A green belt circling the capital of Burkina Faso is preparing the country for the climate crisis

As far as the eye can see is a hodge-podge 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 (4,942 acres), a green belt that now completely rings the city of Ouagadougou.

The green belt began life many years ago 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 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “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,” explains Sidnoma Abdoul Aziz Traoré, an environmental economist and expert in land degradation at the Centre Universitaire de Ziniaré (CUZ). But the situation, he says, is not irreversible.