This says the humidity of the Sahara desert is 25%. I wonder if you could devise some kind of system to collect water from the air? (Taking advantage of the big difference in day and night temperatures) https://saharadesertinfo.weebly.com/humidity.html
Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
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Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#32Sounds like they need a little Permaculture… https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/12/11/greening-the-des... The video above is a followup (6 years later) to greening a section of the desert in 2003.
Permaculture don't work with modern tools, it works well in your garden, but require so much labor that you are economically doomed at scale.
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evaporate the brine and sell it as artisanal sea salts?
Already there is a backlash against sea salt in the artisanal-product-buying community because it has more microplastics than certain mined sources.
This sounds very interesting. Do you have sources for more reading on this?
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#34It's not clear to me what the source of water is relative to the size of the forest, because IIUC, in dry regions like Egypt (and California, Israel, etc), unless you use drip-irrigation with targeted crops (which won't grow a forest), agriculture requires a huge amount of water compared to domestic water consumption, so the wastewater stream from the latter intuitively can't be nearly enough to support a forest. Per…
That's the current forest that was started in 98. The one that they're starting now is 100 million hectares (1 million sq km).
Have you got any English source for this?
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#35It's not clear to me what the source of water is relative to the size of the forest, because IIUC, in dry regions like Egypt (and California, Israel, etc), unless you use drip-irrigation with targeted crops (which won't grow a forest), agriculture requires a huge amount of water compared to domestic water consumption, so the wastewater stream from the latter intuitively can't be nearly enough to support a forest. Per…
Your water needs might drop significantly once the forest is established. Depending on the trees, the established canopy might drop the evaporative losses dramatically.
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#36Seed Balls Kenya is another reforestation initiative that looks impressive. They recycle charcoal dust to not only form a protective shell around seeds embed within it but also provide necessary nutrition when those are planted in degenerate areas. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44044267 http://www.seedballskenya.com/
I really love this idea. There's a part of me that wants to take this idea of biochar seedballs to support reforestation elsewhere. I live in the PNW, and it would be really interesting to see what it would take to convert lumber scrap/timber waste into biochar/syngas, produce energy from the syngas, and use the biochar to support planting trees (and possibly sequester some of it as well.)
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#37checkout the actual forest in Google Maps[1]. If you check the historical imagery in Google Earth Pro, you'll see that sometimes between the end of 2017 and the start of 2018 most of the trees kinda disappeared. I dunno if the forest was cut down or if they just stopped watering it, but its pretty much gone now
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#38Less than 500 acres planted using sewege water from cities. The rest (planting millions of acres of forest) is just a wishlist and the article is short on details.
Yishan Wong (ex Reddit CEO) is working on desalination via solar power that sounds promising: https://www.terraformation.com/blog/our-project-in-hawaii
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#39There's a better way to do it.. Trees can be planted in deserts without irrigation using technology developed by a Dutch company called Groasis [0]. They have also recently come up with a new version of their Waterboxx that can use any kind of wastewater to plant trees, even sea water. [1] Looks like it works via solar condensation which then wicks into the soil so the roots can follow it down to the deeper capillary water ~3 meters below. So no need for drip irrigation.
This new water filter box will come in handy for ongoing restoration projects in the Galapagos Islands etc where fresh water is unavailable. Will make a post for it when more information becomes available.
Re: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert using wastewater
#40Sounds like they need a little Permaculture… https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/12/11/greening-the-des... The video above is a followup (6 years later) to greening a section of the desert in 2003.
Permaculture don't work with modern tools, it works well in your garden, but require so much labor that you are economically doomed at scale.
That true for now, but building better tools solves a great many problems.