Fighting drought with trees in Burkina Faso

By ⋅ August 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
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Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continue to inch forward.
There’s supposed to be a draft ready by December.
That’s when representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen in hopes of finalizing a successor to the Kyoto protocol.
That landmark treaty was supposed to begin the arduous process of turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels.
But major polluters… like the US and China… never signed on.
Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table, but time is running out.
And talks last week in Bonn, Germany produced what a top UN official called only “limited progress.”
Meanwhile, people around the world continue to cope with the effects of climate change.
And the news isn’t unremittingly gloomy.
In the arid Sahel region of West Africa, for instance, Journalist Mark Hertsgaard recently found something of a small green miracle.
He was there researching a book on living with climate change.
And he sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.}

Note correction to lead: The introduction to this story as broadcast stated that China is not a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol.  China did ratify the treaty, but like other developing countries was not required to make specific reductions in greenhouse gases.

LEAD: Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continue to inch forward.  There’s supposed to be a draft ready by December. That’s when representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen in hopes of finalizing a successor to the Kyoto protocol. That landmark treaty was supposed to begin the arduous process of turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels. But the US… which was the world’s major polluter at the time… never ratified the treaty. And Kyoto didn’t require China… which is now the the largest emitter of greenhouse gases… to cut its pollution.

Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table, but time is running out.  And talks last week in Bonn, Germany produced what a top UN official called only “limited progress.”

Meanwhile, people around the world continue to cope with the effects of climate change. And the news isn’t unremittingly gloomy.   In the arid Sahel region of West Africa, for instance, journalist Mark Hertsgaard recently found something of a small green miracle.  He was there researching a book on living with climate change.  And he sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.

HERTSGAARD: The paved road heading north from Burkina Faso’s capital ends in the hot, dusty town of Ouahigouya. Most locals here are farmers, scratching out a living in the savannah that stretches to the horizon on all sides. I’d come here hoping to get a glimpse of how Africa might feed itself under a hotter, more volatile climate. Africa already has the highest proportion of malnourished people on earth. And scientists say climate change will hit this continent hard.

I hadn’t meant to do any radio reporting here, but I met a local radio producer and hired him to record some interviews. I felt the story I was finding shouldn’t wait for the book.

The sound he recorded isn’t great, I’m afraid. His equipment was quite basic. Or maybe it was the ferocious heat. Across the border in Mali, it was 114 degrees in Timboctou, making it the hottest city in the world that day.

But the air felt noticeably cooler at the farm of Yacouba Sawadogo.

Sawadogo wears a brown cotton gown beneath his gray beard. He can’t read or write. But he’s pioneering a simple yet ingenious response to the rising temperatures and withering droughts plaguing his homeland.

Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum, Sawadogo is also growing trees. And the trees, he says, work wonders.

The temperature here is very different than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air comes in hot. The shade cools it. So when the air leaves, it’s cooler.

That shade provides relief from the brutal heat. The trees’ roots also help the earth retain rainfall and their fallen leaves boost soil fertility, so crop yields have gone up. Branches provide vital firewood.

Sawadogo, I should emphasize, is not planting these trees, like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Matthai has been promoting in Kenya. Sawadogo is growing them. Planting trees is too expensive, and most of them die anyway. But young trees sprout naturally every year. What farmers are doing is nurturing those sprouts, often by digging a shallow pit that concentrates scarce rainfall onto the roots.

The trees have helped my family get through good years and bad, Sawadogo says. And he says he’s shared this information with many others. He’s used his motorbike to visit about 100 villages. Others have visited his farm to learn from him.

Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa, but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments seized trees for their own purposes. Recent reforms have reduced such thefts. Now the mixing of trees and cropland is again spreading from farmer to farmer across vast areas of Burkina Faso, Mali and neighboring Niger.

Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the region for thirty years, says farmers in Niger alone have grown an estimated 200 million trees.

“This is probably the largest environmental transformation in the Sahel, if not in Africa. There are fifteen to twenty times more trees than there were in 1975, which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.”

Reij says this form of agro-forestry requires little outside funding… and that makes it a more sustainable response to climate change than most western aid programs.

“In the end, what will happen in Africa depends on what farmers will be able to achieve, and they should be the owners of the process, and not outsiders.”

The quiet greening of the western Sahel shows that Africans are not surrendering in the face of mounting climate change. But all forms of adaptation have their limits. If the outside world does not do its part—by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions—even the most resilient African farmers will find it hard to manage. Meanwhile Yacuba Sawadogo is putting his faith in trees.

Trees are like lungs, he says. If we do not protect them and increase their numbers, the earth will fall apart.

For The World, this is Mark Hertsgaard, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.

Discussion

7 comments for “Fighting drought with trees in Burkina Faso”

  • Jana Rogers

    This is an excellent idea. Is there somewhere I can send a small donation to help this program?

    Thank you for your excellent report and Yacouba Sawadogo for his ingenious idea.

  • http://plant-trees,org Dave Deppner

    Yakuba has the right idea about how Africa and African agriculture can be saved.
    If enough people followed Yakuba’s example his effort could make a major contribution to turning away the threat of climate change. Reducing the amount o carbon we emit is not nearly enough – we need to also remove the excess carbon already in the atmosphere. Each tree such as the ones Yakuba is nurturing and transplanting takes a large amount of carbon out of the air and turns it into food, shelter and other things people need.
    But the threat is massive and growing. It will take many thousands of us, working together, to help get these trees planted.

  • ST Fry

    Gee great idea! California farmers have been doing this for around 100 years in the arid San Joaquin Valley. Planting thousands of fruit and nut trees a year but now it is all in jeopardy by the US Government because of Endangered Species Act. Water restriction on pumping plants in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta which supply water to all these trees on the westside of the San Joaquin Valley are in jeopardy.

  • J. Miller

    Burkina Faso is not a “tiny” country as the introduction to this piece suggested. It’s approximately the size of Colorado. That said, I really appreciated this story — I was a Peace Corps Volunteer outside of Ouahigouya and worked with some very dynamic and hardworking villagers on this very subject — reforestation integrated with agriculture.

  • alan m. harris

    I have heard the Saraha Desert is fast moving south and that Timboctou is completely covered. I lived in Ouagadougou for a year in 1988 and visited Ouahigouya on several occasions. In 1988 it was my impression that trees were being cut for firewood faster than they were being replaced. I would to be honest, quite surprised, but pleasantly, if that is still not true. I wonder who knows whether or not this reporter’s story is representative of the country and the region.

  • A.A.

    It is not just the number or volume of trees that makes the difference. What kinds of trees are the villagers nurturing? Are they wild trees that are adapted to hot and dry conditions, evolved in that place? Are they exotic trees, or horticultural varieties? We also need to think in terms of ecological and biological diversity — not just carbon emissions. “Green” does not mean natural. California’s Central Valley is the nation’s bread (and fruit) basket because of massive landscape transformation and diversions of water from rivers (which drain mountain watersheds). I agree that fruit and nut tree crops are valuable, but let’s not forget that they exist because of unnatural massive water diversions.
    In Burkina, I would like to know if the trees are native, perhaps wild species, and if they are actually adapted to that environment.

  • http://www.theworld.org/2009/08/17/fighting-drought-with-trees-in-burkina-faso/ J. M. Ouedraogo

    I am a native of Burkina, but I have been living in Europe for many years.
    First of all, I must confess that reading Hertsgaard’s opinion piece and the comments is comforting:indeed, one notes that there are a lot of people in this world – no matter where they happen to be living in – who also care about what is going on in the remote Sahel region!It is amazing!
    In the 1970s, as a school boy I was envolved in a local youth NGO called AVDR (Association des Volontaires pour le Développement Rural). Our main activities were about organizing camps in villages, and planting trees (above all accacia) offered at that time by a Governmental agency located in Kaya (North-East of Ouagadougou).
    In recent years, I have come to realize that we could have done better. Indeed, we could have targetted local plants instead: karités, baobab, and many many others that in addition supply food. We could have also combined our projects with other ones such as apiculture, etc.
    These ideas are unfortunately those I have been thinking about many decades later.
    Last August, I was delighted, as I hit upon a BBC report on a British NGO called Tree Aid, that seems to be implementing projects combining regreening and food issue in … Burkina Faso!
    This kind of approach might have been on the agenda of any governments in the region and beyond. That is why I have come to think in this way: instead of waiting for them, environmentalists NGOs and activits might start working out a strategy at two levels:
    1.with journalists NGOs dedicated to this cause: the aim of this outreach is to efficiently work out a communication strategy at local and national levels designed to raise people’s awareness of the challenges that lie ahead.
    2. with all kinds of organizations, and schools in cities and villages, aiming at setting up models for good practice.

    Besides this, it would be absolutely advisable to convene every year or two years in each region or province a sort of forum of all stakeholders. On this occasion, all NGOs and organizations alike that have sponsored, or been funded – no matter the amount – should meet on what they have done, why, their results, and once again share good pratice and information that need to become common lore. Since auditing NGOs is still unknown in quite all Africa, this is another way to introduce this good practice of Western NGOs!