Reprint from September 30, 2021
Second of three parts
It borrows its name from the massive stone structure built by the Qin Dynasty. But the purpose of the Green Great Wall in China is not to hold back the barbarians, it’s to stop the ever-encroaching deserts.
The following article was submitted by Antony Funnell/ABC Radio National:
“We have a short window of 10 years to 15 years to reduce the pressure and if possible reverse the trends,” senior UN official Ibrahim Thiaw said.
“Technologically we have the means, we have the knowledge right now. Maybe we need more of a political will and more public engagement.”
“Mr. Thiaw has praise for the type of forestation work undertaken in places such as China and India, but he worries that a focus on desertification primarily as an environmental challenge misses the bigger problem.
“Just like climate change, human activities are one of the main causes of land degradation,” he said.
“We push international resources, international systems to produce food; we have our industry that is impacting; we have cities that are encroaching into productive land.”
“Shovels stand upright in the soil in the foreground and people sit together on a soil hill.
“Beiser said that’s particularly true of China, where the urbanization of the country’s interior is officially encouraged by the government as a means of reducing overcrowding in coastal cities.
“There are lots more people moving into areas right next to the desert. With people comes livestock. The land just really can’t support that many people,” he said.
“In the Gobi Desert, for instance, the number of people has quadrupled just in the last few decades.”
It borrows its name from the massive stone structure built by the Qin Dynasty. But the purpose of the Green Great Wall is not to hold back the barbarians, it’s to stop the ever-encroaching deserts.
Here is the continuation of article by Antony Funnell/ABC radio National on seeking to grab green spaces from the clutches of deserts in China and Africa infused both with implications and difficulties:
“You’ve got so many people cutting down trees for firewood, so many more farms and factories sucking up groundwater, so many more animals eating up the grass, it just dries up the land.
“Africa opts for a different approach
“In the Sahel region of Africa, essentially the southern fringe of the Sahara — 26 countries have come together to build their own version of the Green Great Wall (in China), rather confusingly dubbed the Great Green Wall (in Africa).
“It too was originally envisaged as a winding strip of trees, twice as long as China’s and several kilometres deep.
“But that approach has been abandoned.
“A man dressed in fatigues stands beside a green tree holding gum arabic.
“Actually, what’s needed is not so much a line of trees as widespread adoption of sustainable land management,” said Jonathan Davies, the global drylands coordinator with the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“As a result, the new approach focuses on creating a patchwork of differing vegetation, matching plant species to the differing environments in need of revegetation.
“That, said Dr. Davies, is its strength.
‘”In many cases [what’s needed] is reviving farming practices that were there in the past and for different reasons, due usually to cultural policies, those practices were eradicated,’ he said.
‘“A common one is agroforestry, integrating trees such as acacia species into the farming system, which obviously stabilizes soil and promotes soil health.’
“The idea is to build a more resilient landscape, one that’s less susceptible to disease and other natural pressures.
Continued next week