FALSE: The Sahara is not shrinking and its greening doesn’t disprove climate change
A claim that climate change is a scam because the Sahara is shrinking and getting greener is FALSE.
This post on X (formerly Twitter) claimed that the fact that the Sahara is shrinking and consequently becoming greener proves that climate change is not real.
The claim that the desert is getting smaller is not true.
The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, its 5.6 million square kilometers hosts between 2.5 and 4 million people. This is about the size of the United States. It gets less than 25mm of rain a year, with 17 per cent of it getting on average only 5mm.
A study in Nature found that the Sahara expanded by 8 per cent between 1950 to 2015. In reality, the researchers found that the desert boundaries have advanced a 100km to the south. Worse still, the study found these trends will continue up to 2050 as global warming continues.
Another study in the Journal of Climate looked at a longer timeframe. The researchers found that the Sahara grew by 10 per cent from 1920 to 2013. They also found that the desert is expanding southward into the Sahel, and threatening fragile grassland ecosystems, human societies, and Lake Chad.
A mammoth tree-planting project called the Great Green Wall is underway to stop this expansion. The African Union initiated the project in 2007, aiming to plant an 8,000km band of trees across 22 African countries.
The wall is meant to combat desertification and climate change, create jobs and increase food security by restoring 100 million hectares of degraded land and sequestering 250 million tonnes of carbon.
PesaCheck has previously shown that a global greening because of rocketing atmospheric carbon dioxide does not mitigate or alleviate the damages caused by climate change.
Ironically, a different Nature study has found that human-caused climate change is increasing the chances of abnormally high rainfall in the Sahara, which could lead to temporary greening.
Scientists have observed that such an event could become more common.
Modelling studies found that, under certain climate scenarios, the Sahara may receive up to 75 per cent more rain because of climate change. However, much of this research is still uncertain.
However, since climate is an integrated system, there are also different feedbacks and effects which could happen from any possible greening in the Sahara.
PesaCheck has examined a claim that climate change is a scam because the Sahara is shrinking and greening and finds it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here's more information on PesaCheck's methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck climate change fact-checker Christiaan van der Merwe and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Stephen Ndegwa.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck’s managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent's largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.