The other Great Green Wall

Africa isn’t content with just one Great Green Wall. It’s now building another one – in Southern Africa.

Last December, leaders from across Africa convened at the UNCCD COP16 desertification conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. One of the top items on the agenda: replicating the successes of the Sahelian Great Green Wall thousands of kilometers further south.

As the Sahelian project edges closer to its 2030 deadline, with millions of hectares restored and millions of lives positively impacted, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) is preparing to write its own chapter of this pan-African green renaissance. 

But what will it take for Southern Africa’s wall to succeed – and what potential does it hold to transform the region’s economy, communities and ecosystems?

A region at a crossroads

For millennia, Southern Africa’s landscapes have been deeply culturally, ecologically and economically intertwined with the communities that call them home, including major ethnolinguistic groups like the Shona, Zulu and Tswana.

These communities were traditionally hunter-gatherer and smallholder agrarian communities who practiced crop farming and pastoralism – practices that remain prevalent today, providing a major source of livelihoods in rural areas.

But following centuries of colonial rule, the region has undergone a major transformation that has uprooted the long-standing relationship between humans and nature.

This included the mass adoption of industrial agriculture by white settler farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe, which pushed native farmers out of their landscapes and livelihoods while also depleting soils.

Mining also grew exponentially, with gold being widely extracted in South Africa, uranium in Namibia, diamonds in Botswana, and copper in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

This led to the growth of mining-dependent livelihoods, with entire towns built for miners, such as Kolwezi in the DRC – the world’s ‘cobalt capital’ – and Chililabombwe in Zambia’s Copperbelt. But it also sparked conflict, caused widespread environmental degradation and displaced communities from their native lands.

Today, Southern Africa, which is home to more than 360 million people who face a complex convergence of environmental, social and economic challenges. 

One of these is the climate crisis. The region is projected to experience a two- to four-degree Celsius rise in temperatures by 2100, with dire implications for agricultural productivity and water availability. 

The Kalahari and Namib deserts, already among the driest on the continent, are likely to expand due to more intense droughts and dune activity. Floods are also likely to become increasingly common and severe, as occurred in Malawi and Mozambique in 2023, displacing millions.

Meanwhile, rampant deforestation, overgrazing and unsustainable land use practices have degraded vast swathes of land across countries like Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa.

Beyond their environmental toll, these pressures are jeopardizing livelihoods. 

The majority of farmers in southern Africa depend on rainfed agriculture. This, combined with degraded landscapes and extreme climate variability, makes them highly vulnerable to poverty and food insecurity – which in turn increase the risk of conflict and forced migration.

A green blueprint from the Sahel

So, what can the region learn from the experience of large-scale restoration initiatives such as the Sahelian Great Green Wall, which is being built in an area that faces strikingly similar environmental challenges?

Launched in 2007, the original Great Green Wall is a pan-African restoration initiative that aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million jobs by 2030. 

Its primary goal was originally to combat desertification and land degradation in the Sahel by creating a greenbelt of trees and vegetation 15 kilometers wide and 8,000 kilometers long – in other words, across the southern border of the Sahara – to prevent it from encroaching on the Sahel.

With time, the Sahelian project has expanded from just tree planting to a large-scale, integrated land restoration and development program that covers sustainable agriculture, water harvesting, livelihood diversification and community-based natural resource management.

By 2023, the initiative had restored over 20 million hectares, sequestered more than 40 million tonnes of carbon, and spurred over 350,000 rural jobs. 

Crucially, the initiative, having launched with 11 countries, is now being implemented across 22 African nations. It now stands as a prime example of how integrated landscape management can simultaneously address the climate crisis, food insecurity and economic exclusion.

In Niger, farmers have successfully regenerated about 5 million hectares of degraded lands, boosting agricultural yields by up to 300 percent and improving household food security as a result.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, land restoration under community-led watershed programs has led to significant increases in water retention, mitigating the impacts of drought. 

All across the Sahel, community nurseries, ecotourism and non-timber forest product value chains such as shea, baobab and moringa offer income and employment for rural youth and women.

If Southern Africa is to build its own Great Green Wall, it can and must draw valuable insights from this blueprint – particularly in mobilizing political will, fostering public–private partnerships, engaging communities and ensuring cross-border coordination.

Building a wall to unlock Southern Africa’s nature economy

The Southern African Great Green Wall is the region’s collective response to land degradation and climate vulnerability.

This ambitious project aims to link ecological restoration with climate-resilient livelihoods and spur green, inclusive growth and economic integration across all 16 SADC member states – more of a green blanket than a green belt.

Inspired by the Sahelian initiative, the concept was launched in 2016 and politically endorsed by SADC ministers in 2019, with the aim of achieving concrete resilience and land degradation neutrality milestones by 2030.

But unlike its Sahelian counterpart, which started with a narrow focus on tree planting, the SADC initiative will bundle restoration with clean water, clean energy, climate-smart infrastructure, sustainable agrifood systems and green enterprise.

This will include partnering with nature-based enterprises across the region – ranging from ecotourism and sustainable forestry to regenerative agriculture, agribusiness and carbon and biodiversity markets. These ventures can provide new income streams for rural communities while also restoring degraded ecosystems.

One such example can be found in Zimbabwe’s Binga District, where communities are managing nurseries and earning an income through afforestation and conservation. 

Similarly, in Namibia, community conservancies already generate over USD 10 million in economic benefits for local communities each year through ecotourism and wildlife management – demonstrating the enormous value of local stewardship.

The Great Green Wall poses a valuable opportunity for Southern Africa to address historical and present environmental and socioeconomic injustices – all while transforming its landscapes for the better.

But first, the initiative must get its priorities right.

How should Southern Africa’s Great Green Wall be built?

A key first step is ensuring that communities are actively involved in designing and implementing the project. The Sahel experience has shown that restoration efforts are likely to falter without local engagement. 

Instead, communities should play a role in every stage – from planning to monitoring and maintenance – to ensure that the project reflects local needs and strengthens community ownership.

This includes addressing the issue of land tenure – especially as the region is riddled with tenure insecurity, colonial legacies of land dispossession and land expropriation policies that continue to this day. These policies often prevent communities from investing in long-term restoration.

As such, SADC countries must work to formalize customary rights and provide legal recognition for communal lands and co-management rights to ensure that local communities have the incentive to invest in restoration and avert historical injustices.

The ‘wall’ must also be built according to the region’s unique geography. Different strategies will be needed for the Miombo woodlands of Zambia and Angola compared to the arid savannas of Botswana and Namibia – and they should be informed by local knowledge in each of these areas.

Likewise, Southern Africa usually experiences climatic extremes driven by El Niño and La Niña, characterized by either very dry or very wet conditions. These can cause devastating droughts or floods, which can set back restoration efforts. 

This points to the importance of going beyond just planting trees: instead, the entire region’s agrifood systems must be climate-proofed with strong early warning and forecast systems and practices such as agroforestry, conservation agriculture and integrated watershed management.

One of the main challenges facing the initiative is funding – especially with Global North countries now cutting back development aid. It is especially crucial now for SADC countries to pursue diversified funding models that include innovative finance tools, such as green bonds and blended finance. 

South Africa has already experimented with conservation bonds and green bond frameworks. Expanding such tools region-wide could unlock substantial capital, especially from the private sector.

Beyond green bonds, the region is budding with agribusiness, tourism and other green ventures. This opens opportunities to attract impact investors and public–private partnerships to restoration, provided these ventures can provide clear incentives and demonstrate returns and co-benefits.

The expansion of the Great Green Wall Initiative into Southern Africa could not come at a more vital time. It offers an opportunity to transform degraded landscapes into drivers of socioeconomic prosperity, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. 

Nonetheless, unlocking all these opportunities will depend on political will, financing, strong regional partnerships and – most importantly – the involvement of local communities. 

In a region still grappling with colonial land dispossession, and now facing the climate crisis through no fault of its own, the Southern African Great Green Wall is more than just a wall. It’s a symbol of Africa’s determination to heal, regenerate and prosper from the ground up.