Earth-observation network of satellites and ground instruments while improving the calculation ability of computers fed meteorological and climate data. By investing about 9 billion dollars in such a program, the scientists hope to better prevent catastrophes. Meanwhile in Burkina Faso (map credit), a landlocked country in the Sahel, local farmers, agricultural engineers and NGOs are working in a more literal sense to battle desertification, a phenomenon closely related to global warming. Desertification results from farming techniques that deplete the soil: in Burkina Faso, a standard technique was to chop down the trees then plant and harvest until nothing more would grow, then move on and do the same thing again. Desertification contributes to global warming just as does the destruction of forests, and can also be intensified due to global warming: longer dry spells followed by torrential rains leave even less water in the soil. Since the 1980s, a return to traditional techniques involving terracing and other methods to retain water and help it penetrate deep into the soil are helping to green the Sahel.Despite the clear benefits, not everyone is leaping on the bandwagon: the farmers are so poor and donations so few that not enough of them can afford the roughly $84/acre investment in picks and shovels to dig trenches, gas and a rental truck to go get stones to use for terracing, hired help for the heavy work (note however that the article discusses the success of one man while the photo shows barefoot women digging trenches with picks and shovels) and ongoing training in greening techniques.
Since activities in one place affect the climate in another, perhaps rather than (or along with) investing 9 billion dollars in a system to alert the US of disasters in time to prevent them, we could invest more in greening the Sahel and other areas suffering from desertification, as this might actually reduce some of those catastrophes and their attendant human security problems wherever they occur.
