A Plan to Slow the Creep of the Sahara—by Planting Gardens

This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From the air, the new garden in the town of Boki Diawe, in northeast Senegal, looks like an eye: wide open, unblinking, and flanked by a smattering of divots dug in the surrounding soil, dark like freckles across a nose. The garden is the latest iteration of the project known as the Great Green Wall, first envisioned as a viridescent belt squiggling thousands of miles across the Sahel region, from Senegal to Djibouti. Okolie uses remote sensing data, such as satellite imagery, to track landscapes tilting toward desert conditions. “Tree and shrub roots hold soil, and the canopies trap raindrops before reaching the soil surface and reduce strong winds,” curbing erosion by wind and the region’s relatively rare but fierce rain, Sterk explained in an email.