Videos like these
are popping up all over social media.
They show colossal dust storms
raging through Delhi
and the surrounding states.
But this isn't a freak weather event.
These storms are becoming seasonal.
The dust comes from the Thar Desert.
Like the Sahara and the Gobi
it's expanding and destroying vital living space.
Africa and China have responded
with ambitious planting projects:
Great Green walls of trees
to try and stop desertification.
And India?
India is lucky -
the North has a natural green barrier:
the Aravalli mountain range,
which has held back the Thar desert
for centuries.
That is...
Until now.
The mega dust storms and hot winds
blowing in from the desert
are threatening the lives of millions
in the National Capital Region.
In 2019
India made a promising announcement:
it would be planting
its own Great Green Wall in the Aravallis
to help fight desertification.
But as we're about to see,
walls of trees have shown mixed results
in other parts of the world.
And the Aravalli mountain range
is facing some serious threats of its own.
So what can India do better
and will it be able to slow the advancing desert?
The Aravallis are the oldest mountain range in India.
They took billions of years
to form and separate
the sandy desert in the north west
from the fertile plains further east -
which is home to at least 70 million people
in India's National Capital Region.
The powerful dust storms
have led to a spike in bronchitis,
breathing difficulties and lung disease.
They also destroy soil and damage crops
But this is not just the fault of climate change.
Direct human actions such as illegal mining,
deforestation and urban sprawl
are eating away the mountain barrier
and turbocharging desertification
in the wider region.
"The mining is happening to such a big extent,
that hill after hill
is being razed to the ground."
Neelam Ahluwalia
runs the Aravalli Bachao Citizens Movement,
which campaigns to protect the Aravallis.
"There are millions and millions
of people living here.
Without the Aravallis,
the desert is going to completely engulf
entire Northwest India."
But North India's construction boom
demands building materials,
and lots of them.
India's supreme court
banned mining in the Aravallis
in 2002, 2009 and 2018.
It has repeatedly ordered a stop
to the unregulated urban sprawl
taking place there too.
But the destruction
of this ancient mountain range
continues at an alarming rate.
"It's going to impact your rainfall patterns,
your climate,
desertification,
groundwater recharge will reduce
in those zones,
wildlife habitat will be destroyed.
And of course,
forest cover will go down."
Chetan Aggarwal
is an environmental analyst
who has been working in the Aravallis region
for decades.
"If you can't protect what you have,
then you won't be certainly able to protect
what you plant in the future."
But 2018 government study estimates
that at least 20%
of the Aravalli hills in Rajasthan
have already been lost to mining.
Important groundwater systems
have been disrupted
and many rivers
have disappeared altogether.
The Aravalli's ancient forests
are also in trouble.
Scientists calculated that since 1975
over 1000 square kilometers of trees
have been cut down and replaced
with housing and farmland.
And taking into account illegal deforestation,
almost six thousand square kilometres
of tree cover has been lost.
That's the equivalent of more
than 380 thousand cricket pitches.
In 2019,
after a season of
especially punishing dust storms,
the government proposed a solution.
India's ministry
of environment, forest and climate change
would create a Great Green Wall -
1, 400 km long and 5 km wide -
to restore 1.5 million hectares
of degraded land in the Aravalli region
and stop the expansion of the Thar desert.
In a press release,
the ministry pledged that the wall would
"create green corridors across the country
to combat land degradation."
and that the wall
would run through the states of
Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi.
But what does building a Great Green Wall
actually mean?
The concept was made famous
by the African Union in 2007,
as a way to collectively re-green
the Sahel desert region
and create livelihoods
for the people living there.
The original tree wall project
started of stretching
from Senegal in the West
to Djibouti in the East,
passing through 13 different countries.
"But, of course,
the progress across the continent
has been sparsely distributed,
you know,
some countries have done much more
than other countries."
Joseph Faluyi is the COO of the
Africa Great Green Wall Project,
which now has 22 countries involved in the initiative.
"And it's not just the idea of planting trees,
but what's really important is sustainability,
how do you ensure
that these things grow to maturity?
So we have to be creative
about the type of trees
that are planted, you know,
and make sure
that there's some sort of irrigation."
Watering the trees proved a tough challenge.
But important lessons were learned too.
Results suggest
the most successful regreening on the continent
has actually been achieved by farmers -
planting trees alongside their crops
in countries like Niger and Malawi.
"One of the things
that I would advise any country
embarking on on this type of project
is to ensure that the people,
the communities
are part of this right from the get go
and participate
and have a clear understanding
of what is the benefit of the project
will be to them.
Because this is going to be
the incentive for them
to really work towards the success
of the project as well."
Africa's Great Green Wall
is aiming to restore 100 million hectares
of degraded land by 2030.
But so far,
well under half of the restoration target
has been achieved.
The UN estimates
that the project still needs
about 33 billion dollars of investment
to complete it.
The question is though -
would that be money well spent?
"Great green walls around the world,
and particularly the ones in
Sahelian West Africa, Algeria and China
that have recently been reviewed in depth,
do not have a good track record at all."
George Taylor is a desertification expert
from the University of Colorado
who has worked extensively
in Asia and the Sahel.
"If desertification, desiccation, drying,
things like this are happening,
they're happening primarily
because of global climate change patterns.
And the idea that, you know,
trees are going to stop a desert advancing
simply doesn't, doesn't hold water."
China started planting its Great Green Wall -
known as the Three-North Shelterbelt Project -
44 years ago.
Since then, the government
has spent billions on tree planting.
The plan is to plant an area of forest corridor
as big as France and Italy combined, by 2050,
so there's still a lot to do.
But can China's large scale planting power
set it apart?
"China is quite different
from these other cases.
And the primary difference
is just the way China is governed,
and the way the Chinese government
gets things done."
So can India's Government
get their Great Green Wall done?
The initiative was officially launched
in March 2023, but since then,
no planting has yet been done.
The ministry of Environment, forest and climate change
says it is still preparing a state by state plan
and identifying vulnerable hotspots.
No one from the ministry
agreed to be interviewed.
And shortly after that launch event,
the Indian government
rewrote a decades-old forest conservation law -
to completely dissolve
important protection regulations.
"So this actually impacts 40% of the
forest in the Aravallis,
which can technically now be opened
for any kind of commercial activity
or real estate or mining or building of roads
or whatever."
With the damage
to the Aravallis already accelerating,
mixed policy messaging has made it hard
to assess the government's commitment
to re-greening.
"On one hand, they are diluting the laws
that are actually protecting the Aravallis,
protecting our forests,
and on the other hand,
they are introducing schemes
like the Green Wall to say that, you know,
they're doing it to combat desertification."
Local communities have responded
to this government inaction by experimenting
with their own replanting strategies.
"So we had to start
from scratch from taking out,
you know, to remove the encroachment
start cleaning them up."
Latika Thukral is a former banker.
Her citizen led movement I am Gurgaon
has now re-generated
10 Aravalli forest sites around Gurugram.
"We decided that we're going to plant
only local species.
We got an expert on hand.
We we reached out to experts
who knew about what it means
to take on an Aravalli forest."
Gurugram, also known as Gurgaon,
is a satellite city of Delhi
that's located within the mountain range.
But it's real estate boom has left
much of the surrounding Aravalli landscape
scarred with illegal mining sites,
polluted waterways and dumping.
I am Gurgaon's first project
transformed an old mining site
into what is now the Aravalli Biodiversity park.
The team collected seeds
from the Aravalli forests
to recreate hundreds of native plant
and tree species.
The planting projects also made use
of indigenous water capture techniques
to support the plants.
They regenerated an old "bund" -
that's an embankment and ditch structure
used to channel water
during the monsoon rains.
And they also cleaned out several johads -
small ponds that help recharge groundwater.
"We were very very clear
that no water from our projects will go out,
and we will find ways of taking water
from the road -
or wherever we can get extra water -
into our projects."
So can a Great Green Wall
help to restore India's Aravalli mountains?
Well probably not, the way things are going:
"If the government doesn't actually
take steps to protect that natural wall
from mining, from real estate development,
from commercial activities.
Then, these kind of schemes are not really...
you know, they're just going to be cosmetic."
With communities
taking the lead on localized replanting,
the responsibility is now
on the Indian government to make good
on its Great Green Wall promise.
Enforcing legal protections
in the Aravallis would be a good start.
What do you think of India's
Great Green Wall plans?
Let us know in the comments!
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