The Sahara Forest Project: Fights off Desertification in the Sahara

You can’t hide under a rock to escape climate change. It affects every country and continent in all corners of the Earth, and it’s on the rise. People are doing all that they can to fight this increasing danger to the world’s renewable resources and they’re using the driest places on Earth to do so! The Sahara Forest Project (SFP) is fighting desertification by “using what we have enough of; deserts, saltwater, and carbon dioxide, to produce what we need more of; freshwater, food, and clean energy.”

According to a recent report by NASA, the MENA region has recently experienced one of its worst droughts of all time, and on the World Day for Combating Desertification, June 17th of 2016, The Sahara Project Company was invited to a UN meeting organized by the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture (GACSA) in Rome to introduce new ideas on how to undo the damage done to the Earth. They have become the 130th member to join the Alliance in the global battle to move the world of agriculture into a more climate smart direction.

The SFP is using several different methods to make this change. These include using saltwater to cool year-round greenhouses for the production of food and biomass, desalinating saltwater to produce freshwater and salt, using solar power to generate electricity and heat and using evaporation hedges for establishing outside vegetation. Several areas of the Middle East ,such as Qatar and Tunisia, are already taking steps to join this battle.

It might sound a bit complicated but it’s actually pretty straightforward. According to SFP, these new technologies and ideas will “annually produce 34,000 tons of vegetables, employ over 800 people, export 155 gigawatt hours of electricity and sequester more than 8,250 tons of carbon dioxide”.

Join the battle now to save the world!

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