Growing Forests in the Desert

February 7, 2012

The environmentalists involved are hopeful that the project will not only help reduce humanity's carbon footprint but will also demonstrate how all countries could establish a local plant species on land thought unusable in order to improve air quality. India, central Asia, and Africa in particular have large swaths of such land available, including the vast Sahara Desert.

To conserve precious stores of fresh water, the researchers chose to use low-quality recycled sewage water as well as saltwater that's the by-product of desalination plants. Then they searched for a plant species hardy enough to successfully grow in desert conditions. They settled on Tamarix, a botanical genus that includes salt cedar trees and is indigenous to old-world deserts.

In the Aravah—a section of the Great Rift Valley running from the southern end of the Sea of Galilee down past the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba near Eilat—they planted 150 different varieties of Tamarix in a common garden setting and also in denser fields the way commercial crops are grown. Now the researchers are starting the hard work of analyzing the amount of carbon dioxide the crops have successfully captured from the atmosphere. If that can be quantified, they will be able to recommend specific growing guidelines to other countries.

Prof. Amram Eshel If they can also be used as biofuel, the potential is almost limitless. Until now, growing crops dedicated to fuel production has been controversial, since converting agricultural land could have the side effect of creating food shortages. Arid and previously unused desert lands provide an ideal solution, Eshel says. Israel doesn't have enough of this land to make a large-scale operation economically feasible, but places like the Sahara Desert could be ideal.