The Sahara Forest Project

'Hedges' of the Sahara Forest Project, showing greenhouses, re-vegetation and solar collector
Image source: Sahara Forest Project

The Sahara Forest Project has fantastic ambitions- to create a beneficial, isolated subsystem of the landscape systems we all depend on, with inputs and outputs carefully controlled and with the subsystems carefully integrated with each other.
The inputs will be:
Sunlight - Mirrors concentrate a solar beam for an energy plant.
Carbon Dioxide- The plants in the greenhouses consume CO2
Nutrients- for plant growth
Salt Water- piped in from the sea (using solar power for the energy to do this). The salt water will be desalinised, again using solar energy. This fresh water will become both an output and an intermediate product, used in the following ways:
To cool the greenhouses- salt water run over pads covering the greenhouses will cool the glasshouses as the water evaporates in the heat.
For plant growth- to water plants in greenhouses
Humid air- (from cooling the greenhouses) will escape to humidify the surrounding air, helping with re vegetation.
Plants- will be output both as food and bio-diesel.
Finally salt and the other minerals from the seawater will become outputs to be used.

After lots of testing, apparently already finding funds (from the King of Jordan and Norwegian environmental funds) , Sahara Forest greenhouses will form long hedges running through the desert. The plan is that these hedges will start to affect the micro-climate in their lee, increasing the creation of clouds and dew fall, to benefit bands of orchards planted alongside the greenhouses, along with tougher drought resistant plants banded further out. It is not hard to envisage this (eventually) creating a virtuous local climate cycle with ever more dew and cloud cover, a neat reversal of the desertification process.
Many of the projects I have looked at have never gone ahead because the political process was impossible (I think an indication that these heroic projects are too frequently designed without thinking about the cultural/social systems that these landscapes hope to integrate with). As I write this, political change in the Middle East may be even now altering the situation for the Sahara Forest Project.*
A good interview with Bill Watts, an engineer working on the project is here.
* I have absolutely no reason to suggest there is any problem with this project, rather I am only making a comment on the general flux in the region overall