When Michal Kravčík asked me the other day: “How can we green the North African desert?”, my memory as a son of the oasis awakened. I grew up where every drop of water counts, where greenery is a miracle maintained through centuries of know-how. Trained in urban planning and land management, I fully grasp the magnitude of the challenge… but I also know that answers exist. And the time for hesitation is over.
While recent satellite images reveal a spectacular greening of the Sahara — lakes are reappearing, vegetation is resurfacing in southern Algeria after the exceptional rains of September 2024 — a burning question arises: why have we still not launched a true regeneration of the North African desert? Far from being a climate utopia, this ambition is grounded in proven knowledge, effective techniques, and concrete examples from around the world. What is lacking is neither science nor inspiration. It is willpower.
🌾 Before Greening the Desert, Save the Lands That Are Becoming Desert
The Sahara was not always a desert. Between 11,000 and 5,000 BCE, it was home to rivers, lakes, savannas. Even today, its fertile fringes — the Atlas steppes, Saharan oases, the lands of the Tell — are dying not from lack of rain, but from neglect. The degradation stems from unsuitable farming practices, bare soils, blind concretization, and infrastructures disconnected from life.
And yet, the solutions are known:
- Zai techniques
- Agroforestry
- Permaculture
- Windbreak hedges
- Rainwater infiltration
- Treatment and reuse of wastewater
- Aquaponics
- Bioclimatic architecture…
Regenerative hydrologists remind us that it is possible to restore water cycles, soil fertility, and biodiversity. But technique alone is not enough.
🛑 What’s Holding Us Back: Rent-Seeking, Short-Termism, and Inertia
Why don’t we act? Because the obstacles are political, economic, and cultural. Money, rent-seeking, corruption, and indifference sterilize our public policies. Water is diverted, not managed. Soil is exploited, not cared for. Development is thought through extractive, short-term logics, often in blatant contradiction with ecological resilience.
Restoring a wadi, channeling water into the soil instead of the sea, planting a hedge becomes almost a subversive act. Because where power rests on the exploitation of territory, any attempt at regeneration threatens a balance built on oblivion, profit, and submission.
🏴☠️ A Colonial History That Has Not Spoken Its Last Word
North Africa has never fully recovered from centuries of colonial domination. Land planning is still steeped in 19th-century logics. As the geographer Marc Côte wrote, we must “reverse space”: reorient planning towards the people, local resources, ecological sovereignty.
Colonial models have left deep scars. Even today, neocolonialism operates through land grabs, unjust contracts, technological dependency, and support for authoritarian regimes. Political independence is not enough. We must decolonize space, the economy, and mindsets.
🌍 Inspiring Models From Elsewhere
Pioneering projects around the world show that regenerating the desert is possible:
- In Saudi Arabia, the Al Baydha Project has been restoring an arid landscape since 2009 through permaculture and water management inspired by tribal knowledge.
- In China, the Great Green Wall has been combating the advance of the Gobi Desert over more than 4,000 km since 1978.
- In Algeria, the rains of 2024 triggered an unexpected greening of the Sahara, proof that the potential is there — it just needs to be unleashed.
These experiences prove that the desert is not doomed to sterility. With care and intelligence, it can become alive again.
🤝 Reinventing Geopolitical Cooperation
Europe has more to gain from a green, stable, and sovereign North Africa than from a militarized and impoverished neighbor. Yet it continues to sell arms, build walls, and turn migration into a threat.
And yet, investing in hydrologists, regenerative farmers, and local cooperation would cost less and be wiser than funding border surveillance. It is time to value peasant solutions, support local practices, and bet on collective intelligence and climate peace.
🧠 A Gentle Yet Determined Mental Revolution
We need a mental revolution. To break free from fatalism. To revalue ancient knowledge while integrating contemporary science. To bring together farmers, engineers, architects, artists, and citizens around a common project: reviving life.
Greening the desert is not just about planting trees. It is about changing paradigms. It means preferring fertile slowness to rapid yields. It means restoring the bonds between humans, soil, water, and climate. It means restoring meaning and dignity to collective action.
✅ In Conclusion: For a Regenerative Policy in North Africa
Here are the pillars of a clear, realistic, and urgent strategy:
- Prioritize saving areas undergoing desertification.
- Restore water cycles: infiltration, retention, reuse.
- Rely on local knowledge and technical innovations.
- Break the logics of rent-seeking, concrete, and neglect.
- Demand historical accountability, denounce current complicities.
- Redirect funding towards life, not war.
- Rethink land planning on the scale of a united Maghreb.
The Sahara has not spoken its last word. It is only waiting to come back to life. It is up to us to rekindle memory, spark the flame, and believe once again in the desert’s fertility
