Siakilo knows firsthand how immediate these issues are. When he was a child, his region would flood perhaps twice in a year. “The houses could be submerged in water. … Crops and livestock would be swept away, and you’d have to start from zero. No food, no farms, nothing to pay school fees with,” he says.

As he grew older, the floods became both more severe and more frequent: up to six or seven per year. “Yet the leadership was still saying that this was a natural phenomenon, that nothing could be done,” he says. That’s when Siakilo decided he had to leave. He went to Nairobi to study, eventually earning his doctorate in climate action at the University of Phoenix in Arizona. He has made it his life’s work to educate lay people and leaders alike, about both the challenges we face and solutions to resolve them.

Today, Siakilo is the senior climate adaptation and resilience advisor for Power Shift Africa,* a non-profit based in Nairobi. Power Shift Africa provides policy papers for leaders across Africa and around the world on what can be done to address the impacts of the changing climate. “It’s about shifting our understanding of what, literally, should power our societies,” Siakilo says. “But it’s also about shifting power dynamics in the global conversation on how to manage climate change.”

It’s unsurprising that some of the best ideas for fighting the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss come from Africa. The continent has had the least to do with creating the global climate crisis we all face, yet its people are grappling with some of the most immediate consequences. While African biodiversity and climate-adaptation initiatives encounter their fair share of obstacles and unintended outcomes, it’s also true that farmers, communities and, yes, even governments are stepping up to meet the challenges with a degree of coordination and success that others could do well to learn from.

This pragmatic approach to addressing climate issues is evident in the evolution of the Africa-led Great Green Wall Initiative, an ambitious plan to combat desertification by planting trees across the Sahel region. The original vision was for a wall 16 kilometres wide and more than 8,000 kilometres long. It was conceived as a line of trees to stop the Sahara from spreading and stretched from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east. Launched in 2007, it required the in-depth collaboration of 11 countries across a territory twice the size of Western Europe.

The initiative aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs by 2030 to support communities across the region.

The number of countries participating has grown to 30. The required budget has also soared from US$8 billion to more than US$40 billion. The need is urgent: temperatures in the Sahel are rising one and a half times faster than the average for the rest of the world, in regions where up to 82% of the population relies on rain-fed agriculture.

But cracks began to emerge in the Wall initiative’s blueprint.

Mending the great green wall

As specific species of trees either died or became invasive, policy-makers and farmers alike soon discovered that the volume of trees planted was not nearly as important as the mix and species of trees deployed, and the way in which communities chose to use them: where trees were placed, in combination with what other vegetation, what value local communities saw from the initiative (and hence whether those communities were on board to sustain the effort) all mattered. Those working on the Wall in countries such as Niger, Senegal and Mali shifted their efforts from simple tree planting to more sophisticated land regeneration: an approach that engages grassroots Indigenous knowledge, species and methods in ways that, in some countries, have measurably improved the quality of the soil over decades.

Farmers in Niger, for example, had laboured for generations under French colonial-era laws that disincentivized the planting of trees on farmland. (Trees were to be kept separate from crops and were considered the property of the government.) Over decades, the tree population sharply declined, and with it the land’s productivity. Topsoil blew away, and rainfall ran off compacted surfaces. By the early 1980s, Niger farmers were producing crop yields of 400 pounds per acre; farms in the United States, by comparison, were producing 5,600 pounds per acre (largely thanks to heavy chemical input, souped-up seeds and expensive farming equipment).

In some communities, the people turned to cultivating trees placed strategically within fields, using root stock on already-cleared land. The trees provided fuel and food and, crucially, started to improve the quality of the soil. By 2004, Smithsonian magazine reported that Niger’s Zinder region had 50 times more trees than it did in 1975. Today, the Wall has been successful in environments such as Mali, Niger and Senegal, places where it was able to build on such local knowledge and grassroots efforts. Wall coordinators link locally led, small-scale initiatives across the country to achieve much larger national goals – literally growing the Wall from the grassroots up. In Senegal, the government, via the Senegalese Agency for Reforestation, has partnered with local farmers practising regenerative agriculture. For example, the Kholy-Alpha natural reserve, in the rural community of Mboula, engages community members directly in cultivating tree nurseries and nurturing the seedlings needed to achieve planting targets each year.

Wall of greenwash?

The Great Green Wall has not been without both its challenges and its critics. African tree-planting efforts made headlines around the world just before the pandemic, when Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million trees on one day in July 2019, toward a claim of four billion planted that year. Achieving four billion trees planted stretches credibility: to do so would require a pace of 40 to 45 million planted per day. The BBC attempted to investigate the claim in 2019, but it’s almost impossible to independently verify the total number of saplings planted in Ethiopia, given there is no free press.

Even in places where the press is free, getting reliable data outside of formal evaluations remains challenging. As per 2014 data from the search engine Ecosia, which partnered with local groups to quantify the success of the initiative to date, the Wall initiative had planted approximately 22.3 million trees and restored 14,284 hectares of land across Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ethiopia. The BBC subsequently reported in 2017 that in Senegal alone, more than 11 million trees had been planted. More recent estimates of success of the whole initiative vary wildly, from 4% to 15% complete, as do survival rates for saplings. A 2019 World Agroforestry study found a survival rate of less than 30% in Ethiopia’s East Shewa zone, in sharp contrast with official Ethiopian government statistics that put the sapling survival rate at 83.4% and 79% for 2019 and 2020 respectively. Reforestation efforts are also hampered by the climate emergency itself: ongoing drought, in particular in Ethiopia, and other extreme weather events that limit the amount of water available to sustain such initiatives.

Regardless, a commitment to “re-greening” through strategic tree planting has since become policy across all members of the African Union. As Babacar Youm, a delegate from Senegal attending COP15 last December in Montreal, explained, “Every country in Africa now has targets to plant trees, from Nigeria to South Sudan.”

Losing the forest for the trees

Governments worldwide have seized on the idea that the rapid planting of trees at mass scale is somehow a catch-all solution to the multi-layered challenges of biodiversity depletion and climate change. In the 2019 election, Canada set itself the target of two billion trees to be planted over 10 years and is already falling behind. Canada had planted 29 million trees in its first two years, a mere 1.5% of the end goal. Obstacles to date include lack of access to land, intermittent disbursement of funding and insufficient seedlings as projects ramp up. In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to plant one billion trees on millions of acres of wildfire-singed federal land in addition to an earlier commitment of 1.2 billion new trees by 2030, but the Americans have also run into serious seed shortages, hampering their efforts to scale up. In the global rush to reach critical mass, the slower, building-from-the-ground-up approach that delivered success in early-adopter countries such as Niger, Senegal and Mali risks being lost.

In January 2020, the Kenyan government evicted 30,000 people from the forest in the name of conservation. “The government was trying to conserve the Mau Forest,” Siakilo explains. “Yet the Ogiek people have been residing there as long as humanity has existed.” Some Ogiek have since partnered with the Kenya Water Towers Agency, the entity leading regeneration efforts, to grow seedlings for the reforestation efforts.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, a government policy intended to support conservation efforts sparked violent protests in June 2022, when officials started moving the semi-nomadic Maasai people from the Ngorongoro Crater conservation area. The government contended that the expanding Maasai population had become a threat to the habitat; UN experts feared the relocations could cause “irreparable harm to the Maasai pastoralists,” as reported by France 24.

“If we are to do re-greening,” says Siakilo, “the key question to ask is ‘For whom is this project?’ The moment you ask that question you are thinking about justice, fairness, equity, inclusion – bringing on board every stakeholder.”

There’s also another issue: forests are dark, reducing reflectivity and absorbing heat. This quality, some scientists believe, could potentially undermine or even negate the carbon-sequestration benefits that planting trees at scale brings. The re-greening must be done in a way that genuinely restores the local habitat.

Such challenges aside, experts do agree that large swathes of arable land have been regenerated through Great Green Wall efforts. In Ethiopia, a report from the World Bank–affiliated Independent Evaluation Group found that Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, its offshoot of the Wall, had regenerated 45 watersheds. As per the report, 98% of the targets that the project set in terms of improved land management had been met. Target areas recorded an increase on average of approximately 5% in vegetation cover and moisture retention over a minimum seven-year period.

Forest financing done right

So, how to finance the kind of locally led re-greening at the scale needed?

The loss-and-damage fund agreement reached by negotiators at the COP27 climate summit in the fall of 2022 will ask Global North countries, which have contributed the most to the climate problem while generating great wealth from the burning of fossil fuels, to essentially provide funding to Global South countries to mitigate climate “loss and damage.” That funding enables Global South governments to leave fossil fuels in the ground while engaging in biodiversity cultivation, including tree-planting work at scale.

At press time, the UN confirmed that the committee set up to deliberate over the fund’s disbursement was on track to meet at the end of March, as announced at COP27, but did not respond to questions about how much funding had in fact been committed. Whether states actually step up to provide funding will have direct impacts on the capacity of some of the more fragile countries to achieve re-greening targets.

Take South Sudan, whose target is to plant one million trees by 2027. As Lwanga Tiba Charles, South Sudan’s assistant director for biodiversity in the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said at COP15 in Montreal last December, “We will engage village communities across all 10 South Sudanese states to cultivate local species of seedlings in community nurseries.” On designated planting days, everyone will participate. South Sudan’s work is to be funded by the Global Climate Fund, a separate climate fund established in Seoul in 2010, at an estimated cost of under US$5 million.

The cost, complexity and unintended consequences of hastily executed tree-planting initiatives are sobering for those looking to Africa’s experience for lessons to regenerate the biosphere and blunt the impact of climate change. Yet Senegal, Mali, Niger and Ethiopia have also been able to restore sizeable swathes of arable land and regenerate watersheds. And this has been achieved in some of the most cash-poor, politically fragile states on the planet.

In light of these achievements, the global community needs to pay closer attention to the Great Green Wall and invest in Africa-led initiatives that have delivered measurable results for some of the most vulnerable on Earth. After all, as Alison Loat, the managing director for sustainable investment and innovation at OPTrust puts it, “What’s at stake isn’t the future of the planet. What’s at stake is the future of humanity.” Who better to lead that effort than the only continent that, to date, has built a pan-continental consensus on how best to combat climate change – and delivered a track record of success.

*Journalists for Human Rights partners with Power Shift Africa on climate media development work. 

Rachel Pulfer is the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.

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Much is at stake as anxious discussions get underway at the long-awaited two-week conference, originally scheduled to occur in China two years ago.

But as Cambodian delegate Nath Pang puts it, there’s hope in the air too.

On COP15’s opening day, Pang is listening to Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault explain Canada’s main goals for the conference: get the parties to agree to a target of 30% protection of biodiversity by 2030 (120 of 196 attending countries had already committed to this “30×30” goal); reverse biodiversity loss by 2030; provide funding for developing countries, like Pang’s, to ensure targets can be met; and integrate Indigenous land stewardship knowledge throughout the process.

“In Cambodia,” Pang says, “we aren’t quite as concerned about climate change, but we are very concerned about the loss of species. My hope is that this COP will help us all put a stop to this.”

Unlike COP27, which took place earlier in the fall in Egypt and was focused solely on reducing the emissions that cause climate change, this gathering is intended to hammer out a framework governing what’s called the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This framework will set targets for how humanity, collectively, will conserve biodiversity, use its components sustainably, and share the benefits from the use of genetic resources equitably.

More than 17,000 delegates representing 196 governments, scientists and climate activists came to Montreal for what is billed as our last best chance to halt and reverse the damage humanity has inflicted on ecosystems worldwide.

The need is urgent. Earlier in the day, we’d heard UN Secretary-General António Guterres describe humanity, aptly, as a “weapon of mass extinction.” Cold hard science bears this out: according to a recent World Wildlife Fund study, since 1970, monitored species (of mammals, birds, insects and plant life) have declined by 69%.

Yet we rely on biodiversity for human survival: everything from maintaining and expanding forest cover to absorb carbon dioxide, to innovations in medicine, to wetlands that can slow down and reverse the destructive impacts of coastal flooding. One expert at the conference likened the destruction of biodiversity to collectively committing suicide.

To halt and reverse the situation, experts hammered out 22 targets that would give the international community a clear pathway to that goal of 30% conservation by 2030. All those Corporate Knights spoke to at the conference agree: failure to get a deal is not an option.

We are very concerned about the loss of species. My hope is that this COP will help us all put a stop to this.

-Nath Pang, Cambodian delegate to COP15

Yet the path to consensus is by no means smooth. The text of the framework retained 1,200 bracketed phrases where negotiators had yet to reach agreement on final wording at the time of printing. Of the five largest landmasses (the U.S., China, Russia, Brazil and Canada), only Canada has signalled willingness to commit to the 30×30 target. (As a non-signatory to the CBD, the U.S. isn’t even at the table.)

Brazil’s new president, Lula da Silva, has pledged to halt and reverse the destruction to the Amazon, but he won’t be sworn in until January, after the conference closes. And NGOs have criticized the current presidency of the CBD, China, for deliberately downplaying the negotiations’ significance. While the UN is there in force, led by Guterres, the only head of government present is that of the host country, Canada. (One of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s conditions for hosting the conference in Montreal was ensuring that the Chinese government would tolerate space for protest and dissent.)

The business community at COP15 is also split. One lobby, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, has published rigorous guidelines for becoming a nature-positive business; another, the International Fertilizer Industry Association, is actively undermining language related to fertilizer use, as per reports from InfluenceWatch, a lobbyist tracking organization. (IFIA denies this charge.) The issue of biopiracy is another sticking point, with delegates from developing countries accusing those from northern countries of excluding them from profits related to medicines developed with materials from the Global South.

So what does success look like for COP15? At the minimum, writes Patrick Greenfield in The Guardian, success includes substantive action on overconsumption, intensive agriculture and pollution, and enough resources for ambitious conservation efforts – without infringing on human rights.

Working in humanity’s favour at COP15 are two things that are also on full display: the creativity of our imaginations, as illustrated by Dutch artist Thijs Biersteker’s robotic seedling, and our ability to adapt. As Cambodian delegate Pang notes, “From this conference, we will have more of the tools we need to protect our biodiversity. That means we still have a chance.”

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Herding cats might be easier, but Figueres, having been submerged in often-turbulent diplomatic waters for most of her professional life, has remained remarkably buoyant as the UN climate chief. That she grew up in Costa Rica, the world’s happiest country according to the Happy Planet Index, could have something to do with it. That politics runs in her blood explains just as much.

Her father, José Figueres Ferrer, was elected president of Costa Rica three separate times – in the 1940s, 50s and 70s. Papa Figueres led Costa Rica’s 1948 Revolution – which ushered in an era of modern democracy. Her mother, Karen Olsen Beck, was a legislator and ambassador. Her brother, José María Figueres, was Costa Rica’s president between 1994 and 1998 and put the country on a path to sustainable development.

Corporate Knights had an opportunity to sit down with Christiana Figueres in April during her brief visit to Toronto, where she was invited to speak with Canadian business and government leaders. Before that she was in Quebec City attending a premiers conference on climate change. It was a rare chance, she told the Toronto Star, to “peek under the domestic kimono” of Canada and interact with its subnational governments.

Below is an edited summary of our interview with Figueres.

CK: What is your reaction to the recently announced Ontario climate change plan?

FIGUERES: We welcome the emissions trading scheme for Ontario, and the news it is going to link with Quebec, which is already linked to California. This is one way to put a price on carbon. That price is more efficient the larger the jurisdiction. Further, B.C. has the carbon tax and Alberta has the levy. Through the effort of the provinces, Canada can join the community of nations that are already engaged on this topic – not to save the planet, but because it is in their economic interest. It is in everybody’s interest to be as creative as possible in figuring out how to get more productivity out of every ton of CO2 we emit.

CK: All 192 UN member states have committed to filing updated emission reduction targets – called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – to the UNFCCC in advance of the Paris climate talks in December. Given what you have seen submitted so far, can an ambitious global target be reached in Paris?

FIGUERES: Thirty-four countries have submitted their INDC contributions: 32 industrialized countries and two developing countries – Mexico and Gabon. The only four industrialized countries that we are still waiting for are Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Prime Minister Harper has told us he intends to submit by June, before the G7 meeting.

The logic behind the INDC approach is bottom-up: a careful assessment by each country of its efficiencies. Above all, INDCs are an investment plan. They identify where each country can invest, profitably, in a change of technology and energy system that is going to get them a bigger benefit and is going to create jobs.

If we stick with business as usual and heavy dependence on fossil fuels, we are not going to create new jobs. If we open up to new areas, with new industries, new technologies, new skills sets, then we are creating jobs in something we know is going to be long lasting.

CK: The EU has set a target of 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030. Is this a credible commitment?

FIGUERES: It is. We are still pushing the curve of innovation and technology development to get to where we will have technology at the cost necessary to reach scale. Once we get to that point, we will see a rapid deployment of new technologies that will help all of these countries. Not only to meet their current targets, but to beat them. We see that trend already in the projections we have. The EU will get to 40 per cent and exceed it.

CK: What impact will the U.S.-China climate deal announced last November have on the Paris talks?

FIGUERES: It was very helpful. China and the U.S. are the highest emitters. Traditionally they have been at odds about climate. To see them come together is to realize two things: First, that it is in each individual nation’s interest to accelerate this technological and energy transformation. Secondly, that they can do more by working with each other than working separately. Both of those messages were in that statement.

CK: What do the commitments from China and the U.S. actually mean to you?

FIGUERES: I have no reason to doubt either government. In fact, China has a track record of putting these types of stretch targets into their 35-year plans. They not only reach these targets, they over-comply with them. China currently is generating more electricity from wind than from nuclear power. When they say they are going to invest in solar or wind energy, we don’t have to believe them, just see what is there.

The huge problem in China is coal. The Chinese would like to breathe cleaner air. It is very interesting: public pressure from people who are suffering from polluted air has actually caused the response in the Chinese government, to the point where they have closed coal plants that are close to cities. They have taken on peak coal by 2020 and they are investing very heavily in the alternatives.

Lastly, they realized that we are going to a low-carbon economy, and they want to continue to be competitive. They have been competitive in the past for their low labour cost, which is no longer the case. They need to be ahead of the curve. They want to continue to produce for their own consumption but also for export of all those technologies that are going to be in demand.

CK: How solid is the U.S. commitment?

FIGUERES: Equally solid. It is based on either already existing regulation, such as for new power plants, or regulation that is being finalized. We already see the effects of this. Many coal mines in the U.S. are closed, and the emissions profile of the U.S. has come down. They are on the pathway and they understand the same thing that China does. The business sector in the U.S. doesn’t want to be left behind with technologies that are not marketable. They also want to be on the cusp of the development and be competitive. So I have no reason to doubt that the U.S. is going to meet those targets.

CK: The IPCCC says emissions need to peak by 2020 to avoid ‘catastrophic’ climate change. What is the strategy, once INDCs are synthesized in the fall, to encourage developed and developing nations to make commitments that are closer to where the science says they need to be?

FIGUERES: We don’t have to wait for all of the INDCs to come in to know that the sum total of those INDCs are not going to get us on the 2-degree pathway. Responding to climate change and being able to get on to the path to keep under 2 degrees doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process. The analogy I use: when you want to get to a destination you know where you are going and you choose a vehicle. You start moving because you know your direction and what your route is. You also know the mileage you need to pass. That is the concept that we have to insert into the Paris agreement.

Ultimately, the science says we all need to peak globally over the next 10 years and then sharply reduce emissions to the point where we get to climate neutrality by the second half of the century. We can start on that path. That is the important step.

CK: Is the Green Climate Fund that was set up in Copenhagen the best mechanism to ensure developed countries are investing sufficiently in incentives to ensure developing countries take the cleaner path?

FIGUERES: It received pledges for initial capitalization of $10.2 billion last year in Lima. The current plan is to decide on first allocations in fall of this year. It is the instrument that all countries have agreed to. It is also a financial institution that is exclusively devoted to financing climate change. The clarity of focus really helps. When you have 194 countries that agree on something, you don’t take that lightly.

CK: What is the plan, if any, for compensating those who have invested in “stranded assets” – that is, those who will be stuck with increasingly unprofitable carbon-intense assets?

FIGUERES: I don’t think there is a plan to compensate people for stranded assets. The conversation is about preventing stranded assets. We already know we are moving to a low-carbon economy, so any new investment into expensive fossil-fuel extraction doesn’t make much sense. Proportionally, the market share of fossil fuels will go down. Cheaper, less carbon-intensive fossil fuels will be kept in the energy mix. The 50 per cent drop in oil price over the past year is none other than a very intentional effort to take off the table very expensive fossil-fuel exploration and projects that will not be viable with lower prices.

CK: What keeps you going and inspired?

FIGUERES: My daughters. This is a problem we inherited. My parents had no clue about this. We are the first generation that does understand. The science is there. This is none other but a parental responsibility. History is calling this generation to stand up and accept this responsibility.

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