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The Sahel region of West Africa is being hit hard by climate change. But in this reporter’s notebook from the country of Burkina Faso, Mark Hertsgaard spotlights a small green miracle that’s helping farmers fight the warming trend. The secret, he says, is trees.

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LISA MULLINS: This is The World. I’m Lisa Mullins. Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continued to inch forward. There’s supposed to 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 kick start an arduous process turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels. But major polluters such as the United States and China never signed on to Kyoto. Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table but time is running out and 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 is not 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. He sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.

MARK HERTSGAARD: The paved road heading north from Burkina Faso’s capital ends here – in the hot dusty town of Ouahigouya. Most locals are farmers scratching out a living in the savannah that stretches to the horizon on all sides. I 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 climate change, scientists say, 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. 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 Timbuktu making it the hottest city in the world that day. But the air felt noticeably cooler at the farm of Yacuba Sawadogo.

YACUBA SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Sawadogo wears a brown cotton gown beneath his grey beard. He cannot read or write but he’s pioneering a simple yet ingenious response to the rising temperatures and withering draughts plaguing his homeland. Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum Sawadogo is also growing trees and the trees he says work wonders.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: The temperature here is very different from 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 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.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

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

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments began seizing 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 where farmers have grown an estimated 200 million trees.

CHRIS REIJ: This is probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel in not in Africa. There are now 15 to 20 times more trees then there were in 1975 which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.

HERTSGAARD: Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the western Sahel since the 1970s, says this form of agro-forestry requires little outside funding and that makes it a more sustainable response to climate change then most western aid programs.

REIJ: 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.

HERTSGAARD: 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 trusting in trees.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: 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 Mark Hertsgaard, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.

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