Africa’s Sahel recovers from drought, bringing more trees, groundwater, and exotic animals

“Across Africa’s Sahel region, groundwater reserves are recovering after decades of drought. Aquifer reserves across Niger have risen by an estimated 15 percent, while Lake Chad reached more than 9,000 square miles in 2024, around 10 times its size in the mid-1980s. One major reason is that rising temperatures in the North Atlantic have pulled the West African monsoon farther north, bringing more rainfall to the Sahel,” reports The Doomslayer.

Yale describes how

Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. Wells are filling as water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in places. Lake Chad, which was one of Africa’s largest expanses of water before shriveling during the droughts, is recovering.

Over years of drought in the late 20th century, the sun hard baked the soils of the Sahel. Now, erratic but extreme rains are returning to this semi-arid region, causing lethal floods but also replenishing rivers, filling desert depressions, restoring water to dried riverbeds known as wadis, and sluicing rainwater off impermeable soils directly into aquifers. The process began in the 1990s but has accelerated in the past five years…

But increased rainfall since the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s explains only some of the rewetting of the Sahel. It cannot fully account for the transformation, say researchers. Also driving the rewetting, they posit, are changes to the land surface, ranging from the internationally funded Great Green Wall project to the revival of traditional water harvesting methods and the chaos caused by jihadist militants, which has led to the abandonment of irrigation projects that once emptied rivers of their flows.

Much remains unclear in these remote lands on the edge of the Sahara Desert, but the trend seems set to be long-term, with climate scientists saying more — and more extreme — rainfall is on the way in the 21st century. As underground water reserves revive, some are forecasting an agricultural renaissance.

Even before the last few years, trees were proliferating in the arid nation of Niger. In 2004, “Niger’s Zinder Valley had 50 times more trees than it did in 1975.” Mainly, that’s because Niger changed the law so that farmers — not the government — own the trees on their land. That gave farmers an incentive to plant and take care of trees, which proliferated as a result. But increasing rainfall since the 1990s also helped.

Kenyan farmers are using artificial intelligence tools to produce much more food.

The impoverished African nation of Zambia has used artificial intelligence to find new mineral wealth.