0:01 [Music] all over the world fertile land is Vanishing swallowed up by the desert Africa has felt the full force of this in a century the Sahara has moved South by 250 km over a front of 6,000 km the land has become sterile and the population has had to flee in the 1950s there was nothing here like that the June was 300 M off this land was all cultivated now you can see the June it's 18 M high up to the date
0:48 palm in Morocco and Sagal a stubborn and decisive struggle is being fought against desertification the 's all form an ecological barrier between the great desert and the Mediterranean that makes them of global ecological importance if this ecosystem is ever destroyed the desertification will move north and affect all of Europe we must wi back Land from the desert the objective is to reconquer 87,500 hectares of land to do that we decided to build a great green wall putting in place 1.7 million to 2 million plants every year to retake strips of desert the bound [Music]
1:50 desert the Sahara immense extends over the territory of 10 states from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea in the north it reaches the Mediterranean I and in the South it is bordered by the Sahel a semiarid region that then becomes tropical Africa the Sahara wasn't always inhospitable desert in the mountain range of enedy in Northern Chad Eve gotier once a research director for the cnrs is listing the rock art sites that tell of a very different past from today once the Sahara wasn't as arid as we see it to be now during the hollene epoch 6 to 8,000 years ago the climate was much more humid and some people even talk of a green Sahara well it probably
2:36 wasn't as green as it is in the tropics more probably it was a savannah with a lot of animal life but it certainly wasn't at all like we see it nowadays yes it's a bit of a rough ride but you see it's worth it once you get up there there are some Fine Things at the sight of this petrified landscape it's hard to believe that this was once a verdant Eden a magnificent savan with many trees where Wildlife was varied and [Music]
3:23 plentiful this is one of about 800 shelters I found in an Eddie and the walls display a message you see the presence of cattle which shows these people were [Music] herders there we can see Hunters yes we can see their bows quite clearly but what we can add is that while they were animal Farmers they were also always hunters for their arrows they seem to have used arrows heads of this type you see there are several examples which come mainly from deserts from different Saharan countries morania Libya Algeria
4:09 and sometimes they're found in huge numbers which shows how important hunting was at the time they hunted all kinds of animals including elephants orox small antelopes and even Birds this shows that the desert was occupied for thousands of years practically continually this is in Striking contrast to the present situation where the Sahara is all but deserted if someone had said to the people who lived here just a few thousand years ago which is as much as to say yesterday that the region would become a desert of stone and sand it's a safe bet they wouldn't have believed it but the desert is there and it is bouncing the pens which are around us
4:54 like this one are scattered around a promet Tre a likely hypothesis is that the her settled here at a time when the lake surrounded the promary like a peninsula it's an idea which has to be proved but what we can imagine and what these pens certainly show is that the people were herders but their way of life included fishing they used the lake as well as the cattle to feed themselves the cave paintings show in drawings the daily life led by the people who painted them in red ochre there are portraits of their game animals descriptions of their hunts if Eve gotier has found fishing scenes these prove that there were many lakes in this region of the ancient
5:39 Sahara Hassan you take the right and I'll take the left okay okay that'll workan [Music] wow wow that's great one two small boats and a hippo h a bit more to the left there that's good like that that's perfect in this cave sheltered the fishermen and their small boats drawn on the Rock it's a little astonishing to find boats in this shelter today especially
6:25 when we look around at this totally arid context 8 to 10 th000 years ago the lake was much larger you can see here that it came some distance a few hundred met from here that's amazing the size it was 20 times bigger than it is now here on the iPad there's a whole series of satellite images which show clearly how Lake Chad has changed since the 1960s and you can see as the images progress how the lake shrinks do you think the lake will just go will it disappear yes well you see if the climate continues to get warmer like we're seeing now it's very likely that in a decade or two the lake will have completely vanished do you think Chad will be
7:11 entirely desert well unfortunately we fear that if the climate continues to develop in the way it's doing now it's very likely the southern part of Chad will become a [Music] desert some experts predict that if Lake Chad disappears the whole whole region will look like this 20 million people will have to move into Exile several thousand kilometers from there in the Northwest the Great Lakes which feed the oases of Southern Morocco are as well drying [Music] up who 1250
7:58 [Music] here we're in a basin where one of the Great Lakes is found and which was once full of water it was between 3 and 5 m deep where I'm now sitting now it's dry the main reason being drought and especially evaporation meteorological forecasts for this part of Morocco predict an increase in temperatures between 0.6 and 1° cus so that rise is an additional pressure upon water resources which are already precarious and in a fragile
8:45 [Music] [Applause] [Music] state desert rains are unpredictable not a drop will fall for months sometimes for several years and suddenly a deluge will fall for hours [Music] the lake is now 100% full that's thanks to the three last floods that the lake is full up to this level but I took a photo before that here I'll show you it and the lake was dry 3 days of torrential rain have refilled the lake do see where it goes to it's one of these floods that filled
9:32 the lake in some regions of the Sahara the rains are so violent that they lead to dramatic events in December 2014 more rain fell here in a few hours than normally Falls in an entire year the Wy brutally burst their Banks and more than 30 people were carried away and drowned it caused hundreds of millions of Euros of material damage thousands of houses were destroyed roads were cut and the electricity Network severely damaged This calamity struck an area where resources are rare all year long Southern Morocco suffers from chronic thirst and when the long awaited rains finally arrive it's a
10:18 disaster this water which could have been providential was lost and served no purpose other than to create fresh Ravens in a landscape that had already suffered [Music] over the last few years a number of rainwater reservoirs have been built to create reserves 400 km of additional channels have been added to the existing thousand kilom recovering all available water and giving it to the population is decisive for the survival of the OES for some of them it is already too
11:04 late professor Lassen cabiri has come to the ruin of the Oasis where he grew up there were date palms at least 15 M high it was all densely green here with thousands of date palms women everywhere and children playing I'm reminded of things because I was born here it was my palm GR in the recent past nearly 200 families lived here and harvested dates the palm trees have died of thirst life has died out and the desert has won again because they all tried to go It Alone the farmers have dug their own grave one of the 200 Wells which were
11:51 dug here in the Palm Grove and which pumped water each one for intensive farming to start with that worked there was water and then it ran out here you can see the roots of the date palm which sort out the groundwater motorized pumping drained the groundwater so automatically the day P will [Music] die the chain of oases formed a barrier which for a long time stopped the desert the loss of Traditional Values of mutual Aid combined with a lack of water led to
12:36 the end of a number of oases the barrier fell and the desert swept through the [Music] breaches Mohammed buadi project coordinator for the Southern Oasis program has made some allow findings how did this happen first there was the drought then the sand came you see the palm trees are dead they're broken and before before the dates were plentiful there was water and we lived
13:23 well how many people were living here at the start of the 70s a 100 families now there are four where did they go to they went to work at agader the Big [Music] Towns you're from here from Tona tell me about this school in the '90s there were over 25 students now you see there are only
14:15 four in this house there are still people living the others are all empty as you can see there's practically no one left in the village and this house no one in that one the same for that one that one they're all gone the decline of the Southern oases was also caused by the abandonment of ancestral irrigation techniques used in desert areas of North Africa and the Middle East the first Oasis dwellers found their water in the melting snow of the Atlas Mountains by building networks of underground drainage channels called qara without maintenance many of these channels blocked up and now the water from the Atlas Mountains doesn't arrive Professor mmed Madan is actively campaigning for the repair of the irrigation system system just where we are here there's a
15:02 field of ketara of over 12 km you can even see it by satellite these ketas were dug several centuries ago and allowed the irrigation of the Palm Groves below them most of these underground channels were dug three centuries ago the oldest are over 3,000 years old if they are regularly cleaned and Consolidated where necessary they still irrigate Parcels of land [Music] these cones are Earth which has been pulled out of the underground drainage Gallery this happens during the digging and cleaning of the gallery and they also allow aeration and sunlight to penetrate during Collective work of
15:48 cleaning and digging these Earth Wells are access points and aeration vents the Keta system was abandoned in several places for several reasons not just the natural effect of drought but also through human factors like urbanization there's also intensive pumping and also young people who no longer wish to work in the ancestral system as well as that sand clogged up the catchment zones these channels are the underground foundations of the rampart raised against the desert sand has to be cleaned out of the K the stones need to be removed and the
16:33 aeration Wells reopened which is what we're doing in several Villages we're cleaning out the Keta work started 3 days ago and it's about how many meters in this well about 18 M descending over 18 m in a well that is only 1 M wide is impressive Len prefers to let mmed Madan who is used to this lead the [Music] way just here there's only about 20 cm
17:20 of water but when there's a good flow the water can get up to here about the height of a man here if there are floods or rains the water can rise back to its usual [Music] level this work was done with rudimentary tools they didn't have Dynamite or explosives just PS and shovels like they did before and this goes on for it goes on for and2 km the objective of my research is to
18:06 convince the farmers and the Oasis dwellers to maintain this system and get water without attacking nature it's adapted to the Oasis System adapted to the climate and adapted to work because it's Collective labor which gives the right to irrigation water each farmer has water rights when their rights are Jew they open their stream to irrigate their field and when their right is up they close the stream so as to pass rights onto the next farmer so an oasis is part of an
18:53 ecosystem of which the DAT Palm forms the main structure it plays role of sun shade in relation to all the other plantations which it protects during the day from the Sun the other plants capture humidity which they give up during the night to the date palm a date palm produces over 100 tons of vegetation during its life this material forms humus which is vital to cultivation it also produces 25 kilos of dates collected by the the women sugar Rich fruit which contain many vitamins and mineral
19:41 salts it also offers wood for building and for wickerwork finally it provides a magnificent sun shade in the shade of which all the other plants grow this is a field of lucern these are red peppers that's fig this is parsley cabbages carrots and turnips traditional oases were places for subsistence farming survival level farming which had a role a few decades ago but nowadays the young people of the South don't easily accept a life with no other perspective than a difficult existence with low [Music] income the rise in popularity of the
20:28 caper which had fallen from favor as a condiment recent interest for argan oil used in cosmetics the revaluing of barbery figs or the honey of wild bees as well as the fashion for organic henna and modern irrigation techniques open up new [Music] perspectives in order for people to stay in the Oasis they must develop a market economy it's not like before when they work just to survive right now farmers are developing products with added value so as to earn money and to remain here otherwise people will leave the Oasis and the
21:13 desert will move in nowadays the OAS are cultivating a lot of organic hen and irrigating with drip feed systems which are costly to install but economic to use it's true that hen is a plant that uses a lot of water but we're seeking a compromise between a product which sells well and the available water in the Oasis how are you are prices good this year they're better last two years prices have risen between 50 and 60% [Music]
21:59 in spite of its high price organic henna is more and more sought after in cosmetics to make skin Beautiful by softening it for cleaning the skin dying hair or to decorate hands and feet with temporary tattoos Oasis dwellers have understood that to survive they must cultivate a climatized plants which have a niche market convinced by this efficient strategy Coastal oases are developing barbery fig farming which is also an attractive product here we're at a place which is worth the journey it's a 900 M high mountain with a real ocean of greenery
22:45 right in the middle of the desert on the other hand to get to this it isn't easy in the center of the desert there's less than 100 mm of rainfall a year but there's a forest of greenery here the cactus captures humidity from the air which comes from the sea the sea is 20 km away humidity Rises and comes here the cactus has tiny pores which can open and these allow the cactus to suck in the water today this unloved plant with a terrible reputation is being rediscovered as a present from nature and we still don't know everything can bring us with this Cactus you can really do
23:32 anything because firstly it's wood you can use it to cook with and it has enormous potential as animal fodder as for the fruit there are a lot of interesting things for human nutrition jams and nectar can be made and you can eat the fruit the cactus is also precious because of its mineral content there's 60% of Omega 6 which has anti-aging properties the plantations are multiplying as the virtues of of the barbery Fig become known because of this Cactus entire areas of previously sterile Hills are becoming [Music] green is it because of the cactus that all these plants are growing back yes in this place there was nothing it was like the hill in front but when we put the cactus here
24:19 the forest regrew this plant wasn't here before now it's everywhere this is called rhub this beside it is SW Doos andat when you plant Cactus as it spreads out it gives shade to other plants so they proliferate around it and when you have plants you get animal life a whole chain a whole ecosystem appears where there was nothing bringing plants to the coastal area of Southern Morocco is vital immense quantities of sand thrown up by rivers and streams are left by the ocean on the shore this sand carried by the
25:05 wind blowing in from offshore creates the Junes which feed the desert there are Junes like this one which have moved 300 kilm from the coast to the desert over thousands of years in the far south of Morocco the coastal town of t fire is at the center of one of the most powerful wind systems of the Sahara the ocean winds join with the Winds of the desert and form giant Junes with bases of more than 800 Metter in diameter the Junes can be divided into two types these huge Junes which are rare and are called Mega
25:50 bans which move between 3 and 6 M every year and these little Junes which move 25 to 30 m a year the little Dunes shaped like a cresant moon can join up and form a chain known as an urg the migration of sand from the coast to the interior is so strong that the coastal road is often submerged traffic has to Halt you can see that National route one has been covered by sand that signpost is completely buried this is the rest of the road covered by
26:36 sand the coastal road is vital for the South every morning digging machines go back to work at an endless task many dwellings at tarfire have been invaded their doors are blocked their door frames stuck the walls themselves attacked the sand affects all of the town's infrastructure a few hundred kilometers to the Northwest the town of mamed close to the Algerian border is trying desperately to survive the onslaught which has already destroyed half of its houses like many of his neighbors sliman has had to move several times to escape
27:22 being buried [Music] [Applause] [Music] there were people here before the sand buried the houses and they had to move this is the house where we used to live this was the room where we slept this was the kitchen through there the staircase and this was the way in this was the front door of the house the sound has buried everything there's two to three meters in these
28:08 rooms people try to escape but the sand catches up at mamid the wind is a little less violent than at tapaya but it blows more than 300 days every year this house may collapse because of the storms the people are scared so they're sleeping in a tent it takes two days of storm for the sand to get to here just two
28:54 days the sand wind follows us from down there right up to here that's what made this wall collapse the whole village is under threat these sandstorms will end up by forcing us all to leave this is the door of San's last house how long will he be able to live here the sand has followed us here it invades where we live it follows us everywhere the sand has blocked my door we can't get into our house we clear it away every day but the sand has beaten us
29:41 for many places have become ghost towns a rain of sand falls night and day stifling all life the villagers drown one by one and the desert advances inexorably submerging everything [Music] a technique known as palm squares has proved effective in front of a zone that needs to be protected fences of Palms planted in a square are placed in the direction from which the dominant Wind Blows the Palms reduce wind speed without causing worldwinds and stop the sand which is carried to ground level Falls and then gathers there before reaching the protected Zone the sand advances 19 M every
30:26 year against this Invasion there are two methods which work here we fight using Palm squares with the leaves of date palms but these squares can only resist for 10 years besides that we try to plant Tamaris using ceramic pots because the pot retains humidity and so the cuting can grow to form a large tree which will stop the sand like that we are making a green belt which will resist longer maintaining the Palm squares needs a lot of Labor and when returns from agriculture are small The Oasis dwellers give up at the architectural School of rabbit architect Carlos Perez Mata is looking for an alternative here we've tried everything
31:12 to hold back the sand whether it be corrugated panels wooden Stakes with Nets Palms even Earth walls we've seen that these Solutions offered by agricultural Engineers don't work up till now the sand has has overcome every obstacle placed in its way but caros Perez Maran hasn't given up the objective is to establish a system with barricades placed on the terrain with a rounded form so as to adapt to the shape of the Junes on a giant scale this giant scale will also allow us to put apartments inside since the Junes rise to seven or
31:58 M will need three story buildings with very narrow alleys and small patios this is just to protect against the [Music] Heat like everywhere else industrially produced breeze blocks easy and quick to put in place have replaced traditional construction techniques the architect's idea is to build in a way inspired by the old buildings by using Earth to benefit from the shade of the palm trees the dwellings should be put back in the heart of the Palm Grove as they once [Music] were this kind of urbanization is nothing new it's the traditional way of living in a Palm Grove living inside is always more pleasant than living outside where the Palms provide no
32:46 [Music] protection a field of small bark and Junes very like those which threaten the oases offers an ideal site to test under real conditions we're trying one of the reduced barriers with a rounded Earth wall so that we can see how the June behaves this allows us to study whether the June will really stop or move off to one side and finally if we could construct Living Spaces inside [Music] it our architect Magnus l proposed working with bacteria to solidify the grains of sand once they're solidified
33:34 we can start to work from an architectural point of view so that we can make a living space for people [Music] [Applause] [Music] at TAA the local authorities have launched the last chance [Music]
34:21 program here at taaya 800,000 tons of sand come from the ocean and fall on the town every year you see here the wall which was built to stop the sand it needs to be six M high before this wall was here the sand caused health and breathing problems for the population to stabilize the sand we use plants which adapt well to The Climate
35:07 here and what plants are you using 90% of TAA 155,000 hectares have already been planted the TAA must survive Winds of over 50 km can you give me an idea of how old these trees are these trees are about 3 years old and they'll grow to two and a half M High thanks to this we've managed to reduce sand encroachment of the Town infrastructure by 80% the project is to double Plantation surface every 2 years but the cost is so high as to be Out Of Reach for the very
35:53 poor Southern oases does this mean giving up before the desert the pan-african great green wall project to stop drying up of the Sahel was launched in 2005 it meant to reforest a 15 km wide band from jibou in the north of Sagal over a length of 7,600 KM up until now only Sagal has really committed itself to this huge project the sahal zone is an intensive mobile grazing territory for vast herds of cattle sheep and goats in the dry season the animals
36:40 graze the little grass that subsists while waiting for regrowth in the rainy season which only lasts 2 months the soil completely bare has no protection [Music] well here you are the seasonal problem a month ago everything was dry no grass the ground was cracked and very dry one night of rain and the way is blocked the roads blocked a paradox of desert areas [Music]
37:30 the violence of the rainstorms might fool us but in fact the amount of rain that falls annually is low sometimes very low the rain falls on hot ground which increases evaporation finally like in South Morocco the rainfall is very [Music] irregular in some Villages large res Wars have been built to recover the rainwater in the dry season these are supplied by Wells which reach the groundwater but there are far from enough of
38:15 these today there's only one cart but a few months ago there were 40 or so come to get water to supply all the villages it's always a great surprise after six months of recording and then there's the result a radical change in the landscape and the environment 6 months of a totally desert environment and then after the rain of these last few days the landscape becomes completely verdant the rainy season is the only time during which the great green wall
39:00 can be extended these are plants that don't get watered they have to be planted when it's wet because when it's dry it's too late and we' have a lot of area to cover in a month we should have finished planting the area these young trees very tender are Delicacies for the herds and all the animals want to eat them this Barb Wire is to protect the
39:45 plantations we're in a grazing Zone where there are thousands of head of cattle without the fencing they'd graze on anything that was planted it's an area where there are only herders practically no Farmers these are herders who are becoming more and more sedentary half of them live all around the parcels of land it's them that keep watch over the land because they know they'll need grass in the dry season when grass becomes rare there's only these Parcels of land where you can find something for the animals The Zone was relatively arid with Advanced deforestation when you think what it was like like 5 years ago when we started up and you look at it now and see what it's
40:31 become It's relatively [Music] encouraging we have to plant a distance of 545 km that 545 km won't just be one plant after another we'll plant them in groves this is ACAA neotica we've planted all kinds of ACAA this year 1.72 million plants that's enormous en
41:20 normal here we are in one of the oldest plantations making up the great green wall after 8 years we have plantations of this type of tree which is particularly adapted to Drought conditions these trees were also chosen because they're used by the local population for example acaia Sagal which makes acaia gum which is used in Pharmaceuticals as well as other trees like the balanites which the local people use for medicine or food these properties make the local populations conserve the plantations in the long overall the herders have respected the enclosures even if here and there starving cattle have made a few holes in
42:06 the fence traditional burn-offs to encourage regrowth have been forbidden a fire break has been made around each parcel thus protected the ecosystem is reborn migrating birds return in Mass particularly in the rainy [Music] season about 20% of the trees planted don't grow but that's an acceptable percentage in an arid [Music]
42:51 region the great green wall agency has seven nurseries where thousands of trees await plant planting however scientists would like to improve the resistance of the young plants they're betting upon recent experiments which have already worked in Laboratories here are the acaas which are due to be planted on the site of the great green W to help them to grow and adapt to a relatively hostile environment in a few months where they won't get a drop of water for 10 months we're giving them a partner it's a mushroom which will help them to resist the these adverse conditions for the 10 months to come the mushroom that we eat is only the visible part its filaments develop under the ground over very large
43:37 areas the mushroom as it develops will establish a sort of web in the soil which allows a liazal and interactions between different plants trees and herbaceous plants are more easily able to exchange nutrients between different sorts of plants right now however the use of the mushroom is limited to a few Parcels of land and in the short term our objective is to produce enough of these mushrooms industrially to use them on a large scale over large sections of the great green wall right we're going to take the plants from these two lots treated with the mushrooms preliminary tests have shown
44:25 that plant mushroom symbiosis multiplies the survival rate of young trees by four now the experiments are facing the challenge of the field a lot of herders have settled in the areas around the great green wall forest rangers work with them to recruit the labor force they occasionally need and to collect information especially about what they feel this project started here eight years ago do you find things are positive or
45:11 negative what I want to pass on is that I'm just looking to work but when this project offers work for several months and you leave behind your sheep and goats and donkeys you work hard and at the end of the month you're not paid and then this goes on for five or six months is there any point in if you say you haven't been paid it's because the money isn't in the treasury other people and other projects have used it but when the money comes in you'll be paid in spite of recurrent funding problems which have upset payments of promised wages the herders have become more sedentary over the last few years those who are nomadic come back to the country in the rainy season
46:02 herding products are still an essential part of local resources at the market of wo held every Tuesday goats sheep and cattle are sold while the great green wall has been built to hold back the sand the intention is also to fight against poverty and diversify Revenue sources for the local population the creation of gardens [Music] helps these spaces are reserved for women who use them for Market gardening and horiculture they gain revenue from that and that diversifies work already
46:47 they say it's changing food habits it's not like before in some areas because they're nomadic the children can't attend school when we started to act here people started to settle down and the school which was here reopened because the young people who once moved the animals for grazing Stadium the great green wall show me what's good and what's not
47:38 good okay children what isn't good desert fire no water those working on the great green wall are not limiting themselves to restoring the ecosystem they're also taking care of people this is not just an ecological project the great green wall will have an impact in transforming the environment which will have an effect on health for example in providing a much more diverse and rich food supply that is much better for today's population on the other hand with the water that will come along with the wall we could have infectious diseases developing The Observatory run by Anthropologist Jil but records changes anticipates problems and measures the
48:25 efficiency of health and sanitation in the field in this notebook we have the figures over three years of the frequency of malaria we can see a very big fall thanks to the release of impregnated mosquitoes Sagal is absolutely exemplary since it's managed to link the agency which plants the trees and the scientists which monitor all the modifications which come with that perhaps it's a shame that senagal is the only Pioneer and the others have difficulty following this example but it has to be said that the sahal is a war zone and I think that starting from senagal we will convince the others to build this great green
49:16 War we're not yet in the desert we're at the edge in the S we have to ensure the desertification doesn't come to the lands of the S and that's the fight we're in there are no Utopias when the whole population of an area on the Move we have to try something to keep them in place and that's the challenge The Oasis program in Morocco and the great green wall of Sagal show that The Retreat of fertile land can be stopped it's not just a question of reconquering lost ground but fighting to ensure that reconquered desert land is viable this fight is everyone's business if it is lost Millions of climate refugees will swell the desperate crowds beating on the doors of Europe
50:03 [Music]
