Human health impacts of continental restoration in Sahel
Research Background
Drylands support nearly 40% of the world’s population but face some of the greatest pressures from land degradation, climate change, and food insecurity. Large scale restoration projects are increasingly promoted as “Nature based Solutions” to tackle these challenges while conserving biodiversity.
The Great Green Wall (GGW) is one of the most ambitious of these initiatives. Spanning more than 7,400 km across 11 countries, it aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land in the Sahel by 2030. The GGW promises to improve food security and livelihoods for tens of millions of people, reverse biodiversity loss, and strengthen resilience to climate change.Early evidence shows that GGW activities are already restoring vegetation, soils, and water systems. The initiative has also mobilized major international investment, estimated at $50 billion over two decades. However, one critical dimension has been largely overlooked: human health. Restoration projects rarely consider health directly, missing opportunities to design for well-being or, in some cases, risking unintended harms.This project, funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and involving partners in The Gambia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and the UK, sets out to change that.
This study is funded by UK MRC (Medical Research Council)’s Applied Global Health Research award as “The impact on human health of restoring degraded African drylands” project, co-funded with researchers from The Gambia (Prof Kris Murray and Prof Nuredin Mohammed, MRC@Gambia), Senegal (Prof Sokhna Thiam), Burkina Faso (Prof Biebo Bihoun ) and UK (Prof James Hargreves and Prof Kris Murray, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) with Prof Kris Murray as the main PI.
Research Questions
Our central question is: How does restoring degraded drylands through the Great Green Wall affect human health, especially in early childhood?In this project we will examine both potential benefits, including better nutrition and diet diversity, improved mental health, reduced exposure to extreme heat and pollution, as well as possible risks, such as increased habitats for disease vectors (mosquitoes, ticks, snails) or rising human-wildlife conflict (snakebites, primates, elephants).
By treating the GGW as a multi-country natural experiment, we aim to show how restoration can deliver not only environmental and economic gains but also health benefits.
We, at MoHANI, are focusing on multi-scale analysis using both national-scale data collection efforts (The Gambia, Senegal, and Burkina Faso) with Dr Alisher Mirzabaev (International Rice Research Institute).
