South Sudanese Expert Highlights Importance of Replicating Ethiopia’s Green Legacy, Cooperation

 Addis Ababa, October 04/2023 (ENA) South Sudan Representative at the four-day Global Environment Facility Workshop in Addis Ababa, Wani Nelson has stressed the importance of replicating Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative and cooperating on combating the borderless impacts of climate change in East Africa. 

The Green Legacy is an initiative launched by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in June 2019 with a target of planting 20 billion seedlings within four years, rooted in a vision of building a green and climate-resilient Ethiopia.   

The country has so far planted billions of seedlings.

Ethiopia has also been allocating a billion saplings every rainy season to countries in the East African region with the view to encouraging the countries to replicate the initiative and cooperate in combating the effects of climate change.      

The representative at the workshop told ENA that “Ethiopia is championing the planting of trees in the region.”

According to him, South Sudan is one of the countries in the region replicating Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative.

“We have also an initiative that aims to replicate what Ethiopia is doing by planting 100 million trees. We are working on the project,” Nelson revealed.   

Ethiopia has promised to support South Sudan in planting trees along the border in the neighboring states bordering Ethiopia, the expert added. 

The representative noted that cooperation between Ethiopia and South Sudan on the issue of climate change has a great impact as most of the communities are agro-pastoral.  

“Most of the states that are in neighboring Ethiopia are agro-pastoral communities and we see that planting trees restores the land and even the forest that has been destroyed.”  

Therefore, the expert said that planting trees along the border with Ethiopia will lead to forest regeneration and the actual restoration of the land to support agriculture as well as providing multi-forest products to the communities that live around this area.

Nelson pointed out that climate change has no boundaries, and a lack of climate change in Ethiopia can also affect neighboring countries, including South Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda. 

“We need to collectively work together to restore degraded landscapes as one because for us to stop desertification we need to restore degraded landscapes and also watershed management.” 

The representative further stressed the need to replicate the Ethiopian initiative and cooperate in combating the borderless impacts of climate change.

“We need to work to the other; or the challenges that are being faced in a certain country can easi together to be able to break these barriers of working in silos as individual countries by working together as a region to address the issues of climate change. When you work together, you can take experience from one country and apply thosely address that instead of passing through the same stages that the other country actually experienced.” 

The IGAD Regional Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan is what the East African countries should follow and align with their plans and strategies, he underscored. 

Encouraged by the first phase of the Green Initiative, Ethiopia has embarked on repeating the  success by commencing the second phase this year. 

It also launched the National Adaptation Plan of Action in 2007 and the Ethiopian Program of Adaptation on Climate Change and Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions in 2010. 

Moreover, Ethiopia endorsed a Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) strategy in 2011, with the objective of building a green and resilient economy.