africa

WTF Fun Fact 12966 – Yacouba Sawadogo

Yacouba Sawadogo is a farmer – and an environmental hero. Hailing from Burkina Faso, he and his family helped stop the desertification of his village by planting their own forest.

But there’s so much more to his efforts and what we can learn from them about the importance of trees (and caring about the land around us).

Yacouba Sawadogo, the man who stopped the desert

Sawadogo’s village, in the northern part of Burkina Faso (in the Sahel Belt), suffered from a long drought from 1972 to 1984. The land was further impacted by overfarming and overgrazing by animals, and the resulting famine killed hundreds of thousands of people.

He used an ancient African technique called zai. Zai involves planting specific trees and enriching the soil, resulting in faster forest growth and improved soil quality. But his fellow farmers who saw him planting trees in the desert thought he was losing his mind.

He and fellow farmer Mathieu Ouédraogo proved them wrong.

“Yacoub Zai”

Sawadogo has no formal science education but used traditional knowledge to plant what is now a nearly 100-acre forest with 96 tree and 66 plant species. There are edible and medicinal plants in his forest, and it’s now home to previously endangered animals.

According to LifeGate (cited below), Yacouba Sawadogo recalled getting his nickname: “Thomas Sankara [President of Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987] launched an appeal to develop initiatives to stop the advancement of the desert, and when he came to see my work, he asked me what technique I was using, and I told him it was zai. That’s why I’m also known as Yacoub Zai”.

Trouble in the forest

There is a 2010 documentary (The Man Who Stopped the Desert) about his life, and he won the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 and the Champions of the Earth award in 2020. However, Sawadogo was still fighting for the land until very recently.

In the early 2000s, the nearby city of Ouahigouya annexed the forest as part of a larger municipal land grab. Officials offered Sawadogo and each of his family members just 1/10th of an acre of the land and no other compensation. Then, people began erecting settlements on the plot.

Sawadogo began raising money in 2008 to buy the land and keep it safe. But the value of the land (thanks to his own efforts) made it extremely valuable – more than he could afford, even with fundraising. Finally, in 2021, the environmental arm of the local government erected a protective fence around the forest to preserve it, thanks to Sawadogo’s ongoing efforts. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Yacouba Sawadogo, the African farmer who stopped the desert” — LifeGate

WTF Fun Fact 12824 – Teen Invents Tool To Catch Elephant Poachers

A teen named Anika Puri has invented a new way to catch elephant poachers.

“I was quite taken aback,” the 17-year-old Chappaqua, New York student told Smithsonian Magazine. “Because I always thought, ‘well, poaching is illegal, how come it really is still such a big issue?’”

Learning more about elephant poachers

Puri and her family visited India a few years ago and saw ivory lined up at a Bombay market. The ivory trade has been illegal for decades in India.

After some research, Puri realized African elephants are still being hunted and that the “forest elephant population had declined by about 62 percent between 2002 and 2011.” Those numbers continue to drop today.

As a wildlife lover who is gifted in science and technology, Puri invented a system to help catch poachers.

According to Smithsonian: “Drones are currently used to detect and capture images of poachers, and they aren’t that accurate, the teenager explains. But after watching videos of elephants and humans, she saw how the two differed vastly in the way they move—their speed, their turning patterns and other motions.”

Tracking and stopping elephant poachers

Once she saw the difference in movements between humans and elephants, she realized she could build a piece of technology to track their movements.

As a result, she spent 2 years creating ElSa (short for “elephant savior”). Still in the prototype stage, the machine-learning driven device “analyzes movement patterns in thermal infrared videos of humans and elephants.”

Better yet, Puri says the accuracy is 4 times that of other tools. Her tool also costs a mere $250 to make whereas others run into the thousands of dollars due to their use of high-resolution cameras.

However: “ElSa uses a $250 FLIR ONE Pro thermal camera with 206×156 pixel resolution that plugs into an off-the-shelf iPhone 6. The camera and iPhone are then attached to a drone, and the system produces real-time inferences as it flies over parks as to whether objects below are human or elephant.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “This Teenager Invented a Low-Cost Tool to Spot Elephant Poachers in Real Time” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12771 – The Saraha Desert Forest Mystery

Ok, trigger warning: There’s a high chance of getting Toto’s “Africa” stuck in your head by reading this post. But, the truth is, there used to be plenty of rains down in Africa. Enough to have made the Saraha Desert a rainforest.

It’s not a huge shock, since we know the Earth has gone through different climatic periods, but this was one far more recent and accounts for a more radical change than scientists ever could have imagined. In other words, it really takes a lot to turn a vibrant forest into a bone-dry desert, and this happened a mere 6000ish years ago! It’s pretty interesting.

How did the Sahara go from forest to desert?

So, what’s the deal here? Well, since we don’t have a time machine, we can’t know for certain. It could have to do with the tilt of the Earth’s orbital axis changing, it could also be part of a longer, larger pattern of transition.

African Humid Periods in the distant past meant….you guessed it…more rains down in Africa. In particular, northern Africa (which is where the Sahara is, in case you don’t have a map handy). But at some point, those rains went away.

As Smithsonian Magazine (cited below) explains:

“With more rain, the region gets more greenery and rivers and lakes. All this has been known for decades. But between 8,000 and 4,500 years ago, something strange happened: The transition from humid to dry happened far more rapidly in some areas than could be explained by the orbital precession alone, resulting in the Sahara Desert as we know it today.”

Cool use of archaeological data

We can see from archaeological data (which is not perfect, but is overwhelmingly in favor of showing past water and trees in certain areas) that the area was once forest, and even rainforest. But what’s also interesting – and seals the deal for most people – is that in this period there is also evidence of pastoralists. That means people were raising and herding animals. And you definitely can’t do that in a desert.

Are humans to blame?

If it wasn’t solely an axial issue (regarding the Earth’s tilt), some scientists believe that humans could have played a big role in changing the climate due to overgrazing.

There have been suggestions that the end of the humid period in northern Africa could have been brought about by humans letting domesticated animals eat up all the moisture-loving plants. They would have probably had to use fire as a land management tool as well. And that may have been enough to trigger the big change that turned the forest into a desert.

It’s not that easy, of course, but that’s the general idea. There are also hypotheses that humans had nothing at all to do with it. And neither one of those would be related to whether or not humans are affecting the climate currently, so it’s not a political discussion (thankfully). – WTF fun facts

Source: “What Really Turned the Sahara Desert From a Green Oasis Into a Wasteland?” — Smithsonian Magazine