By 2020, 60 million people from sub-Saharan Africa are expected to migrate because of desertification. The Great Green Wall is a $8bn project restoring degraded land. But will it encourage people to stay or earn the money to go? 

The first thing you notice about the garden is how out of place it looks in this dusty, hazy landscape, where herds of cows kick up sandstorms and goats nibble at sparse weeds below scraggly trees. The garden is a swatch of vibrant colour: green tufts growing lettuce, aubergine, watermelon and other produce form tidy rows, and women in bright skirts walk through, bringing tin watering cans from the well to hydrate this lush little corner in a vast, parched landscape.

Here, in Koyli Alfa village in central Senegal, Batta Mbengu works in this garden every Wednesday; there are almost 300 women who labour here, divided into groups of 30, with each group taking a weekly shift. And every week, each woman contributes 100 West African francs (about 14p) to a tontine – a communal pot of money that any member can cash out when she needs it. For example, when a member has a baby the other women bring the tontine money to the naming ceremony and gift it to the mother. It’s a safety net in a place where financial insecurity is part of life.

The garden is, the women hope, another safety net. They have saved their proceeds so far to buy seeds for next season, and are trying to turn enough of a profit to buy some chickens and support their families.

Mbengu certainly needs it. Her brother has spent the past month trapped in a Libyan prison, apprehended for trying to get to Europe. She misses Ndiaga, the family joker who worked as a tailor before leaving in secret. She also knows he won’t come back until he has something to bring the whole clan. “I hope he gets to Europe; the ones here want to go too,” she says. But maybe some day, the garden can be a reason for the young men of Koyli Alfa to stay. “When we realised our sons were risking their lives in boats we asked for this kind of programme,” she says.

"We want the garden to yield a lot so our sons won’t go abroad" Batta Mbengu

To encourage men like Ndiaga and their children to stay in their countries of birth, the World Bank, the EU and other international donors and development organisations are banking on gardens like this one. It is part of the Great Green Wall, an $8bn 4,000-mile effort to stymie the environmental devastation of climate change and the human misery that comes with it. This orderly garden isn’t just a local source of money and food, it’s also one link in an ambitious continent-wide chain seeking to reshape opportunities and stave off the wreckage of climate change.

While donors hope the project will encourage would-be migrants to enjoy better conditions at home, some migration experts say such development policies might have the opposite effect. With a little more money in peoples’ pockets, migration becomes more tenable.

The Great Green Wall is more of a metaphor than an actual wall. It was initially conceived as a physical barrier of trees on the edge of the desert, but over the past few years, it has evolved into a hodge-podge of projects that attempt to restore degraded land and combat desertification. Thanks in part to the ongoing war in Syria, the phrase “migration crisis” is on the pages of every European newspaper, on the lips of its politicians and on the minds of voters. While Syrians dominate the news coverage, many migrants risking their lives in inflatable boats travel from sub-Saharan Africa through Libya. It’s this story that environmentalists are increasingly trying to highlight in an effort to capture the attention (and money) of European governments and international donors.

By 2020, some 60 million people from sub-Saharan Africa are expected to migrate to North Africa or Europe because of desertification alone, and that number will only grow larger through the subsequent decades. Great Green Wall proponents now make the case that the wall is a key part of a broader strategy to stem the tide of African migrants coming to Europe’s shores – too many of whom die along the way.

“There is an emergency, and I have a feeling that people do not really get it,” says Monique Barbut, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. “Most of the people who talk about migration – the press, the TV and all that – they always either say it’s because there’s a war or because they are so poor they are migrating. But why do you have wars? Why do you have economic distress which makes you migrate? It’s rare that people unearth the real roots of that question.”

Every year, some 12 million people from west and central Africa leave their home countries, and more than 75% of this migration happens within sub-Saharan Africa. Men from landlocked countries like Niger go to the coasts of Senegal or Cote d’Ivoire and work in the ports; others, who have a bit more to spend, go to South Africa, where they can earn more than in their villages.

But today, a greater number of migrants from more developed countries like Senegal pay smugglers to bring them to Europe. This pattern is not new, but the numbers are: this is the biggest global wave of migration since the second world war, and it is only set to grow. Development successes – fewer infant and child deaths, lower rates of maternal mortality, longer lifespans – coupled with stubbornly high fertility rates mean the population of the Sahel region is set to grow by 250% in just a few decades, from 135 million people today to 340 million by 2050. At the same time, communities that used to be desperately impoverished are doing a little better. There are more healthy young men with heavy financial obligations than in generations before, and more resources to afford the trip abroad.

The Senegalese village of Goulokum is – or was – home to many of these men. One of the Sahel’s “villages with no men”, the people you see around town reflect a curious demographic: young women, children and the elderly. Cheikh Diop, a tall, baritone 32-year-old son of a farmer, is one of the many men here who made his exodus, seeking work in Europe. He travelled up north to Mauritania, from where he and a dozen other men set sail on a rickety pirogue bound for Spain. As they pulled into Las Palmas, the Spanish police were there; in the end, Diop spent 40 days in Europe, every one of them in a Spanish jail. The Spanish authorities accompanied him on the flight back to Senegal, dropping him at the airport and handing him €50 to get home.

"Today it’s much hotter than it used to be many years ago. We used to have many good harvests. Not any more." Cheikh Diop

Diop went to Spain, he says, “because agriculture does not bring enough money”. That was 10 years ago, and now, with two wives and a child to support, it hasn’t become any easier – it’s only the difficulty of his previous trip and the fear of dying along the way that keep him home. Goulokum, he sighs, was different when he was a child, an easier place to survive. 

In villages like Goulokum, it only takes a walk down the sunburnt central road to see who has gone to Europe and who hasn’t. The homes of migrants are expansive multi-room properties made of brick, concrete and cinderblock; the homes of those who stay are wood, with thatched roofs. So many families have a relative living in Italy that several of the older men speak fluent Italian. Children greet unfamiliar guests with “ciao”.

Migration, according to Elvis Paul Tangem, ‎the coordinator of Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahel Initiative at the African Union Commission, “has completely changed the discourse around the Great Green Wall, and we are now looking at going deeper and talking more about issues of employment, social security, natural resource security”. The inability to make a living from the land is “one of the biggest push factors for immigration, as I know from my home country of Cameroon”, he says. “That is what makes ambitious youth leave. Either you leave or you join the next employer – which is either the traffickers or an extremist group, the leading favourite being Boko Haram.”

While many men, women and children in west and central Africa migrate to find work, others are fleeing conflict and some are forced out of their homelands because of climate change and its ripple effects; these three incentives also overlap. For some climate migrants, the impact of rising global temperatures is evident. Once-abundant land is no longer fertile; there is sand where there used to be trees; droughts come more often and last longer; grass on which to graze cows or goats becomes patchy and scarce; hotter weather and shorter rains means growing food or tending to your animals, as your father did, is no longer a viable option.

For others, the effects are indirect. Smaller plots of arable land mean more violent conflicts over it; terrorist groups grab food, water and land in areas of scarcity to consolidate power and influence; young men who are unable to support a family because the land is no longer productive find purpose and manhood in the extremist groups that wreak havoc and displace millions across the continent.

Communal gardens like the one in Koyli Alfa speckle the increasingly barren Senegalese landscape, as do multi-acre fenced-in plots of grass where men can do traditional men’s work: grazing their goats and cows. Over-grazing has depleted the land and men took to cutting down trees to feed their herds, making it harder to grow anything at all.

Now, local agricultural technicians with the Great Green Wall, like 47-year-old Samba Sall who has worked here since 2008, help manage the grazing lands and patches of produce. Ten men are employed as grassland guards to regulate grazing and others, many of them high-school-aged boys, are paid to help reforest the land. Countrywide, 11.4m trees have been planted since 2007. “Before, they were playing cards,” Sall says. “Now they plant the trees.”

The project is new, and there’s still a lot of hand-holding. The Great Green Wall gives the gardeners seeds, hires local staff, pays the water bill and brings in water systems, fertiliser and barbed wire for security. On Mondays, the women take the produce to the market. It will also take years of training and support to make these environmental interventions self-sustaining – at some point, the garden in Koyli Alfa needs to be able to afford its own water, seeds and fertiliser, and it’s nowhere close. It’s also going to have to expand. To really make a difference, experts say, the gardens have to offer more than basic subsistence farming, and more even than selling produce to other nearby villages.

Here, too, Barbut sees an opportunity, with Europe relying heavily on imported food and not producing enough on its own. “The only place in the world today where you can produce food in quantity is Africa.”

The Great Green Wall spans from here in Senegal to Djibouti on the horn of Africa, cutting across the Sahel and the Sahara. In Agadez, Niger, a hub for human smugglers bringing migrants across the border to Libya and then into boats across the Mediterranean, one pilot project is paying 100 young men €100 per month to help restore 500 hectares of depleted land. The Great Green Wall is training another 500 Malian men stuck in migrant camps in Niger, hoping that the Malian government will see the wisdom in giving men trained in land restoration some work to do when they return. 

In Ethiopia, 15m hectares of land have already been restored; in Nigeria, it’s 5m, and in Sudan, 2,000. According to the UNs Commission to Combat Desertification, the ultimate goal is to complete the wall by 2030 and bring with it 50m hectares of restored land, food security for 20 million people, access to climate change-resilient agricultural technologies for 10m small farms and 350,000 jobs across the continent.

“Most of those projects are labour-intensive,” says Barbut. “They are not technology projects. You do not need to be trained for five years, you do not need to buy machines from outside, you don’t need those kinds of things. But you need the few hundred euros per farmer so that they can eat every day.”

But a few hundred euros more than in the past, many migration experts say, doesn’t add up to staying put – it means more people can afford to leave. For many men from Senegal and other African nations that are inching toward greater prosperity but still have astronomical unemployment rates, a ticket to Europe is a sound financial investment. Those who migrate from countries like Senegal aren’t the poorest of the poor; they’re often from better-off families. And indeed, as household income goes up in sub-Saharan Africa, so does the propensity to migrate.

Proponents of the Great Green Wall are banking on that trend turning around. As word trickles back about the many migrants who die in the Nigerien desert or drown in the Mediterranean, and the militias who run brutal migrant prisons and even slave-trading posts in Libya, the traditional factors that call young men to Europe’s shores may be eclipsed by fear and self-preservation.

The wall, advocates hope, will temper some of the push factors as well by making a job at home, if not fortune-making, at least reasonably bearable. At the very least, they say, the Great Green Wall seeks to combat climate change, and the wider effects of that – preventing conflict, starvation and drought – are beneficial worldwide.

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The World Bank Group is back again with its Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on climate change - ‘From Climate Science to Action’, starting from May 8^th, 2017.

The new course presents the most recent scientific evidence on climate change. It explores different strategies for low emission and climate resilient development and provides an overview to the Paris Agreement ratification with some reflections on COP22 outcomes. Through interactive video talks, complimented with curated readings, resources, and quizzes, renowned scientists and policy makers from the field will lead you through the course. An active discussion forum on the course would further enhance learning where participants get to exchange knowledge with peers from across the globe. As the course concludes, you will be invited to reflect on what you can do at the national, local, community, and individual level to limit global warming below 2°C and adapt the impacts already occurring.

This MOOC on climate change is taught by:

Alan S. Miller, Principal Climate Change Specialist, World Bank Group

Claudia Barrera, Senior Carbon Finance Specialist, World Bank Group

Get the latest information on climate change and find out what you can do about it. Spread the word through #learnclimate

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The rapid transformation of farming and food systems to cope with a warmer world, such as adopting climate-smart practices, particularly to curb greenhouse gas emissions, is critical for hunger and poverty reduction, the United Nations agriculture agency said today in a new report.

“There is no doubt climate change affects food security,” said the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, as he presented The State of Food and Agriculture 2016 report at the agency’s headquarters in Rome.

“What climate change does is to bring back uncertainties from the time we were all hunter gatherers. We cannot assure any more that we will have the harvest we have planted,” headded.

That uncertainty also translates into volatile food prices, he noted. “Everybody is paying for that, not only those suffering from droughts,” Mr. Graziano da Silva said.

FAO warns that a ‘business as usual’ approach could put millions more people at risk of hunger, than in a future without climate change. Most affected would be populations in poor areas in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, especially those who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Future food security in many countries will worsen if no action is taken today.

“The benefits of adaptation outweigh the costs of inaction by very wide margins,” emphasized Mr. Graziano da Silva.

However, it is agriculture, including forestry, fisheries and livestock production, which is contributing to a warmer world by generating around a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, agriculture must both contribute more to combating climate change while bracing to overcome its impacts, the report says.

Time for action

Without action, agriculture will continue to be a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. But by adopting climate-smart practices and increasing the capacity of soils and forests to sequester carbon, emissions can be reduced while stepping up food production to feed the world’s growing population, the report says.

The report provides evidence that adoption of climate-smart practices, such as the use of nitrogen-efficient and heat-tolerant crop varieties, zero-tillage and integrated soil fertility management would boost productivity and farmers’ incomes. Widespread adoption of nitrogen-efficient practices alone would reduce the number of people at risk of undernourishment by more than 100 million, the report estimates.

It also identifies avenues to lower emission intensity from agriculture. Water-conserving alternatives to the flooding of rice paddies can slash methane emissions by 45 per cent, while emissions from the livestock sector can be reduced by up to 41 per cent through the adoption of more efficient practices.

“2016 should be about putting commitments into action,” urged Mr. Graziano da Silva, noting the international community last year agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change, which is expect to come into force early next month. Agriculture will be high on the agenda at the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), known by the shorthand COP 22, in Morocco starting on 7 November.

Helping small farmers adapt to climate change risks is critical

Developing countries are home to around half a billion small farm families who produce food and other agricultural products in greatly varying agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions. Solutions have to be tailored to those conditions; there is no one-size-fits-all fix.

Helping smallholders adapt to climate change risks is critical for global poverty reduction and food security. Close attention should be paid to removing obstacles they may face and fostering an enabling environment for individual, joint and collective action, according to the report.

FAO urges policy makers to identify and remove such barriers. These obstacles can include input subsidies that promote unsustainable farming practices, poorly aligned incentives and inadequate access to markets, credit, extension services and social protection programmes, and often disadvantage women, who make up to 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force.

The report stresses that more climate finance is needed to fund developing countries’ actions on climate change. International public finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation is growing and, while still relatively small, can act as a catalyst to leverage larger flows of public and private investments. More climate finance needs to flow to sustainable agriculture, fisheries and forestry to fund the large-scale transformation and the development of climate-smart food production systems.

This article was originally posted here.

Development practitioners know secure land rights for women are important for the well-being of rural families, whether a woman is head of her household or lives in a household headed by a man. We know the research shows that women’s land rights are associated with family improvements, such as:

• Increases in food expenditures
• Children less likely to be severely underweight
• Improvements in child educational achievements
• Increases in share of expenditures devoted to healthcare

And we know that improvements in gender equality could raise agricultural output. A recent study of six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa stated that “if women worldwide had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20–30% and raise total agricultural output by 2.5–4%.

Secure land rights can also provide women with a fallback position in the case of divorce, abandonment, or death of their husbands. Secure land rights can provide access to credit and rental income.

But in my view, maybe even more important but less frequently discussed, secure land rights can improve women’s status in their families and communities. Status matters because inequality between men and women often means that harming women and girls is acceptable and normal. Surely we agree that women around the world should be able to be free from having their physical, sexual, emotional, and economic rights violated.

In almost every focus group I have ever conducted with women—no matter the country—domestic violence against women is raised and discussed, even laughed about. I do not ask about it—women talk about it in the same way they talk about their burdensome chores. Both women and men accept this behavior as ordinary.  

Also common among rural women are the difficulties of —

• Sharing resources with a second wife and her children
• Walking long distances for wood or water; having little or no say about what is planted or what happens to the income from the land
• Improving unusable and abandoned land and then losing it to a stronger male; not being compensated for land takings
• Using a relative’s land one year and being kicked off the next or even before the harvest
• Being left behind in the village while husbands travel to earn money, sometimes never hearing from them again
• Having land and livelihood sold or mortgaged for liquor or sex without any knowledge
• Being deemed a burden or counted only as property

Secure land rights grant women opportunity and status. Still, women’s status is an untouchable subject in my meetings with policymakers and governments if my goal is to convince them to make meaningful changes in laws and policies that will have a positive influence on women’s land rights. Frankly, raising women’s rights at all will almost certainly shut down any real policy discussion. Instead, I talk about agricultural productivity, food security, economic growth, and poverty reduction—how giving women rights to land can positively affect those priorities. I often use a quote from the World Bank World Economic Development Report in 2012:

“Gender equality is smart economics, enhances productivity and improves other development outcomes.”

I am a lawyer, so I accept that this is the better argument, the winning argument. But when I talk to women, the positive impact they speak of is often intangible. It relates to how they are viewed by their husbands and their community; it is about their new status as a valued member of their family and village.

I am thrilled that women’s land rights are part of the discussion on rural women’s day because of the enormous positive impact secure land rights will have on agricultural productivity, food security, poverty reduction, families, and, women’s status.

This blog post was originally posted here.

A growing global population and changing diets are driving up the demand for food. Production is struggling to keep up as crop yields level off in many parts of the world, ocean health declines, and natural resources—including soils, water and biodiversity—are stretched dangerously thin. One in nine people suffers from chronic hunger and 12.9 percent of the population in developing countries is undernourished. The food security challenge will only become more difficult, as the world will need to produce about 70% more food by 2050 to feed an estimated 9 billion people.

The challenge is intensified by agriculture’s extreme vulnerability to climate change. Climate change’s negative impacts are already being felt, in the form of reduced yields and more frequent extreme weather events, affecting crops and livestock alike. Substantial investments in adaptation will be required to maintain current yields and to achieve the required production increases

Agriculture is also a major part of the climate problem. It currently generates 25% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Without action, that percentage could rise substantially as other sectors reduce their emissions.

Producing More with Less

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes—cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries--that address the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change. CSA aims to simultaneously achieve three outcomes:

1.    Increased productivity: Produce more food to improve food and nutrition security and boost the incomes of 75% of the world’s poor, many of whom rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

2.    Enhanced resilience: Reduce vulnerability to drought, pests, disease and other shocks; and improve capacity to adapt and grow in the face of longer-term stresses like shortened seasons and erratic weather patterns.

3.    Reduced emissions: Pursue lower emissions for each calorie or kilo of food produced, avoid deforestation from agriculture and identify ways to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

While built on existing knowledge, technologies, and principles of sustainable agriculture, CSA is distinct in several ways. First, it has an explicit focus on addressing climate change. Second, CSA systematically considers the synergies and tradeoffs that exist between productivity, adaptation and mitigation, in order to capitalize on the benefits of integrated and interrelated results.

Find out more about CSA basics, planning, financing, investing and more in the online guide to CSA developed in collaboration with the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR): https://CSA.guide.

Climate-Smart Agriculture and the World Bank Group

The World Bank Group (WBG) is currently scaling up climate-smart agriculture and in its Climate Change Action Plan has committed to 100 percent of agricultural operations being climate-smart by 2019. The WBG portfolio will also increase its focus on impact at scale and be rebalanced to have a greater focus on adaptation and resilience. To enable these commitments, we are screening  all IDA projects for climate risks, and will continue to develop and mainstream metrics and indicators to measure outcomes, and account for greenhouse gas emissions in our projects and operations. These actions will help our client countries implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the agriculture sector, and will contribute to progress on the Sustainable Development Goals for climate action, poverty, and the eradication of hunger.

The World Bank Group also backs research programs such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which develops climate smart technologies and management methods, early warning systems, risk insurance and other innovations that promote resilience and combat climate change.

For example, Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Country Profiles bridge a knowledge gap by providing clarity on CSA terminology, components, relevant issues, and how to contextualize it under different country conditions. The knowledge product is also a methodology for assessing a baseline on climate-smart agriculture at the country level (both national and sub-national) that can guide climate smart investments and development.

Working Toward Food and Nutrition Security, while Curbing GHG Emissions

The Bank’s support of CSA is making a difference across the globe:

In Uruguay, the Sustainable Management of Natural Resources and Climate Change (DACC) project is supporting sustainable intensification through a number of initiatives including the establishment of an Agricultural Information and Decision Support System (SNIA) and the preparation of soil management plans.

The Morocco Inclusive Green Growth project supports the national green growth agenda by increasing the supply of agrometeorological information and facilitating the diffusion of new, resilience-building technologies such as direct seeders.

In Senegal, the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Program (WAAPP) and its partners have developed seven new high-yielding, early-maturing, drought resistant varieties of sorghum and millet. Released in 2012, these varieties are being widely diffused to farmers and show positive yield result.

In Ethiopia, the Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project has helped restore 2,700 hectares of biodiverse native forest, which has boosted production of income-generating wood and tree products such as honey and fruit.

African farmers who have adopted evergreen agriculture are reaping impressive results without the use of costly fertilizers. Crop yields often increase by 30 percent and sometimes more. In Zambia, for example, maize yields tripled when grown under Faidherbia trees..

This blog post was originally posted here.