Can cloud seeding make the UAE's desert green?

How far can Cloud Seeding go?

What is cloud seeding?

In the sprawling deserts of the United Arab Emirates, there are huge areas of greenery emerging amidst the golden sands. This transformation is not some natural phenomenon, it’s by design. It’s called desert greening and, for all the UAE’s opulence, this may be its most valuable investment yet.

The United Nations estimated that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living with absolute water scarcity.

If you don't have water for people, animals, and plant communities, as a nation, you will struggle. Especially in desert countries increasing lack of water due to climate change is resulting in less secure water. And the Middle East is home to 12 of the 17 world’s most “water-stressed countries.”

The UAE receives less than 200 mm of rainfall each year. To put that into context, London soaked up an average of 1,051 mm of rain in 2022, while Singapore was drenched in a whopping 3,012 mm during the same year.

The amount of rain in different countries:

Enough water is essential for the UAE

So, as one can imagine, ensuring enough water for the UAE’s population is a real challenge. To continue to support its increasing development and growing population,

the UAE government invested more than 20 million dollars in research to start a process called cloud seeding.

Cloud seeding enhances the rain in the cloud. The main objective of that is to increase the storage of groundwater.

The consequences of cloud seeding:

• It enhances the rain in the cloud.
• It increases the storage of groundwater.

Cloud seeding was a direct order from His Highness Sheikh Mansour. When did the cloud seeding start?

When was the cloud seeding started?

The start of cloud seeding dates back to late 2000 and early 2001.

We were partnered with the National Atmospheric Research in the U.S. The entire Gulf region could face a 50 percent reduction in water availability per capita by 2050. The UAE has tried to combat desertification, which is no longer productive land because it can't support plant growth.

Statistics

Some statistics about desertification and cloud seeding:

• The Emirate spans over 83,000 square kilometers, and around 80% is desert.
• Approximately 75% of our planet's land is already degraded. These lands have become deserts or are uninhabitable.
• About 12 million hectares of land are lost around the world each year as a direct consequence of drought and desertification.
• The World Bank estimates the Emirates has lost almost 33,000 hectares of land from 2002 to 2018.
• The decrease in arable land is primarily due to land degradation. This impacts over 3 billion people.

Tough situation for people

People that live in desert and dry land ecosystems that cover nearly half of the globe, are particularly vulnerable to the loss of arable land and land degradation. But in the last 50 years, what was once a large desert and a tranquil fishing port has evolved into an urban metropolis.

Long before the skyscrapers and bustling cities, the UAE had a history of planting trees in areas that lacked them, a process called afforestation. So what we're seeing across the world, especially some of the countries that have significant desert systems is efforts to green that desert, which means bringing in trees, and other plant communities to increase, as the initiatives say, the greenness of the deserts.

The country’s late president sought to provide permanent homes for nomadic Bedouins in the parched desert. His dream set the stage for a nation's ambitious endeavor and their leaders knew that trees could help with the fight against desertification.

About two decades ago, the “One Million Trees” initiative was announced by the ruler of Dubai.

The plan was to plant 250 thousand trees every year, in collaboration with the Dubai Police Academy. It wasn’t long before groves of olive, palms, and the resilient ghafs, the national tree of the UAE, painted the once-empty land with life. When you are planting some of those trees, you can dig different holes to capture water and engineer the landscape so those trees that you're bringing in will be able to survive.

And so that's critically important is that it's not only the types of trees that you're bringing in, or in the types of plants you're bringing in for these afforestation projects, but also how you engineer that landscape to be able to receive those plants and that they can survive. A tree nursery for the “One Million Trees” initiative was created, spanning more than 130,000 square meters.

The challenges

But challenges loomed large over green dreams. 'Mall of the World,' a mega shopping center project. It was said that Dubai Holding, the investment vehicle of the Emirates ruler, would require 6.8 billion dollars to build that entertainment district. Could you guess where they wanted to build this mega project? None other than the very land where the tree nursery once thrived. And just like that, the project fell through, and thousands of trees withered away and died.

But in January 2015, the UAE Cabinet approved the UAE Green Agenda for 2030, aimed at building a green economy. Plants are this miracle worker in terms of pulling carbon dioxide. So you see a lot of engineering approaches to think about how we pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, but plants by themselves are one of the best tools that we have. The UAE is not alone in its quest to green the desert.

China

Other countries like China have followed the same path, as seen in a desert called Kubuqi in the country’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. In 1988, a Chinese company partnered with the Beijing government to build solar farms and other renewable energy projects. Three decades later third of Kubuqi is green, preventing dunes from encroaching on farms.

The United Nations Environment Programme estimated the Kubuqi project cost 1.8 billion dollars over 50 years.

Beijing is a proponent of cloud-seeding technology. They used it to manipulate the weather to protect farming areas and to guarantee clear skies for key events. The UAE performs around 1,000 hours of cloud seeding to enhance rainfall in just one year. And it’s all controlled out of this building, the National Center of Meteorology in Abu Dhabi, where they track the whole process.

Interviews

A cloud seeding expert explains how the seeding process works:

We wait for the forecast when we have a good chance for clouds, we send the aircraft to that location. It goes under the cloud, in the first stage of the cloud there is a good updraft at that time, it can release all the salt and, with a good updraft, it goes inside the cloud and starts to condense and the droplets become bigger and start to rain.The center manufactures a salt substance that helps enhance rainfall. They put them in what they call “flares.”

We also spoke to one of the weather forecasters. He explains how the operations work:

We alert our pilots and tell them when to be at the airports. So, as expected, we wait for the clouds to appear on the radar. We have our pilots talking to us.

Let us know if there are any updrafts in your area. The real planes fly out from the runways in Al Ain. We have around 110 weather stations. It gives us metrological data every 15 minutes. The information on the screens tracks wind, speed, and direction, while satellite imagery monitors clouds to track fog and dust. Anything passing above the country will be from the satellite, especially the clouds.

But is the UAE seeing results from their efforts over the years to create a greener country?

So we have different ways of either increasing the water or saving the water. We have desalination, we have using plantation that doesn't take much water. There are many ways. One of the ways is cloud seeding. Is there any success in terms of more greenery around the UAE because of cloud seeding efforts? So the UAE is expanding on agriculture and also we were spending too much before.

We have to do a plantation with the study. Plantation costs a lot of water. We can control this water and not to use it as a waste. According to the World Bank, climate-related water scarcity will cost the region up to 6% of its GDP by 2050.

As we green landscapes, this results in healthier people, not only healthier landscapes. Greening landscapes impact the well-being, the mental health of people, and the physical health of people in terms of the air that they breathe. In a region expected to be most impacted by warming temperatures, the time has never been more important than now to find alternate ways of maintaining life in the desert.

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