Diretube. Ethiopia is to ratify a convention related to the creation of the pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall, which is aimed at combating the expansion of the Sahara Desert.
The House of Peoples’ Representatives discussed the draft proclamation to ratify the convention and passed it to the Environmental Affairs Standing committee for further scrutiny.
The Great Green Wall is a pan-African initiative proposed by the former Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade to establish a green belt of planted trees across the Sahel- Saharan region in order to fight desertification and land degradation, according to the preamble of the draft proclamation.
The pan-African Great Green Wall initiative involves the planting of a 15 km wide and 7000 km long transcontinental forest belt running from Dakar to Djibouti, passing through Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Sudan.
African heads of state and government, during their eighth ordinary conference, endorsed the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative with the objective of tackling the damaging social, economic and environmental impacts of land degradation and desertification in the region.
According to the preamble of the draft proclamation, all signatory countries except Ethiopia, have ratified the convention and the proposed project has been under way since June, 2010.
To successfully erect the 7,000 km long green wall, each member country should plant a 15 km wide forest and a 10 km wide retention basin in their respective territory, the document stated.
To do this, the draft proclamation authorized the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to undertake all actions necessary for the implementation of the convention, in collaboration with the appropriate federal, regional and city administrations.
Currently, the Great Green Wall is attracting several international partners such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) that decided to allocate up to 115 million dollars to the construction of the green wall.
Other international development institutions have also made investment pledges of up to three billion dollars to support building the wall.
Furthermore, the African Union, in cooperation with the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Global Mechanism of the UNCCD, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Walloon Region of Belgium has mobilized more than 50 million euros in support of the Great Green Wall Initiative.
Source: EthiopianReporter
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