There are still a few more days left in this week's first Great Green Wall conference. Representatives from 20 countries are meeting. As one official said this conference is about more than just greenery, land degradation, which effects as much as 65% of Africa, leads to other destabilizing forces like "climate change, illegal migration (particularly youth), declining agricultural productivity and insufficient job creation for our rural community."And of course experts speaking to Reuters point out, it leads to extremism as well.
It was hard for me to wrap my head around what's at stake, until I read this quote from the UN: "Some 60 million Africans could be forced to leave their homes within five years as their land turns to desert, while two thirds of the continent’s arable land could be lost by 2025 due to growing desertification".
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