This article was taken from the June 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
The Sahara Forest Project has a simple yet ambitious goal: to grow vegetation in the desert.
As a pilot, a one-hectare plant is now being built outside Doha, Qatar, by Michael Pawlyn of Exploration Architecture, engineer Bill Watts of London design firm Max Fordham, and the Norwegian nonprofit Bellona Foundation.
They intend the plant to use sunlight and seawater to produce food, fresh water and energy. It will also include a cooling system that vapourises the saltwater to hydrate a 600m2 greenhouse designed to produce up to four tonnes of food crops a year. Hollow "evaporative" hedges will further vaporise the leftover brine, in the process accumulating calcium carbonate and gypsum. The architects will then be able to use these now-solid hedges as building materials on the site."
Rather than maximising one goal, there's potential to produce fresh water and building materials, build biodiversity, and farm fish and algae," says Pawlyn. With £3.3 million from two fertiliser companies - Norway's Yara International and Qafco, based in Qatar - the pilot project aims to be up and running by November.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
