[groby_b]

This requires constant upkeep. The goal is to structure it so the local community is incentivized to invest that upkeep, but it's not just gonna happen all by itself. The goal is indeed a self-sustaining ecosystem, but one with human participation. If you want more detail, a good keyword is "Farmed Managed Natural Regeneration"

That keyword also makes it pretty clear it's more than a shovel and some seeds :)

And, fwiw, your request made me look at the thegreatgreenwall.org, and... good god. It is one of the lowest-information sites I've seen in a while. You could spend hours on there and learn nothing. https://thegreatgreenwall.org/science-and-the-ggw is as far as I can tell the only concrete part of this piece.

A much better starting point if you care about a bit more than feel-good vibing is https://www.unccd.int/our-work/ggwi

And that site makes it again abundantly clear that this is a very large scale project. The difference from the Qattara Sea project is that it actually managed to gin up multinational corporation, and that it takes a long term lens (as opposed to "IDK, let's flood this, rest's gonna work out" of the various seaflooding projects). And, most importantly, because it integrates the local communities in the project.

The last part matters because any such project is far from "fire and forget", and you need a strong local stake in any such project for it to succeed.

[blagie]

Thank you! I received three responses.

1) One pointing to the linked promo video designed to give feel-good vibes, claiming that's a citation. (fnordpiglet)

2) One without citations, just claiming this was designed by "researchers" and I should take that on the double-authority (bluGill)

3) And yours, which is helpful and points to an actual set of citations!

Thank you for that!

Footnote: There was a point in history when slashdot, and then reddit, were populated by intelligent discussions. At some point, there was a cliff. I enjoy HN, but I feel like we're heading for that cliff. I've seen this dynamic more and more. There are good people like you still left here, but the signal-to-noise ratio is dropping....

[bluGill]

All indications are this is supported by serious research from universities. Though I will agree that if you want to go deeper than a conversation level you will need to find who. I would assume the the researchers are writing most of this up in language others than English. In fact if you found a lot of information in English I would be very concerned as the people doing this do not speak English. They may publish some in English as well, but if the majority isn't in the local language (which might be translated or not) there is a problem.

[blagie]

Speculation is very unhelpful, as are uncited claims. It's just not.

FYI: Your assumption is wrong. The language used for instruction in most universities in ECOWAS is either English or French, and mostly English. If you're talking about the research, or anything vaguely like leadership, all people doing this will speak primarily English as the lingua franca.

You can figure that out with by googling this:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=top+universities+ecowas&ia=...

And visiting their web pages.

The related problem is that e.g. Nigerian English or Ghanian English isn't the same as British or American, and academic journals do discriminate on this sort of thing, very explicitly.