Khaki sand surrounds the shores of Lake Bardawil on the northern edge of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The blue water is a marked contrast against the arid landscape. Pieter van Hout knows the region well as he steps out of his research trailer in the Netherlands to check on a collection of plants inside a controlled dome. He’s part of a group called The Weather Makers.
“We really look at ‘weather’ making as restoring the biosphere, so that we also restore the hydrological cycles,” van Hout says. “We want to increase the biosphere biomass, which increases biomass underground, which improves soil health, which increases infiltration and water retention, which adds to evaporation, condensation and eventually rain.”
They are currently focused on regenerating the ecosystem along Lake Bardawil and ultimately hoping to restore the water cycle across the nearly barren Sinai.
“Back in the day, 4,000 to 8,000 years ago, it used to be quite a green oasis,” van Hout says. “Returning it starts with Lake Bardawil, which used to be on average 20 to 40 meters deep and is now less than 1.5 meters.”
He says their plan, if the Egyptians approve, is to dredge the lake of the sediments flushed into the lagoon from the nearby mountainsides, desalinate those soils with plants and freshwater in hopes of returning that soil to the land where plants can once again start to grow.
“If you have the right amount of vegetation, that actually makes sure that you have enough moisture in the air, which in the Sinai is a third more than now,” van Hout explains. “Then you’ll have enough water in the air to actually condensate and come down as precipitation.”
Essentially the goal is to restart, kickstart and jumpstart the region’s natural water cycles by improving the soil health, water infiltration and adding living plants that will evaporate moisture into the air.
“In specific spots in the Sinai we can replant trees outside in plant cocoons, a protective shell, which lasts for three years and then degrades, with enough water to feed the roots as they grow toward the groundwater,” van Hout says . “In the right areas, if you have enough vegetation, you should have cloud formation.”
Clues from the past point to a region with a vast watershed of rivers and tributaries. A beating heart once home to jungles full of tropical plants and animals. The Weather Makers believe the Sinai can be that again.
Monumental Management
Regreening a desert and restoring the hydrological cycle of a now arid region is not a simple fix.
“In order to make that happen it’s really got to be a full management of the whole hydrologic cycle, and you need a mechanism in place to retain and then recycle that moisture,” says Eric Snodgrass, meteorologist with Nutrien. “That’s very difficult to do and it often requires some pretty amazing geoengineering in order to make that occur.”
The Weather Makers point to the Loess Plateau in China. Once brown and degraded, it’s now a lush green valley where plants and animals thrive. Although it took working closely with the area’s farmers.
“There were a lot of farmers there and many of them had goats,” van Hout explains. “Everything that was green was eaten by the goats and so the farmers had to be convinced to keep the goats inside while they were regreening.”
He says that required financial assistance and education for farmers in the region while the regreening process took place.
Van Hout points to another example: Costa Rica. The nation went from plantations to jungle in a matter of 40 years.
“The proposition is not that the entire planet can be green,” says van Hout. “It’s mainly about degraded landscapes because those are the areas you can influence and regenerate.”
Restored Not Reinvented
Intentional or not, humans have helped shape today’s weather patterns through their quest to tame the wild. From using trees to build cities or ships to tapping water sources for farming and feeding a planet of 8 billion, technology has led to growth and innovation. Scientists and engineers are wondering if it can lead us back.
“If we want it, it can happen quite fast,” van Hout says. “Nature is very resilient and can come back very quickly.”
Van Hout, who has worked with a farmer’s association in the Netherlands in the past, says their approach is what he would consider holistic. Farmers work with nature and in turn, nature helps to deliver yield.
“Farmers today get money for how much they produce in one field,” he says. “I personally think we should also pay farmers for the quality of the food that they produce.”
He says focusing more on quality and less on quantity allows room for farmers to partner with nature in new and different ways.
“Farmers don’t always earn enough to make mistakes in their fields and a crop failure can be a business failure,” van Hout says . “Hopefully though, farmers can agree if you take care of the soil you will have better yields, you’ll have to irrigate less, use fewer nutrients, etc. It’s not just about planting more trees.”
The Weather Makers will be taking their Sinai Initiative to COP27, the UN climate conference scheduled for November of 2022.
