From Degraded Land to Stronger Livelihoods: The Sahel’s Resilience Test

A WFP-led initiative restoring degraded land and strengthening food security across five Sahel countries has been recognized as a United Nations World Restoration Flagship. The designation highlights a broader effort to connect ecosystem recovery with food production and social support at a time when conflict, displacement, climate shocks and economic pressures continue to leave millions across the region facing acute food insecurity.

The recognition of the Sahel Integrated Resilience Initiative as a United Nations World Restoration Flagship puts a spotlight on a difficult policy question confronting the region: can restoring degraded land also help reduce chronic food insecurity and repeated dependence on emergency assistance? The WFP-led programme, operating across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, is trying to answer that question by combining environmental restoration with measures aimed at protecting livelihoods and strengthening local food systems.

Since 2018, the initiative has supported more than four million people and rehabilitated over 335,000 hectares of degraded land along the edge of the Sahara Desert. Its significance goes beyond the scale of land restored. The programme links ecosystem recovery with school meals, nutrition activities, support for smallholder farmers and capacity strengthening for local institutions, reflecting an approach in which environmental degradation and food insecurity are treated as overlapping rather than separate challenges.

Restoration Is Being Asked to Do More Than Repair Land

The Sahel's food crisis is being shaped by several pressures at once. Conflict and displacement continue to disrupt livelihoods, while climate shocks, economic pressures and environmental degradation further weaken communities' ability to absorb repeated setbacks. An estimated 7.4 million people across the region were projected to face Crisis levels of food insecurity or worse during the June-to-August 2026 lean season.

This makes land restoration a much broader development issue than simply improving soil or vegetation. Where productive land deteriorates, households can lose part of the economic base on which farming, food production and income depend. Restoring that land therefore becomes linked to the larger question of whether communities can rebuild productive assets and withstand future shocks with less reliance on emergency support.

The Sahel Integrated Resilience Initiative is structured around that connection. Instead of treating ecosystem restoration as a stand-alone intervention, it combines land rehabilitation with food, nutrition and agricultural support. The logic is that resilience is more likely to endure when communities are able to protect livelihoods while restoring the natural resources on which those livelihoods depend.

The approach also aligns with efforts by governments across the Sahel to invest in longer-term solutions that strengthen local food systems, boost production and reduce dependence on humanitarian assistance. The UN recognition gives greater visibility to that strategy, but the more important test will be whether the model can continue delivering results as pressures across the region remain severe.

The Early Numbers Suggest Progress, but Scale Matters

The programme is producing measurable gains at participating sites. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Mauritania, WFP reached more than 2.4 million people in 2025 through integrated resilience interventions across almost 1,000 villages. Satellite-based monitoring showed that 75 percent of WFP resilience sites recorded improved soil and vegetation conditions.

There has also been a decline in the share of participating households requiring humanitarian food assistance between harvests. That proportion fell from 44 percent in 2020/2021 to 33 percent in 2024/2025, indicating that households involved in the initiative maintained or improved their food security over the period.

Niger illustrates how large the model can become when implemented at scale. More than 1.4 million people were reached there in 2025 through integrated resilience interventions across hundreds of sites, making it WFP's largest programme of its kind in the region. The country has therefore become an important test of whether the approach can operate beyond isolated projects and across a much wider network of communities.

Local improvements do not automatically translate into regional change. The Sahel continues to face high levels of food insecurity, and the number of people requiring assistance remains substantial. The challenge is not simply to demonstrate that restoration can work in selected locations, but to determine whether these gains can be sustained and expanded without losing effectiveness.

The Bigger Bet Is on Preventing Future Humanitarian Need

Evidence cited by WFP indicates that integrated resilience investments can be up to 3.5 times more cost-effective than humanitarian response and could help avoid as much as USD 9.7 billion in future humanitarian assistance needs by 2055.

Those figures matter because they frame resilience not only as an environmental or social objective, but also as a potential way of changing the economics of crisis response. Humanitarian assistance often arrives after households have already lost income, food stocks or productive assets. Resilience programmes attempt to reduce the severity of those losses before repeated shocks push communities into deeper dependence.

With millions of people still projected to face Crisis levels of food insecurity or worse, immediate humanitarian needs remain significant. The policy challenge is therefore not choosing between emergency relief and long-term resilience, but finding a way to finance both without allowing recurrent crises to consume all available resources.

For governments and donors, this creates a difficult investment horizon. The benefits of restoring land and strengthening livelihoods may accumulate over years, while humanitarian needs demand funding immediately. Sustaining resilience programmes therefore requires continued commitment even when political and financial attention is pulled toward the latest emergency.

UN Recognition Raises the Profile, but the Real Test Comes by 2030

The World Restoration Flagship designation gives the Sahel initiative international recognition under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. It places the programme among large-scale and long-term restoration efforts, while also reinforcing the idea that degraded ecosystems, food production and household vulnerability cannot be addressed effectively in isolation.

However, recognition is not the same as completion. By 2030, the initiative aims to restore 475,000 hectares while supporting biodiversity, livelihoods and long-term food security. Reaching that target will require expanding beyond the more than 335,000 hectares already rehabilitated and sustaining investment across a region where instability and repeated shocks continue to complicate development gains.

The programme is supported through a longstanding partnership with Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, alongside Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland and other partners.

What happens next will be measured less by the prestige of the UN designation than by whether the reported gains endure. The key questions are whether restored land remains productive, whether participating households continue to reduce their dependence on food assistance, and whether the approach can be expanded while maintaining results across very different national and local contexts.