In China, scientists have turned a large area of ​​dry land into a lush oasis. Now, a group of maverick engineers want to do the same for Sinai

Last modified on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 at 09.43 EDT

F lay in Egypt in early February to give the most important speech of his life. Ties van der Hoeven prepared by listening to the podcast 13 Minutes To The Moon-a podcast that tells the story of how NASA completed the moon landing. The task he is discussing with the Egyptian government is more grounded in nature, but equally ambitious. It can even represent a huge leap for mankind.

Van der Hoeven is the co-founder of Weather Makers, a Dutch company of "integrated engineers" that plans to regreen the Sinai Peninsula, the small triangle connecting Egypt and Asia. Weather Makers believes that within a few decades, the Sinai Peninsula can transform from a hot, dry, barren desert into a green paradise full of vitality: forests, wetlands, farmland, and wildlife. Weather Makers believes that the re-greening of the Sinai Peninsula will change the local weather patterns, and even change the wind direction, bringing more rainfall-hence the name.

"If anyone doubts whether the Sinai Peninsula can be re-greened," Van der Hoeven said to Egyptian representatives, various academics, ministerial representatives, and high-level military officials, "then you must understand that moon landings were considered unrealistic. They are here. At the beginning, they did not develop a complete and detailed road map, but they had a vision. They did it step by step."

If not persuasive, van der Hoeven is nothing. The 40-year-old engineer is talkative, energetic, and down-to-earth. His ideas run through disciplines ranging from morphology to esoteric mysticism, and he often threatens to quit. But he is very concerned about the future. "The world is ready for regenerative change," he said. "In the long run, this will completely change our behavior as a species. This will be a big step for mankind."

This may not sound far-fetched, but they insist that the weather maker’s plan is not only completely feasible, but that this is the type of project that humans should now consider. In recent years, discussions about the climate crisis have focused on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases; now, we are beginning to realize that the other side of the coin is to protect and replenish the natural world. There is no better mechanism to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than nature, but in the past 5000 years, human activities have reduced the total biomass of the earth by about 50% and destroyed or degraded 70% of the world’s forests. As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last year: "Human activity is the source of our chaos. But it means that human action can help resolve it."

Weather Makers knows this very well: they originated in the dredging industry, which is one of the heaviest industries there. In the past few centuries, dredging has helped humans change the face of the earth on a larger scale. Van der Hoeven is trained as a morphological engineer and has been working in the industry for the past ten years, working on projects around the world, including the artificial island of Dubai, the creation of which involves large-scale dredging and land reclamation. He was attracted by the expatriate lifestyle there. He admitted: drinking, eating, partying, "I lost a bit of my soul." After returning to the Netherlands in 2008, he began to re-examine his career: "What I saw was, The dredging industry has great potential; we are just abusing it."

He worked for the Belgian company Deme and devised a new method of dredging that was more environmentally friendly and more efficient. He uses cheap sensors to simulate maritime conditions in real time—waves, ocean currents, tides—in order to more accurately determine when and where it is safe to work. While experimenting with the system, he lived on the boat with his skeptical colleagues and even cooked meals, thus winning their support. When his technology saved a fortune, the headquarters was also persuaded.

In January 2016, Deme’s Egyptian representative, Malik Boukebbous, contacted Van der Hoeven, and the Egyptian government asked him to study the restoration of Lake Badaville, a lagoon on the northern coast of Sinai. The lake used to be 20 to 40 meters deep, but today it is only a few meters deep. Dredging the lake and cutting off channels to allow more water to flow from the Mediterranean will make the lake deeper, cooler, and less salty-all of which will increase fish populations.

But Van der Hoeven didn't want to stop there. "If I feel that I am on the right track, it will be difficult for people to distract me," he said. He began to study the Sinai Peninsula in more detail: its history, weather patterns, geology, tides, plant and animal life, and even religious texts. He abandoned other projects and spent a long time in his apartment, surrounded by diagrams, maps, books and sketches. "People are afraid of me because I forgot about myself. My friends are cooking for me." The deeper he sees, the greater the potential he sees.

There is evidence that the Sinai Peninsula was once green between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago. The cave paintings found there depict trees and plants. The 1,500-year-old St. Catherine’s Monastery near Mount Sinai records timber harvests. Satellite images show a network of rivers flowing from the mountains in the south to the Mediterranean.

The reason why the Sinai Peninsula has become a desert is probably due to human activities. No matter where they settle, humans tend to cut trees and clear the land. This loss of vegetation will affect the ability of the land to retain water. Grazing animals trample and consume plants when they try to grow again. The soil loses its structure and is washed away-hence the silt in Lake Badavir. Van der Hoeven calculated that the lake contained approximately 2.5 billion cubic meters of silt. If the Sinai Peninsula is to be repaired, a large amount of nutrient-rich material reserves are exactly what is needed. "Obviously, we have a huge opportunity," he said. "This is not the solution to a single problem; it is the solution to all problems."

At this stage, Van der Hoeven and Deme agreed that it is best for him to work as an independent entity, so in 2017, he founded Weather Makers with his two friends Gijs Bosman and Maddie Akkermans. Both seem to be stable effects. Bosman is the project manager of Royal HaskoningDHV, a Dutch engineering company, and a friend of his student days. He has the ability to translate Van der Hoeven's grand vision into actionable technical details. Akkermans has a background in finance and economics. "The tie said,'I'm too confused. So I can't do this alone,'" she said. "Having someone like me who can tell him the truth and put him on the right track gives him the confidence to start a company."

They consulted interdisciplinary experts, especially the few veterans who have been farming the ecological restoration furrows for decades. Van der Hoeven called them his "jedi." The first of them is John D Liu, a Chinese-American ecologist with a broadcasting background. Restoring a degraded landscape as large as Sinai sounds like science fiction, but someone has done it before. When Van der Hoeven was immersed in his research, a friend begged him to watch a documentary called "Green Gold", which Liu produced for Dutch TV in 2012. It records that northern China is almost equivalent to France. In 1994, Liu, who worked as a TV reporter in Beijing, at the request of the World Bank, filmed the launch of an ambitious restoration project led by pioneering Chinese scientist Li Rui. At that time, the Loess Plateau resembled the Sinai Peninsula: dry, barren, and severely eroded landforms. The mud was washed away and blocked the Yellow River. Farmers can hardly grow any crops. The plan to restore it is large, but the technology is relatively low: planting trees on top of a mountain; steep slopes of terraced fields (manual); adding organic matter to the soil; controlling grazing animals; and retaining water. This transformation is amazing. Within 20 years, the deserts of the Loess Plateau have turned into green valleys and fertile farmland, as recorded by Green Gold. "I watched it 35 times in a row," Van der Hoeven said. "Seeing this, I thought,'Let's go!'"

He said that the Loess Plateau project was also a turning point for Liu-from broadcasting to ecosystem restoration: "You start to see that everything is connected. It's almost like you are in a matrix." Despite being a Jedi, The 68-year-old Liu is easy-going and talkative, more like an ex-Hippie in the Midwest than a mysterious Zen master. Since 2009, he has been an ambassador for Commonland, a Dutch non-profit organization, and a consultant for Ecosystem Restoration Camps, a global network of communities of practical volunteers.

After watching "Green Gold", the weather makers almost rushed into Commonland's Amsterdam headquarters and shared their plans. "They won't be rejected!" Liu recalled. "I said,'We have to work with these people because this is the boldest paper I have ever seen.'"

Mr. Liu brought Van der Hoeven to China and witnessed the Loess Plateau with his own eyes. "In a place that is basically a desert, it is now raining with cats and dogs instead of flooding because it is infiltrated and kept in the system-all this is so impressive to him."

Through Liu, van der Hoeven met another Jedi: Spanish meteorologist Professor Milan Milan. In the 1990s, Milan began investigating the disappearance of summer storms in eastern Spain for the European Commission. "I found that the loss is directly related to the construction of coastal areas," he said. The rainfall in this area comes almost entirely from the Mediterranean sea breeze. However, the breeze alone cannot carry enough water vapor to create storms inland. It needs to absorb extra water, and it used to absorb water from coastal swamps and wetlands. However, in the past two centuries, these wetlands have been established or converted into arable land. No extra moisture; no more storms. "Once you remove too much vegetation, it will quickly lead to desertification," Milan said.

Millán found that such a change will not only affect the local weather: "The water vapor that has not settled on the mountain will return to the Mediterranean, and it will layer up in about four or five days, and then it will flow to other places.: Central Europe. In other words, buildings on the Spanish coast are causing floods in Germany. He said that the results of Milan's investigation basically did not attract the attention of the European Commission. Retired at the age of 79, he spoke with the gentle tiredness of a long-ignored expert: "My criticism of them is that the fellow barber will use pliers to extract your teeth. It hurts, but it works. You are still there. Use those procedures, but you can save your teeth."

Millán's research and Liu's experience in the Loess Plateau have reached basically the same conclusions. Cut down trees, destroy the ecosystem, and the rain disappears; restore the ecosystem to create a more humid landscape, and the rain returns. Millán distilled his work into a simple motto: "Aquatic water, soil is the uterus, and plants are midwives."

Re-greening the Sinai Peninsula is to some extent a question of restarting the "aquatic water" feedback loop. After the restoration of Lake Badaville, the second stage is to expand and restore the surrounding wetlands to evaporate more water and increase biodiversity. The Sinai coast is already a major transit point for migratory birds worldwide; the restored wetlands will encourage more birds, which will increase fertility and new plant species.

In restoring the interior of the Sinai Peninsula, there is another challenge: fresh water. This is where another Jedi comes into play: John Todd, a gentle marine biologist and pioneer of ecological design. In the 1970s, frustrated by the narrowness of academia, Todd established the New Alchemy Institute in Massachusetts, an alternative research community dedicated to sustainable living. One of his innovations is the "ecological machine"-a low-tech device consisting of a transparent bucket covered by a greenhouse.

"The ecological machine is basically a living technology," Todd explained. The principle is that water flows from one bucket to another. Each bucket contains a micro-ecosystem: algae, plants, bacteria, fungi, worms, insects, fish; like a series of artificial ponds. As the water flows, it becomes cleaner and cleaner. "You can design a device to treat toxic waste or sewage, or you can design a device to grow food. They are powered by solar energy and have a lot of biodiversity-in a sense, they reflect The sum of life on Earth for the past 3.5 billion years." In Sinai Peninsula, ecological machines will be used to grow plants and produce fresh water.

Last fall, Weather Makers built their own ecological machine on a pig farm on the outskirts of their Dutch city s'-Hertogenbosch. For the first step of a plan to change the world, it is not entirely attractive. It looks like a standard agricultural complex tunnel. On a cold, drizzling day, meteorologist Pieter van Hout gave me a virtual tour. There are six transparent buckets in the greenhouse, which are filled with various shades of green and brown water. In some tanks are fallen leaves and dead plant material. Van Hout points to the brown algae that grow on both sides: phytoplankton, the basis of the food web, which provides food for the further upstream of the life chain: insects, snails and fish in a tank (in Sinai, these are edible tilapia ).

Some water evaporates from the bucket and condenses on the inner skin of the greenhouse, where it is collected by a drainage system. Even on cold days in the Netherlands, the containers on the ground will keep dripping water. Van Hout said that in the high temperatures of the Sinai Peninsula, the cycle will run faster. The water supplied to the ecological machine will be salt water, but the water condensed inside will be fresh water, which can then be used to irrigate plants. If the structure is properly designed, people only need to beat the drum outside to create artificial "rain" inside. When the plants and soil in the greenhouse reach a certain degree of maturity, they will maintain themselves. You can then remove the greenhouse and repeat the process at different locations. "The idea is that you might have 100 such structures," John Todd said. "They stayed in one location for five years, and then they moved, so these little ecology were left behind."

In the Sinai Peninsula, sediments from Lake Bardawil will be pumped to hills 50 kilometers inland, and then trickle down through a network of ecological machines. Van Hout said that the saltiness of the sediment is actually an asset because it retains all the nutrients. Flushing them through the ecological machine will "reactivate" them. Around the water tank, they are now testing which salt-tolerant or halophyte grows best. Van Haut proudly pointed out a pile of white plastic buckets containing silt that had just been dug from the bottom of Lake Badaville. "This is what the restoration of the ecosystem looks like in real life," he said with a smile, "a bucket of very expensive mud."

It is difficult to quantify how much difference the Sinai Peninsula after re-greening can make. Van der Hoeven said that in terms of carbon sequestration, it will undoubtedly reach "billions of tons." But these indicators are not always useful: if you convert atmospheric carbon into phytoplankton, what happens when the fish eat the phytoplankton? Or when the bigger fish eats that fish?

The impact of re-greening the desert is the subject of some controversy. Deserts play a vital role in cooling the earth because they reflect up to 30% of the solar radiation that falls on them back into space-a measure called albedo. The area covered by vegetation is darker and has low reflectivity, so the albedo is low (10-15%), which absorbs more sunlight, which may have a warming effect.

In addition, of the remaining 70% of solar radiation that is not reflected in the desert, about two-thirds return to the atmosphere in the form of long-wave radiation; in other words, heat. With almost no clouds or moisture, most of the heat will leave the atmosphere and enter space-another key mechanism for cooling the earth. If the desert is regreened, climate scientists believe that these mechanisms will be affected.

But weather makers say that these objections underestimate the impact of a fully functional biodiversity ecosystem on the earth’s weather and water systems. Ecosystems remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while deserts do not, thus helping to alleviate the greenhouse effect—albeit only temporarily. Secondly, in humid green areas, the solar energy that would have been dissipated into the atmosphere will be converted into evapotranspiration-evaporating water from the landscape-which has a cooling effect, although scientists say that this cooling effect will be released The latent heat offsets when the water vapor condenses elsewhere.

Their plan may not be able to "solve" climate change, but weather makers believe that on a global scale, the restored ecosystem and water cycle will help stabilize the unbalanced weather system originally discovered by Millán Millán. "The climate regulator on earth is the biosphere," Bosman said. "All cycles depend on it. In the past 10,000 years, we have removed more than half of this biosphere."

Currently, the hot Sinai Peninsula acts as a "vacuum cleaner", sucking moist air from the Mediterranean, and then collecting it into the Indian Ocean. The colder Mount Sinai means less water is "lost". Instead, it will land in the Middle East and North Africa like rain, thereby increasing the natural potential of the entire region. Van der Hoeven described the Sinai Peninsula as an "acupuncture point": "In some places in this world, if we accumulate joint energy, we can do a lot."

However, Mount Sinai is also an acupuncture point in geopolitics. After the Arab Spring, the area has become a battlefield between Egyptian security forces and Islamic insurgents. There have been many terrorist incidents: In 2015, a Russian passenger plane bombed and killed 224 people; in 2017, the attack on Sufi mosques caused the death of more than 300 believers. North Sinai is currently a restricted area for outsiders, controlled by the military, and plagued by poverty, terrorism and human rights violations. Ahmed Salem, the founder of the Sinai Human Rights Foundation, based in the United Kingdom, said that since 2018, the military has restricted the access of local fishermen to Lake Badaville to only a few months a year. "There is a lot of pain," he said, "because they have no other way to make money and support their families." Salem said that the restored landscape will bring tangible benefits to the locals, but it all depends on the president. Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. "If Sisi really wants to help them [The Weather Makers], it doesn't matter, because he is like a god in Egypt. But if he doesn't, they will fail."

But the Sisi government seems to have realized that ecosystem regeneration can solve many problems at the same time: food security, poverty, political stability, climate goals, and the potential of internationally renowned green projects. The government is about to sign a contract for the first phase of the restoration plan, which includes the dredging of Lake Badaville. The subsequent stages are likely to require financial support from external institutions such as the European Union.

As an outsider, Weather Makers know that their plan requires local support, cooperation and labor. Due to military restrictions, none of them have been to Lake Badaville, although they have established a connection with an organic farm called Habiba in southern Sinai. Habiba was founded in 1994 by Maged El Said. Maged El Said is a charming Cairo-born tour operator who fell in love with the area. Initially it was a beach resort, but in 2007, El Said got involved in organic farming, and now Habiba connects other farms, local Bedouin tribes and academic institutions.

El Said has reservations about the Weather Makers plan: "This is a big shiny project, but you are also completely changing the environment, flora and fauna. I don't know if there will be side effects." But in terms of a larger mission , They are very consistent: "We are all in the same boat. Desertification and climate change are happening so fast, so we need to take action on the ground. Enough seminars, enough seminars, lectures, lectures, lectures."

Globally, the trend is shifting in the direction of Weather Makers. Driven by prominent advocates such as Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, and British ecologist Thomas Crowther, discussions about regreening, reforestation and rewilding are increasing, and they are becoming more and more urgent. They made headlines in 2019 Studies have shown that the climate crisis can be solved by planting 1tn trees (he later admitted that this is not so simple).

This year marks the beginning of the United Nations Ecosystem Restoration Decade, which "calls for the protection and restoration of ecosystems around the world." The United Nations hopes to restore 350 million hectares of land by 2030, which can remove an additional 1.3 to 2.6 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere. After decades of dividing environmental issues and failing to achieve its own goals, the United Nations has also begun to realize that the only feasible solution is to complete all the work at once. It especially hopes to unite young people. Its social media activities carry the label "Generation Recovery". "Ecosystem restoration is not a technical challenge; it is a social challenge," said Tim Christopherson, head of the UN Environment Program's Nature Promotion and Climate Division.

Countries and companies are also making increasingly ambitious commitments to re-greening, even if they are working hard to achieve these commitments. For example, the United Kingdom plans to create 30,000 hectares of forest land each year by 2025. India pledged to restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. "The World's Largest Ecosystem Restoration Project" The Great Green Wall of Africa aims to plant 8,000 kilometers of trees from Senegal to Djibouti across the Sahara Desert (14 years have passed, and only about 15% have been completed). At the same time, green companies are taking root, such as the Berlin-based search engine Ecosia, which has so far planted more than 120 million trees worldwide.

"The main challenge," Christopherson said, "is the lack of human imagination; we cannot see a different future because we are staring at the dystopian path of pandemics, climate change, and biodiversity loss. But we are in The collective consciousness together is a huge opportunity. It’s not difficult to imagine what a four-lane highway would look like. But imagine a restored landscape of more than 1 million hectares-no one knows what it will look like, because there hasn’t been before. Really did it."

Van der Hoeven would agree. He cited Yuval Noah Hariri's book "Sapiens", which argued that humans have the upper hand because of our ability to share information, ideas, and stories: "We can Believe in a myth—believe in something that doesn’t exist yet."

The re-greening of the Sinai Peninsula is just a myth at present, just like the Apollo missions; but it now exists in the imagination as a signpost for the future we aspire to. The more it is shared, the more likely it will happen. It may become a turning point-an acupuncture point: "We will not change humanity by saying,'Everything must be reduced'," Van der Hoeven said. "No, we have to do more good things. Why don't we get together and do something in a positive way?"

This article was revised on April 13 and June 11, 2021. Earlier versions said that "deserts are heat generators and reflect about 60% to 70% of the solar energy that falls on them directly back into the atmosphere", and the increased green area will "help cool the earth." This paragraph has been replaced to acknowledge how climate scientists believe that regreening the desert will actually warm the planet. Also added a quote from Gijs Bosman on the importance of the biosphere.