The Sahel Nature Nonprofits

The Sahel is the transition, a belt of semi-arid savanna thousands of kilometres wide running across Africa between the Sahara and the tropical south. It is a landscape of acacia and grass and baobab, of pastoralists moving herds along routes their families have used for centuries, and of rainfall so variable that a bad year is not an anomaly but a feature of the system.

It is also the place where the phrase climate frontline is most literal. Warming, erratic rain, soil degradation, and rapid population growth have combined into a pressure that feeds displacement and conflict, and the environmental story here is inseparable from the security story. The Great Green Wall, an effort to build a band of restored land across the continent, has been slow and difficult and remains one of the most ambitious restoration ideas ever proposed.

The organizations here work on farmer-managed natural regeneration, which has quietly greened millions of hectares by simply protecting the trees that resprout from existing root systems, restore degraded soil, and defend the wetlands and the pastoral routes that hold this system together.