Green belt that's keeping a city cool

Huge swathes of vegetation surround the urban sprawl of Ouagadougou as an unusual project looks to combat the effects of the climate crisis

- Elia Borràs

As far as the eye can see is a hotchpotch of trees, vegetable plots and water tanks. Up close it may look like a gigantic allotment, but this unusual project actually stretches for 2,000 hectares, a green belt that now completely rings the city of Ouagadougou.

The green belt began life back in the 1970s, with the aim of building a protective wall against the encroaching desert that lies beyond the greenery, just a few steps away. In Burkina Faso, one-third of the territory - about 9 million hectares of productive land - is degraded, with an estimated average degradation rate of 360,000 hectares per year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. "Burkina Faso is not a climatically favoured country, but the drought of the 1980s exacerbated the problem, leading to significant population movements toward less degraded areas," said Sidnoma Abdoul Aziz Traoré, an environmental economist and expert in land degradation at the Centre Universitaire de Ziniaré. But the situation, he said, is not irreversible.

The initial goal of the green belt was to reforest 2,100 hectares at an annual rate of 100 hectares, and by 1986, the area where trees had been planted was 1,032 hectares. The project stuttered a little in later years, despite reaching 2,000 hectares. But new impetus has recently been given to the project, which seeks, beyond holding back the desert, to combat heat and promote urban agriculture to help feed a city that has doubled its population in just 14 years, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Demography. The deadly heatwave that hit the country last year, with temperatures exceeding 42.3C for three consecutive days, hammered home the urgency of what is now a vital project for the city.