Called “Great Green Wall”, the green wall will spans the Sahel region from Senegal in the West, to Djibouti in the East of Africa. By 2030, the Great Green Wall is expected to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs in rural areas, in line with the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

While the wall will fight against poverty and hunger, it aims to build local resilience to climate change, contributing health and well-being, creates jobs, boosting economic opportunities. The wall will create a transitional zone between the arid Sahara desert to the North and the belt of humid savannas to the South.

The wall will create a mosaic of green landscapes across eleven countries: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. And once complete it will be “the largest living structure on the planet”, three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef, in Australia.