and will be the largest living structure on the planet.

When complete the Great Green Wall will cover 100 million hectares of what organizers hope will become formerly degraded land.

The African continent is particularly affected by desertification, especially in its Sahelian band.

The GGW will reach across that band  specifically through Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.

The 196 UN Member States in attendance received updates on the GGW and figure out how best to move past challenges.

COP15 has seen UN Member States pledge to restore over 1 billion hectares of degraded land worldwide.

The meeting started on May 9.