A decades-old push to develop sustainable land-use practices in sub-Saharan Africa has begun to show results. Trees planted in the 1980s are coming of age, offering new sources of nutrients and income to communities long reliant on monoculture cereal crops. Better water-management strategies have replenished water tables in many regions.

Those were a few of the highlights pointed out yesterday by a panel of experts at a World Resources Institute (WRI) forum, "Building Climate Smart Agriculture and Resiliency in the Sahel." Because features like trees and water tables take time to mature, it is only recently that the success of many of these projects has become evident, panelists said.

"It wasn't until six years ago that [scientists] realized the vast transformation that was occurring," said Gray Tappan, a remote sensing specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

However, the panelists also cautioned that climate change and increasing population densities would place added stress on the region in the future, reinforcing the need to increase the scope of proven land-use practices immediately.

Many of the strategies that have proved most successful, such as bringing trees back into farmlands, diverge from the kinds of industrial-agriculture strategies advocated by many development agencies in the 1970s, panelists said.

"For a long time, the agricultural development paradigm was 'Let's clear up those trees because we want you to be able to mechanize,'" said Robert Winterbottom, director of the Ecosystem Services Initiative at the WRI. "People overlooked some of the ecological importance of traditional practices."

Panelists agreed that one key factor in the success of natural resource management was, paradoxically, ending government control of lands. When farmers understood that they, and not the government, were the owners of trees, they were much more likely to actively cultivate them, the panelists said.

"Farmers invest in trees if they have clearly defined user rights," said Chris Reij, a senior fellow with WRI. "That's very important: If the trees are supposed to belong to the government, they will not do so."