In 1981, Tony Rinaudo worked on a small reforestation project on the borders of the arid Sahara Desert. For almost 20 years, he worked to help turn a potential ecological collapse into a thriving agricultural success, bringing a ten-fold increase in forestation and a multi-million dollar agriculture industry. This, he says, holds a significant lesson for post-bushfire Australia. By Tony Rinaudo, republished by permission from ABC.

Sydney, Australia. February 2020. From 1981 to 1999 I lived in Niger Republic, on the border of the Sahara Desert working for Serving in Mission. When I arrived in 1981, I was confronted by an environment on the cusp of ecological collapse and barely able to support life. Severe drought and crop failure the previous year had precipitated the crisis. Deforestation and land degradation over previous decades had significantly exacerbated the problem.

While our first priority was to get food to desperately needy families, we did not shy away from the major root cause of the problem — deforestation.

It wasn't a popular message. The destruction of nearly all tree cover had resulted in loss of soil fertility and its ability to store and slowly release moisture. Trees in that environment radically reduce soil and air temperatures and wind speeds, reducing the rate at which the soil dries out and increasing the utilisation of what rain does fall.

Additionally, many of the indigenous species in Niger exhibit hydraulic lift — the ability to draw up water from deep in the soil profile and leak it out through shallow roots. This can in turn effectively bio-irrigate crops.

But a crisis needed to be called out for what it was. No other designation would result in the required concerted corrective action necessary to solve the problem. De-forestation contributed to land degradation and desertification. It was not sufficient to declare that drought was a normal part of the climate cycle.

In Niger, individuals and communities for the most part weren't particularly interested and most didn't want to change the old methods. Regardless, we combined humanitarian relief activities with aggressive reforestation activities. We were teaching, but also learning with them, about the best methods, the best species, the best crop-tree dynamics. We opened the door of comprehension and willingness to change more than a notch. Our message wasn't initially popular, but the hard-earned lessons acquired during that period serve me to this day.

The result was an environmental transformation which has been described as one of the most significant positive environmental changes in all of the sub-Saharan Sahel, if not all of Africa. Today, Niger boasts more than 6 million hectares of farmland with an average tree density of 40 trees per hectare (about 240 million trees) — up from four trees per hectare in 1980. Today, even though Niger remains a drought and disaster-prone country, farmers in Niger are growing an additional 500,000 tons of grain every year without external aid.

The gross annual income going directly to 4.5 million of the world's poorest farmers is estimated at $US900 million. Tellingly, if we had waited until after the crisis to tackle deforestation it would have been too late. People's heightened sense of urgency and the need to act decisively would have passed.

Today, in Australia, only the most hardened fingers-in-ears climate change denialist would still cling to the fantasy that the current drought and unprecedented post-bushfire scenario are a normal part of the Australian milieu. We are in a climate crisis, and the first step towards addressing a crisis is to declare it as one.

Australia has experienced the catastrophic consequences of the failure to declare a climate emergency – and this has resulted in a failure to prepare and take action.

That's what concerns me about the current response to the bushfire crisis: the calls to only treat the symptoms and not the underlying causes. The big fib is that now is not the time to talk about the climate.

I would argue strongly that even as we put all of our efforts into keeping Australians safe, putting out the fires and helping with recovery, we simultaneously need to be on a war footing, tackling the causes of the fires. There's no excuse for foot-dragging.

Even though Australia's emissions are small on a global scale, this is no excuse for foot-dragging on emissions reductions and unfettered exploitation of fossil fuel reserves for fast profits. We need to reduce our reliance on coal and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to the climate changes which have contributed to the unprecedented drought, extended fire seasons and high temperatures. To not do so would be to commit ourselves to perpetual firefighting mode.

I only had a few staff and we worked in just 12 villages at the start of the famine, yet the famine impacted millions. But most importantly, in the following 20 years, the reforestation technique we introduced went viral in Niger. Today it is spreading across Africa and beyond.

In Australia, we also need to take seriously outstanding examples of regenerative agricultural practices. Ones that first nations and farmers have pioneered, including indigenous land management and burning practices, permaculture, natural sequence farming, keyline farming, native pasture cropping and application of minimal tillage and holistic grazing management principles. These practices simultaneously mitigate against climate change while enabling adaptation. Our economy is still strong enough to divest from the short-term benefit of fossil fuel exploitation to invest in energy sources of the future.

Truly sustainable prosperity is co-dependent with environmental responsibility; it has been pointed out that while there are many environments with no economy, there are no economies that do not rely on the environment.

In Niger, it took a severe crisis to elicit positive change. Sadly, Australia is going through a severe crisis right now. So will we be satisfied with continuing to deal with symptoms? Or will we make the hard choices and tackle root causes? Working with nature instead of fighting against it will give us much greater prosperity and food security than by destroying nature and working against it.

Tony Rinaudo is the Senior Climate Action Adviser at World Vision Australia.

To see Tony’s original post, go to: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-23/what-i-learnt-about-australian-bushfires-living-on-edge-sahara/11885000