Turning the desert green

Just as the COP 27 meeting was starting, the Egyptian government agreed with a group of Egyptian, Belgian and Dutch engineers to start work on a plan that may not just slow down global warming in the Sinai but actually turn the desert back into a fertile, green place. Does that sound crazy to you? Well, it's the very real dream of Gijs Bosman, one of the Dutch engineers involved. His group is called The Weathermakers.

The team's name comes from the idea that we human beings have been "changing the weather" for thousands of years, not just for the couple of hundred years that our industries which burn coal and oil and gas have speeded up global warming. They see that the climate of the Sinai changed because people began chopping down trees and farming thousands of years ago. The Weathermakers think that they can give Nature a helping hand to put it back the way it was.

Reversing a vicious circle

Gijs and his friends have a lot of experience building huge ports and dykes that control the sea around Holland and that's where this project will start.

At the north end of the Sinai peninsula, where it meets the Mediterranean Sea, there's a shallow, salty lagoon called Lake Bardawil. When people began chopping down trees in Sinai, that led to rich soil being washed down from the hills into the lake. In the end, there was mainly just sand on the hills and the lake was filled up with earth. That also made Sinai hotter, in a way that less and less rain fell. We call that a "vicious circle". And so the Sinai turned into a desert.

Gijs and his team will start digging out the earth from the lake and opening the lake up more to the sea. That will make Lake Bardawil less salty and also cooler. Then they will take the soil they've removed from the lake and spread it on top of the desert sand (after cleverly using plants to remove the salt from the earth). That will let farmers grow more crops, and also allow people to plant trees. All that planting will also help make the area of Sinai near the coast greener and cooler.

Helping Nature heal itself

This will take quite a few years, but Gijs believes that once that happens, Nature will join in, changing what we call the "water cycle" in Sinai. If the coast is greener and cooler, the clouds that come in from the Mediterranean will start cooling and so they will drop more rain on to the Sinai. That will help more plants and trees grow inland. And the greener the Sinai is, the more rain will fall. We call that a "virtuous circle"!

It may take 30 years, Gijs thinks. A similar project in China has already helped to re-green a much larger desert.

It's not the answer to climate change everywhere. But it's good to know that, even when the governments at the COP 27 find it hard to agree on ways to stop climate change, people like Gijs and his friends are not waiting around to put things in place that can fix some of the problem.

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