Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene November 2018 Vol.13 No.5 | Page 26

Environment
Oasis dreaming regreening the Djiboutian Desert
Older farmers remember a time when the
desert was green and they could graze cows.
Desertification now means they can no longer
keep cattle, and goats and camels have to
be walked long distances to find patches of
green. Photo by UN Environment / Hannah
McNeish
Globally, rising
sea levels and
temperatures,
deforestation
and increasingly
unpredictable rains
are damaging fragile
coastal ecosystems
and putting people
in already arid and
poor countries
like Djibouti at
the forefront of
the battle against
climate change.
“Khor Angar is
the biggest mangrove forest in Djibouti and the most
important. It used to span 120 hectares and dropped to
60 hectares,” says climate change adaptation specialist
Mohamed Ahmed Djibril, who works for Djibouti’s
Ministry of Environment. “To make sure it didn’t
disappear, we had to intervene.”
To save this important ecosystem and the people who
rely on it from ruin, the Government of Djibouti, UN
Environment and partners have helped the community
to restore forest areas, unblock canals and improve the
drinking water supply.
With just over US$2 million in funding from the Global
Environment Facility, the project supported the restoration
of mangrove forests to provide a buffer for important
ecosystems and communities from seawater intrusion. The
community cleared the debris clogging up the forest, and
mechanical diggers were brought in to drag out the larger
pieces and clear the sand from seawater channels. When
the circulation of water was restored, the forest could
breathe and grow again.
New generations of mangroves now dot the shore in an
area outside the village that has been fenced off to stop
camels—the only animal that can now survive here due to
the lack of pasture—from eating the plants.
The Khor Angar nursery now produces around 35,000
seedlings per year and the community has planted more
than 100,000 seedlings in total, says Djibril, who oversaw
this pilot project. “The most important thing for us was to
make sure the community that depend on these mangroves
can live and keep living from them,” he says.
It will take between 50 and 100 years to fully restore the
mangrove forest, but the community is already seeing
results, most noticeably with the return of crabs to the
area. It’s not like it was in its heyday, explains Ali Omar,
“but it is getting better, little by little”. The aim is for
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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • November 2018
natural reforestation to take over from the project’s
success at replanting mangroves with only a 0.5 per cent
mortality rate.
The project has helped fishing communities to overcome
falling fish stocks by providing better equipment and
training on sustainable fishing practices, date palm
cultivation, eco-tourism and small-scale agriculture. It has
also helped people access a better quality, cheaper supply
of fresh water by upgrading its desalination system with a
new pump, pipes and generator.
Khor Angar is one of two sites in Djibouti where the
project has helped communities to adapt to climate
change, and the effects of more frequent droughts and
erratic rains. In an area of southern Djibouti called
Damerjog, the project constructed three small dams to
improve farming and prevent salt water from intruding
into wells, as well as supporting the installation of solar-
powered irrigation in 18 farms.
Further inland
from Khor Angar,
UN Environment
and partners have
also supported the
construction of a
small tree nursery
to grow date palms
for shade and
fruit, and to test
A fisherman points out areas of mangrove
whether areas of growth and the remaining few areas of degraded
the desert can
trees after a community-led project helped clear
be successfully
the forest of dead wood blocking trees and
regreened. “There fish from oxygenated water. Photo by UN
used to be so
Environment / Hannah McNeish
much forest here
that you would not even be able to see if people were
passing,” says Ali Ibrahim Mohammed, 65, who has
watched the weather changing.
“When I was little it would rain every season, and for the
past ten years, it hasn’t rained at all,” he says. “Without
trees there is no rain and without rain there is nothing.”
Mohammed hopes that the now knee-high cluster of
date palms planted in 2014 will survive and that the
reforestation initiative will be expanded to ensure the
survival of people living in the surrounding areas.
Abdul Mohammed Omar still walks two kilometres a
day to guard and water the trees, even though he is no
longer being paid. “I am working for my country and
community,” he says, adding that he dreams of the day
when the trees will bear fruit and provide much needed
patches of green and shade in the Djiboutian desert.