撒哈拉绿色长城：生态复兴之路
Stretching from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, the Great Green Wall was initially envisioned as a 15-kilometre-wide belt of trees traversing 8,000 kilometres of the Sahel, a literal living barricade intended to halt the southward creep of the Sahara. Conceived in the mid‑2000s, the project captured global imagination with its audacious simplicity; however, a decade and a half of implementation has exposed the limitations of such a monolithic vision, prompting a profound reimagining that now favours a patchwork of regenerative practices tailored to the intricate social and ecological contours of one of the world’s most fragile dryland regions.
Early phases, driven by a target of 100 million hectares restored by 2030, prioritised mass tree‑planting campaigns that often proved disappointing, with mortality rates in some sites exceeding 60 per cent, owing to a combination of unsuitable species selection, erratic rainfall, and insufficient post‑planting stewardship. Critics, including agroecologists and local herders, argued that the linear, top‑down approach disregarded the ancestral land‑use know‑how that had long sustained pastoral and farming communities. In response, the initiative’s implementation bodies increasingly shifted their emphasis towards farmer‑managed natural regeneration (FMNR)—a low‑cost technique that encourages the resprouting of indigenous trees and shrubs from underground rootstock already persisting in farmers’ fields—which has quietly transformed millions of hectares of degraded parkland across Niger and Mali, boosting sorghum yields by allowing the nitrogen‑fixing Faidherbia albida to shed its leaves during the growing season.
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