Flying into Egypt in early February to make the most important presentation of
his life, Ties van der Hoeven prepared by listening to the podcast
– the story of how Nasa accomplished the lunar landings. The mission he was
discussing with the Egyptian government was more earthbound in nature, but every
bit as ambitious. It could even represent a giant leap for mankind.
It sounds impossibly far-fetched, but not only is the Weather Makers’ plan
perfectly feasible, they insist, it is precisely the type of project humanity
should be getting its head around right now. In recent years, discussion about
the climate crisis has predominantly focused on fossil fuels and greenhouse
gases; now, we’re coming to realise that the other side of that coin is
protecting and replenishing the natural world.
There is no better
mechanism for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than nature, but in
the past 5,000 years, human activity has
by an estimated 50%, and destroyed or degraded 70% of the world’s forests. As UN
secretary general
: “Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means
human action can help to solve it.”
The Weather Makers know this very well: their origins are in dredging, one of
the heaviest industries there is. Over the past few centuries, dredging has
helped humans alter the face of the planet on ever-greater scales. Trained as a
morphological engineer, Van der Hoeven has spent the past decade in the
industry, working on projects across the world, including
, whose creation involved large-scale dredging and land reclamation.
He got
sucked into the expat lifestyle there, he admits: drinking, eating, partying, “I
lost a little bit of my soul.” Returning to the Netherlands in 2008,
he began to reexamine his own profession: “What I could see is that the dredging
industry had so much potential; we were just misusing it.”
Working for the Belgian company Deme, he devised a new method of dredging that
was both more eco-friendly and more efficient. He used inexpensive sensors to
model maritime conditions in real time – waves, currents, tides – so as to
determine more precisely where and when it was safe to work. Trialling the
system, he won over sceptical colleagues by living on the vessel with them, even
cooking meals. Head office was also convinced when his technique saved a small
fortune.
In January 2016, Van der Hoeven was contacted by Deme’s Egyptian representative,
Malik Boukebbous, who had been asked by the Egyptian government to look into
restoring Lake Bardawil, a lagoon on the north coast of the Sinai. The lake was
once 20 to 40 metres deep, but today is just a few metres deep. Dredging the
lake and cutting channels to allow more water in from the Mediterranean would
make it deeper, cooler and less salty – all of which would boost fish stocks.
But Van der Hoeven did not want to stop there. “If I feel I’m on the right
track, it’s difficult for people to distract me,” he says. He began looking at
the Sinai peninsula in more detail: its history, weather patterns, geology,
tides, plant and animal life, even religious texts. He took himself off other
projects and spent long hours in his apartment surrounded by charts, maps,
books, sketched diagrams. “People were afraid for me because I was forgetting
myself. My friends were cooking for me.” The deeper he looked, the more
potential he saw.
There is evidence that
the Sinai once was
green
– as recently as
4,500 to 8,000 years ago. Cave paintings found there depict trees and plants. Records in the
1,500-year-old Saint Catherine’s monastery, near Mount Sinai, tally harvests of
wood. Satellite images reveal a network of rivers flowing from the mountains in
the south towards the Mediterranean.
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The Sinai peninsula today, and how it could look after
regreening. Composite: The Weather Makers
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What turned the Sinai into a desert was, most likely, human activity. Wherever
they settle, humans tend to chop down trees and clear land. This loss of
vegetation affects the land’s ability to retain moisture. Grazing animals
trample and consume plants when they try to grow back. The soil loses its
structure and is washed away – hence the silt in Lake Bardawil.
Van
der Hoeven calculated the lake contained about 2.5bn cubic metres of silt. If
one were to restore the Sinai, this vast reserve of nutrient-rich material was
exactly what would be needed. “It became clear we had a massive opportunity,” he
says. “It wasn’t the solution to a single problem; it was the solution to
all the problems.”
By this stage, Van der Hoeven and Deme agreed that he would be best off working
as a separate entity, so in 2017 he founded the Weather Makers with two friends:
Gijs Bosman and Maddie Akkermans. Both appear to be steadying influences.
Bosman, a project manager at Dutch engineering firm
Royal HaskoningDHV
and a friend since student days, had the ability to translate Van der Hoeven’s
grand vision into actionable technical detail.
Akkermans has a
background in finance and economics. “Ties said, ‘I’m too chaotic. So I can’t do
this alone,’” she says. “Having someone like me who could tell him the truth and
keep him on track gave him the confidence to start a company.”
They consulted with experts across disciplines, in particular a handful of
veterans who have been ploughing the eco-restoration furrow for decades. Van der
Hoeven calls them his “Jedi”. The first of these is John D Liu, a
Chinese-American ecologist with a background in broadcasting. Restoring a
landscape as large and as degraded as the Sinai sounds like science fiction, but
it has been done before.
While Van der Hoeven was immersed in his
research, a friend implored him to watch
a documentary called Green Gold, which Liu had made for Dutch television in 2012. It chronicles the story of
the Loess plateau, an area of northern China almost the size of France. In 1994,
Liu, who was working as a television journalist in Beijing, was asked by the
World Bank to film the start of an ambitious restoration project, led by a
pioneering Chinese scientist, Li Rui.
At that time, the Loess
plateau was much like the Sinai: a dry, barren, heavily eroded landscape. The
soil was washing away and silting up the Yellow river. Farmers could barely grow
any crops. The plan to restore it was huge in scale but relatively low tech:
planting trees on the hilltops; terracing the steep slopes (by hand); adding
organic material to the soil; controlling grazing animals; retaining water.
The transformation has been astonishing. Within 20 years, the
deserts of the Loess plateau became green valleys and productive farmland, as
Green Gold documents. “I watched it 35 times in a row,” says Van der Hoeven.
“Seeing that, I thought, ‘Let’s go for it!’”
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Ties van der Hoeven: ‘If we want to do something about global
warming, we have to do something about deserts.’
Photograph: Judith Jockel/The Guardian
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The Loess plateau project was also a turning point for Liu, he says – away from
broadcasting and towards ecosystem restoration: “You start to see that
everything is connected. It’s almost like you’re in the Matrix.”
Despite his Jedi status, 68-year-old Liu is easygoing and
conversational, more midwestern ex-hippy than cryptic Zen master. Since 2009, he
has been an ambassador for
Commonland, a Dutch nonprofit, and an adviser to
Ecosystem Restoration Camps
– a global network of hands-on, volunteer communities.
After watching Green Gold, the Weather Makers practically burst into
Commonland’s Amsterdam headquarters to share their plans. “They were not going
to be denied!” Liu recalls. “I said, ‘We have to work with these people, because
this is the most audacious thesis I’ve ever seen.’”
Liu brought Van der Hoeven to China to see the Loess plateau first-hand. “To be
in a place that had been essentially a desert where now it’s raining cats and
dogs, and it’s not flooding, because it’s being infiltrated and retained in the
system – it was all just so impressive to him.”
Through Liu, Van der Hoeven met another Jedi: Prof Millán Millán, a Spanish
meteorologist. In the 1990s, Millán began investigating the disappearance of
summer storms in eastern Spain for the European commission.
“What I found is that the loss is directly linked to the building up
of coastal areas,” he says.
Rainfall in the region comes almost
entirely from Mediterranean sea breezes. However, the breeze alone doesn’t carry
enough water vapour to create a storm inland; it needs to pick up extra
moisture, which it used to do from the marshes and wetlands along the coast.
Over the past two centuries, however, these wetlands have been built
on or converted to farming land. No additional moisture; no more storms. “Once
you take too much vegetation out, it leads to desertification very quickly,”
says Millán.
Such changes do not just affect the weather at a local level, Millán discovered:
“The water vapour that doesn’t precipitate over the mountains goes back to the
Mediterranean and accumulates in layers for about four or five days, and then it
goes somewhere else: central Europe.” In other words, building on the Spanish
coast was creating floods in Germany.
Millán’s findings have gone
largely unheeded by the European commission, he says. Now 79 and retired, he
speaks with the gentle weariness of a long-ignored expert: “My criticism to them
was: the old township barber would pull your teeth with pliers. It hurt, but it
was effective. You’re still using those procedures, but you could save all your
teeth.”
Millán’s research and Liu’s experience in the Loess plateau arrived at
essentially the same conclusion. Chop down the trees, destroy the ecosystem, and
the rains disappear; restore the ecosystem, make a wetter landscape, and the
rains come back. Millán distilled his work down to a simple maxim: “Water begets
water, soil is the womb, vegetation is the midwife.”
Desertification and climate change is happening so fast, we need action on
the ground. Enough seminars, talks, talks, talks
Regreening the Sinai is to some extent a question of restarting that “water
begets water” feedback loop. After restoring Lake Bardawil, the second phase is
to expand and restore the wetlands around it so as to evaporate more moisture
and increase biodiversity. The Sinai coast is already a major global
crossing point for migratory birds; restored wetlands would encourage more birds, which would add fertility and
new plant species.
When it comes to restoring inland areas of the Sinai, there is another
challenge: fresh water. This is where another Jedi came into play: John Todd, a
mild-mannered marine biologist and a pioneer in ecological design.
In the 1970s, frustrated by the narrowness of academia, Todd
established the
New Alchemy Institute, an alternative research community in Massachusetts dedicated to sustainable
living. One of his innovations was the “eco machine” – a low-tech installation
consisting of clear-sided water barrels covered by a greenhouse.
“An eco machine is basically a living technology,” Todd explains. The principle
is that water flows from one barrel to the next, and each barrel contains a mini
ecosystem: algae, plants, bacteria, fungi, worms, insects, fish; like a series
of manmade ponds. As the water flows, it becomes cleaner and cleaner.
“You could design one that would treat toxic waste or sewage, or you
could design one to grow food. They are solar-driven, and have within them a
very large amount of biodiversity – in a sense, they reflect the aggregate
experience of life on Earth over the last 3.5bn years.” In the Sinai, eco
machines would be used to grow plants and to produce fresh water.
Last autumn, the Weather Makers built their own eco machine on a pig farm on the
outskirts of the Dutch city of s’-Hertogenbosch, where they are based. For the
first step in a plan to change the world, it is not exactly prepossessing. It
looks like a standard agricultural polytunnel.
On a cold, drizzly
day, Weather Maker Pieter van Hout gives me a virtual tour. Inside the
greenhouse are six clear-sided barrels filled with water of various shades of
green and brown. In some of the tanks is leaf litter and dead plant material.
Van Hout points out the brown algae growing on the sides:
phytoplankton, the basis of the food web, which feeds life further up the chain:
insects, snails and, in one tank, fish (in the Sinai these would be edible
tilapia).
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The Weather Makers, from left, in their eco machine: Eduardo Vias
Torres, Pieter van Hout, Maarten Lanters, Ties van der Hoeven,
Maddie Akkermans, Gijs Bosman, Mohammed Nawlo. Photograph: Judith Jockel/The Guardian
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Some water evaporates from the barrels and condenses on the inside skin of the
greenhouse, where it is collected by a system of gutters. Even on a cold day in
the Netherlands, there is a constant trickle into a container on the ground.
In the heat of the Sinai, the cycle would run much faster, says Van
Hout. The water feeding the eco machine would be salt water, but the water that
condenses inside would be fresh water, which can then be used to irrigate
plants. If the structure is designed correctly, one would only need to drum on
the outside to create an artificial “rain” inside.
When the plants
and the soil inside the greenhouse reach a certain maturity, they become
self-sustaining. The greenhouse can then be removed and the process repeated in
a different spot. “The idea is that you may have 100 of these structures,” says
John Todd. “And they’re spending five years in one site and then they’re moved,
so these little ecologies are left behind.”
In the Sinai, the sediment from Lake Bardawil would be pumped up to the hills,
50km inland, where it would then trickle back down through a network of eco
machines. The saltiness of the sediment is actually an asset, says Van Hout, in
that it has preserved all the nutrients. Flushing them through the eco machines
will “reactivate” them.
Around the water tanks, they are now testing
to see which salt-tolerant plant species, or halophytes, grow best. Van Hout
proudly points out a stack of white plastic tubs containing silt freshly scooped
from the bottom of Lake Bardawil. “This is what ecosystem restoration looks like
in real life,” he laughs, “buckets of very expensive mud.”
Estimates of how much difference a regreened Sinai could make are hard to
quantify. In terms of carbon sequestration, it would doubtless be “billions of
tons”, says Van der Hoeven. But such metrics are not always helpful: if you
convert atmospheric carbon into, say, phytoplankton, what happens when a fish
eats that phytoplankton? Or when a bigger fish eats that fish?
There are certain points in this world where, if we accumulate our joint
energy, we can make a big difference
Another useful measure could be global temperature. In addition to sequestering
carbon, green areas also help cool the planet.
Deserts
are heat producers, reflecting around 60% to 70% of the solar energy that falls
on them straight back into the atmosphere. In areas covered by vegetation, much
of that solar energy is instead used in evapotranspiration: the process of
condensation and evaporation by which water moves between plants and the
atmosphere.
“If vegetation comes back, you increase cover, you
reduce temperature, you reduce solar reflection, you start creating a stable
climate,” says Van der Hoeven. “If we want to do something about global warming,
we have to do something about deserts.”
At present, the hot Sinai acts as a “vacuum cleaner”, drawing moist air from the
Mediterranean and funnelling it towards the Indian Ocean. A cooler Sinai would
mean less of that moisture being “lost”. Instead, it would fall as rain across
the Middle East and north
Africa, thus boosting the entire region’s natural potential. Van der Hoeven describes
the Sinai peninsula as an “acupuncture point”: “There are certain points in this
world where, if we accumulate our joint energy, we can make a big difference.”
The Sinai is also an acupuncture point geopolitically, however. Post-Arab
spring, the region has become a battle zone between Egyptian security forces and
Islamist insurgents. There have been numerous terrorist incidents:
the bombing of a Russian airliner
in 2015 killed 224 people;
an attack on a Sufi mosque
in 2017 killed more than 300 worshippers.
Northern Sinai is
currently a no-go area to outsiders, controlled by the military, and plagued by
poverty, terrorism and human rights abuses. Since 2018 the military has
restricted access to Lake Bardawil for local fishermen to just a few months a
year, says Ahmed Salem, founder of the UK-based
Sinai Foundation for Human Rights.
“There’s a lot of suffering,” he says, “because they don’t have
any other way to earn money and feed their families.” A restored landscape would
bring tangible benefits to locals, says Salem, but it all depends on the
president,
Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. “If Sisi really wants to help them [the Weather Makers], it will be OK for
them because he’s like a god in Egypt. But if he doesn’t, they will fail.”
But the Sisi government seems to have recognised that ecosystem regeneration
could fix many problems at once: food security, poverty, political stability,
climate goals, as well as the potential for a green project of international
renown. The government is close to signing contracts for the first phase of the
restoration plan, which covers the dredging of Lake Bardawil. Subsequent phases
may well require financial support from external bodies such as the EU.
As outsiders, the Weather Makers are aware their plan will require local
support, cooperation and labour. Because of the military restrictions, none of
them has visited Lake Bardawil, although they have forged links with an
organic farm in southern Sinai named Habiba.
Habiba was established in 1994, by Maged El Said, a charismatic,
Cairo-born tour operator who fell in love with the region. Originally it was a
beach resort, but in 2007 El Said branched into organic farming, and Habiba now
connects other farms, local Bedouin tribes and academic institutions.
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The Weather Makers have forged links with Habiba organic farm in
southern Sinai. Photograph: Courtesy of Maged El Said
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El Said has some reservations about the Weather Makers’ plan: “It’s a big shiny
project, but also you’re drastically changing the environment, the flora and
fauna. I don’t know if there will be side-effects.”
But in terms of
the larger mission, they are very much aligned: “We are all in the same boat.
Desertification and climate change is happening so fast, so we need action on
the ground. Enough of workshops, enough seminars, talks, talks, talks.”
On a global level, the tide is turning in the Weather Makers’ direction.
Discussions about regreening, reforestation and rewilding have
been growing in volume and urgency, boosted by high-profile advocates such as
Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough and British ecologist Thomas Crowther, who
made headlines in 2019 with research suggesting the climate crisis could be
solved by
planting 1tn trees
(he later acknowledged it was not quite that simple).
This year marks the beginning of the
United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, “a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems around the
world”. The UN hopes to
restore 350m hectares of land by 2030, which could remove an additional 13 to 26 gigatons of carbon from the
atmosphere.
After decades of compartmentalising environmental issues
and missing its own targets, the UN, too, has come to realise that the only
viable solution is to do it all at once. It particularly wants to rally younger
people to the cause; its social media campaigns carry a “generation restoration”
hashtag. “Ecosystem restoration is not a technical challenge; it’s a social
challenge,” says Tim Christophersen, head of the Nature for Climate branch at
the
UN Environment Programme.
Nations and corporations are also making ever more ambitious commitments to
regreening, even if they are struggling to live up to them. The UK, for example,
plans to create
30,000 hectares of woodland a year by 2025. India has pledged to
restore 26m hectares of degraded land by 2030. Africa’s
Great Green Wall, “the world’s largest ecosystem restoration project”, aims to plant an 8,000km
line of trees across the Sahara Desert, from Senegal to Djibouti (14 years on,
it is only around 15% complete).
Meanwhile, green companies are
taking root,
such as Ecosia, the Berlin-based search engine, which to date has planted more than 120m
trees around the world.
“The main challenge,” Christophersen says, “is the lack of human imagination;
our inability to see a different future because we’re staring down this
dystopian path of pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss. But the
collective awareness that we are in this together is a huge opportunity.
People don’t have a problem imagining what a four-lane highway would
look like. But to imagine a restored landscape of over a million hectares –
nobody knows what that would look like because it hasn’t really been done
before.”
Van der Hoeven would agree. He cites
Yuval Noah Hariri’s book Sapiens, which argues that humans prevailed because of our ability to share
information, ideas, stories: “We were able to believe in a myth – in something
which was not there yet.”
Regreening the Sinai is presently little more than a myth, just as the Apollo
missions once were; 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 is to happen.
It could come to be a turning point – an acupuncture point: “We’re
not going to change humanity by saying, ‘Everything has to be less,’” says Van
der Hoeven. “No, we have to do
more of the
good things. Why
don’t we come together and do something in a positive way?”
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