Abstract: The pandemic shock unfolded a great need for prioritizing the local solutions to the global humanitarian issues, not making an exception for the SDGs. But localizing the implementation of such strategies has not been robust. The premises of such revisiting of the sustainable development goals were, early on, in the ante-covid-19 era, when in 2007, the African Union launched the Great Green Wall, a flagship of the U.N system, to combat the effects of climate change on the environment and livelihood in the Sahel region. Yet, this African-led initiative shies away from the bottom-up approach. This literature review foresights how a most plausible nexus of top-down and indigenous approaches — so far left out — may help develop a sound sustainable development achievement at the local level. The Article 7.5 of the Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report 2022, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Biodiversity and Ecological Services (IPBES) highlight the need for taking in consideration the indigenous thinking and practices. COVID and the subsequent vaccine diplomacy issue, aggravate the local communities’ distrust of traditional humanitarian actions. Henceforth, this study explores the benefits of including the indigenous knowledge and practices in the Great Green Wall Initiative by: a) analyzing the need for a practical implementation of the sustainable development goals; b) using the case of the Green Wall to highlight the importance of Indigenous Knowledge to ecological security, water security, food security, economic security, social security, and livelihood copy strategy. This desk research consulted text reports, webpages, official documents, news articles, and research papers. The paper proposes morphing the current SDGs into a more localized and harmonized transformative adaption of the top-down and bottom-up approaches. This study is significant because it contributes to restating specific challenges of implementing the present SDGs and the future opportunities of a more pragmatic sustainable development agenda.

Key words: decolonization, climate security, indigenous knowledge, great green wall

JEL codes: Q5, Q2