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Ground-Truthing Sahelian Greening: Ethnographic and Spatial Evidence from Burkina Faso

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Abstract

Historically, the Sahel of West Africa has been considered synonymous with desertification. In recent decades, however, satellite images reveal patterns of enhanced vegetation termed the “greening of the Sahel.” This greening is well-documented but its mechanisms remain poorly understood. The Sahel is also a region emerging from a 30 year period of reduced rainfall in which several severe droughts occurred. As a response to droughts and land degradation, farmers have rehabilitated thousands of hectares of degraded soils by constructing low barriers of rock through widespread soil and water conservation (SWC) development projects. Remote sensing analyses suggest that these extensive soil conservation projects may explain greening in northern Burkina Faso. This study combines ethnographic fieldwork with the analysis of Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) data to test whether SWC investments contribute to greening. Ethnographic data reveal a tension between the perceptions of rural producers who feel that their SWC efforts contribute to greening and those of state officials who contend that SWC has only local impacts and that the regional landscape continues to degrade. Our analysis of GIS and RS data suggest that both perspectives are valid but contingent on the particular spatial and temporal scale used for analysis.

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Notes

  1. Desertification is defined by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as “land degradation in arid, semiarid and dry subhumid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities.” Land degradation is further defined “as the reduction of loss of the biological or economic productivity of drylands.” Thus, the two terms are nearly synonymous but this paper uses the term “degradation.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anthropology, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA

    Colin Thor West & Elisabeth Kago Nébié

  2. Geography, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    Aaron Moody

  3. Institut Géographique du Burkina Faso (IGB), Ougadougou, Burkina Faso

    Oumar Sanon

Authors
  1. Colin Thor West
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  2. Aaron Moody
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  3. Elisabeth Kago Nébié
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  4. Oumar Sanon
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Correspondence to Colin Thor West.

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Funding

This project was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-12618000). Support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Carolina Population Center (CPC), and the Center for Global Health and Infectious Disease (CDHI) also helped fund this research.

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The authors declare they have no conflict of interest.

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West, C.T., Moody, A., Nébié, E.K. et al. Ground-Truthing Sahelian Greening: Ethnographic and Spatial Evidence from Burkina Faso. Hum Ecol 45, 89–101 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9888-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9888-8

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