In Senegal, the ambitious Dakar Greenbelt project seeks to create an extensive network of ecological infrastructure in and around the city to sustainably address environmental concerns and enhance urban life. With support from David Gouverneur and Ellen Neises, Ph.D. candidate Rob Levinthal in the Weitzman School of Design led two courses that included a field trip to Dakar, that culminated in students presenting their visions for parts of the Greenbelt. (Image: Courtesy of Chaowu Li)

From a desert to an oasis: Penn engages in ambitious greening effort in the Sahel

January 31, 2025

Students from the Weitzman School of Design journeyed to Senegal to help with an ambitious ecological and infrastructural greening effort as part of their coursework. The Dakar Greenbelt aims to combat desertification and promote sustainable urban growth.

From leadership strife and regional conflicts to the sweeping waves of global economic transformation, the Sahel region—the southern edge of the Sahara Desert—has endured a century of dramatic change that has profoundly shaped life for its growing population, says Rob Levinthal, a Ph.D. candidate in City and Regional Planning at the Weitzman School of Design. Urbanization, industrialization, and modernization have drifted across the African continent, but in the fragile ecosystems of the Sahel, he notes that these trends have exacerbated the region’s challenges and have intensified desertification and rendered the land increasingly inhospitable.

The Sahara Desert threatens to steadily disrupt the Sahel, driven by deforestation and unplanned urban growth, further threatening the livelihoods of millions, says Levinthal, who, prior to joining Penn, spent 27 months serving in the Peace Corps in Senegal. “The effects of deforestation, land degradation, and a changing climate have made the ecological conditions pretty dire in some places,” he says. “My job there was planting trees as a part of an agroforestry effort and we were struggling to do even that, as we had a limited number of collaborators in these different villages that I was living in.”

During this time, Levinthal caught wind of a “huge, ambitious project that was planting a line of trees across the continent.” The Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI) is a multinational effort to combat deforestation and desertification that seeks to create a living wall of vegetation spanning the width of Africa.

Intrigued with the project, Levinthal began to ask, “How is this happening? What were the skills needed join? Who was in charge of making these large-scale projects?”

This curiosity led him to delve deeper at the start of his graduate studies at Penn, conducting interviews with stakeholders like Deborah Goffner, a researcher from France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, who connected him to local leaders in Senegal like Bocar Sall, lead forester in the Senegalese Directorate of Water, Forestry, Hunting and Soil Conservation. From discussions born out of the GGWI, they came up with an idea for a greenbelt around Dakar, and Levinthal, Sall, and Goffner garnered support from the UN Environment Program’s Generation Restoration Cities competition.

A landscape showing a lot of pollution along a shoreline. — Lac Mbeubeuss, Dakar’s sprawling landfill, sits at the intersection of urban expansion and environmental degradation, where waste pollution threatens surrounding wetlands. (Image: Courtesy of Chaowu Li)

Advocating for broader involvement in the Dakar Greenbelt project at Penn, Levinthal engaged faculty members Ellen Neises, David Gouverneur, Eugénie Birch, and others. That team then helped secure funding for the project from Penn Global and PennPraxis to support two parallel courses offered this fall: a design/build studio tailored to landscape architecture students and one for a city and regional planning students, both focused on designing and planning the Greenbelt. At the start of the semester, students in these courses traveled to Senegal, immersing themselves in the local environment and collaborating with community members and project partners. Informed by their experiences in Dakar, students developed comprehensive plans for the Greenbelt, which they presented as their final projects shortly before the December break.

“It’s been truly wonderful to be part of a project this profound and far-reaching,” says Neises, pointing to the opportunity for students and faculty to meet with environmental activists and national leaders in Senegal and to contribute to the local community there working on the Greenbelt project.