🇪🇬🌱 The controversial plan to turn a desert green

Ties van der Hoeven’s ambitions are nothing if not grand. The Dutch engineer wants to transform a huge stretch of inhospitable desert into green, fertile land teeming with wildlife.

His sights are set on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, an arid, triangle-shaped expanse that connects Africa with Asia. Thousands of years ago it was bursting with life, he said, but years of farming and other human activity have helped turn it into a barren desert.

He has spent years fine tuning an initiative aimed at restoring plant and animal life to roughly 13,500 square miles of the Sinai Peninsula, an area slightly bigger than the state of Maryland. The goal: to suck up planet-heating carbon dioxide, increase rainfall and bring food and jobs to local people.

But in 2016, the course of his career changed when he was pulled into a venture to help the Egyptian government restore shrinking fish populations in Lake Bardawil, a saltwater lagoon in northern Sinai, separated from the Mediterranean by a narrow sandbar. It used to be more than 100 feet deep but is now less than 10 feet deep in parts, as well as hot and salty.

Within a few weeks, van der Hoeven devised a plan to open up the lagoon by creating tidal inlets and dredging “tidal gullies” to get more seawater flowing through, making it deeper, cooler, less salty and more full of marine life.

Scanning the terrain in Google Earth, he saw the outline of a network of now dried-up rivers, criss-crossing the Sinai like blood vessels, suggesting this land was once green. He pored over weather models and ecological studies and started to see connections.

He could use the sediments dredged from Lake Bardawil to help regreen the surrounding area. “They are salty but they hold very many nutrients and minerals, which you need to start restoring the land,” he said.

He would start with the wetlands around the lake, expanding them to lure the birds and fish.

Then, he would go higher into the region’s mountains, pumping in the lake’s sediments and layering them to create soils where they could grow different varieties of salt-tolerant plants. These would help revitalize the soils, van der Hoeven said, reducing salt levels and making the land able to support a larger array of plants.

Van der Hoeven’s central idea is that adding vegetation to the landscape will mean more evaporation, more clouds forming and more rain falling. It could even change the winds, as greening the region can bring back moisture-laden flows of air, he said.

🔗 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/08/climate/regreen-desert-sinai-egypt/index.html

🇺🇦❌🇷🇺📸 — Photo from the damaged cars