These dots in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert can even be seen from space.
They are crop circles – farming the unfarmable.
And wind turbines which make it rain where it almost never rains.
Real game-changers to combat expanding deserts?
Humans are driving the transformation of arid lands into vast sandscapes hostile to life,
putting a billion livelihoods at risk.
So, what if we could revitalize and restore what's been lost?
"We have no doubts about the possibility, the viability of this idea."
Scientists are exploring incredible ways to green the desert.
But can they really stop sand from swallowing up the world?
This is the fastest-growing desert on the planet.
The Gobi, which means 'waterless place' in Mongolian, stretches across Mongolia and China.
It devours about 6000 square kilometers of grassland per year, engulfing villages and turning
landscapes into an uninhabitable wasteland.
Tens of thousands of people have become
environmental migrants forced to resettle elsewhere.
Only a couple of thousand people are left.
The reason why Gobi and other deserts are expanding
is partly due to changing climate cycles affecting the rainfall,
but human-driven global warming is also fueling this process.
Some 3000 kilometers from the Gobi, in the deserts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,
the Aral Sea is drying up.
Mainly because of industrial farming.
This, but also extreme droughts, deforestation and overgrazing
have severely degraded once-fertile soils.
This manmade destruction is called desertification.
And it's happening on a global scale.
By the middle of the century, 25% of the world's soils will be affected.
"If we don't have a solid base upon which people's
livelihoods can depend on,
everything else becomes precarious."
This is Dr. Barron Joseph Orr, Lead Scientist for the
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
His job is to find solutions to help the half a billion
people whose livelihoods are already
hard hit by desertification –
and the other half a billion who are at risk.
Most live in South East Asia, the Middle East,
the Sahara region and North Africa.
The good news, the situation is not hopeless.
Remember the green dots from the very beginning?
As small as they seem, each one is actually a round field,
1km in diameter, in the heart of the desert.
They're a symbol of Saudi Arabia's
agricultural expansion since the 1970s.
Now wheat and other crops cover vast areas.
That's incredibly water-intensive.
Farmers tapped water from the last Ice Age –
one kilometer underground.
But obviously, there is a catch.
"They went for crops that were highly productive
in agriculture but also thirsty, demanding a lot of water.
So your sustainability of the system is very low."
Monocultural farming depletes soil,
so it cannot retain water in the long term.
But that is key!
It only rains a few centimeters of average rainfall per year.
That can't refill the aquifers.
Experts estimate that the pumps will need to be turned off in about 50 years.
The desert sands will reconquer the artificial oases.
But there are more sustainable ways of using water in the desert.
On Saudi Arabia's west coast
a different experiment is going on.
An initiative called the Al Baydha project,
has developed a system for regenerating the lands using
... flashfloods!
Yes, you heard right, flashfloods in the middle of the desert!
These videos shared on social media in 2021
show what rainfall in Saudi Arabia can look like.
But most of the valuable freshwater in the region
runs off or evaporates.
"We said okay, well, if we can catch flashfloods
and get that water in the ground...
Then that becomes a sustainable source of water,
even if it's only happening, you know, every 18 months
or every 20 months or whatever."
This is Neal Spackman, specialist in regenerative
agriculture and former director of the Al Baydha project.
Together with the local community,
Neal Spackman and other agricultural specialists
have been building dams, terraces, and kilometers of ditches.
The idea is to channel the floodwaters to where they
are needed and retain them.
There, they can be reabsorbed.
These are methods that the likes of the
Incas used hundreds of years ago.
"So, it's slowing down the water first with
those human-scale earthworks, physically.
That allows for biology to get established
and then you're slowing down the water ecologically."
At first, artificial irrigation was needed to promote plant growth
and get the ecological cycle started again.
But then by harvesting flashfloods, significantly more
water could be put in the ground than taken out.
Native trees, bushes and grasses even survived a 30-month drought,
without additional irrigation.
"We had birds come back.
We had small mammals come back.
It was quite amazing to witness, actually,
to see life coming back to this place."
The project has been up and running since 2010.
It has proved that it's possible to restore
water tables in the desert.
The next challenge is to increase agricultural output
to make people in the area self-sufficient again.
Even the Sahara was green for a brief period.
Thousands of years ago, monsoon rains made
the desert a habitable place.
Today, the Sahara is rocky and sandy,
and in some areas it is expanding by
almost 48 kilometers per year.
Manmade activities in the surrounding drylands
mean it's the globe's most threatened place
in terms of desertification.
That process is fueling land conflicts
in a region that's already poverty-stricken.
Solar and wind farms could potentially put an end to this –
not only by creating energy, but by making it rain.
Scientists have developed a climate model
showing that if one-fifth of the entire Sahara
were covered with solar farms and wind farms,
there would be 5cm more rainfall in the Sahel region.
That might not sound like much,
but it would increase vegetation cover
by almost 20 percent.
How does it work?
Well, the black surface of the solar panels heats up the air,
making it rise to higher altitudes.
The wind turbines' rotation has a similar effect.
"So it goes up and then this upward motion,
it carries the moisture with it.
And the upward motion when it reaches the higher altitudes,
it will cool because higher altitudes are cooler, lower pressure.
So it's colder and the moisture condenses,
becomes rain, and falls down."
This is Dr. Safa Mote, he's a physicist
researching how to prevent environmental,
economic and social catastrophes.
Theoretically, at least, the model would boost
plant growth on a huge scale running from
East to West Africa across the Sahel region.
"We believe that this will significantly
improve rain-fed agriculture.
And will significantly improve
food production in the region.
And the additional vegetation will give us
improvements of ecosystems in the area.
So it's a win-win situation for the environment,
for the economy and for the people."
The gigantic energy park would create more than
four times the energy currently consumed globally each year.
The scientists believe it could be used to
contribute to clean development in an array
of different ways in Africa –
from infrastructure to the desalination of seawater –
you might want to watch a video we did on the topic.
But, all in all, the logistics and politics of transporting the
energy and the estimated costs of some 20 trillion Dollars
make the project seem rather unfeasible.
And there are cheaper ways of reclaiming the desert.
What started out as a project to protect
the transportation routes of a local salt mine
in the Kubuqi desert, has become a huge reforestation operation.
"The city used to be besieged by desert, now it's a paradise."
"At the end of the 20th-century desert lands
increased by 10,000 square kilometers every year.
Now it is decreasing by 2,000 square kilometers annually."
This isn't just government propaganda.
The Kubuqi project is seen as one of the world's most
successful restoration projects.
"By working in a systematic and collaborative way like that,
they were successful."
New seeding methods have played a decisive role in the reforestation of
thousands of square kilometers since 1988.
Special water jets create a hole in the sand
and simultaneously water the cutting.
"They reduced the planting time from something
like ten minutes per tree or per seedling.
If it was, it was crops, down to, I think, ten seconds.
I mean a very powerful and important change."
In the Kubuqi desert, farmers also started putting strawbales
around the young plants on the dunes to protect them from the wind,
so they have a real chance of growing."
Huge desertified areas have become green again.
Some are now being used for cattle grazing and crop farming.
Liquorice and other herbs suitable for
this climate are also grown here.
They are in high demand in traditional Chinese medicine.
And yet the region does not consume much more water
than what it receives in annual rainfall.
"They thought about the market,
they thought about the start-up costs,
they thought about the social practices in the grazing areas.
They addressed all of these, not just one location,
where they were doing restoration, but the entire region."
A huge variety of animals from gazelles to
hedgehogs, sparrows and wild geese returned to the region.
Greening the Kubuqi is even helping Bejing 800 km away.
The desert's restoration has decreased air pollution by
sandstorms in the Chinese capital significantly.
So, reversing desertification IS possible,
we can restore soils, water cycles and vegetation
to protect the livelihoods of millions of people –
with natural, or high-tech, methods.
But what is also clear, the cost the efforts involved in the process
mean that we will never be able to turn all the world's
desertified land into fertile soil.
"They're the foundation of all life on the planet.
But we need to find ways to value those,
beyond the concept of conservation.
Beyond the concept of it's nice to have nature.
It's not nice to have. It's necessary."
To stop desertification and desert expansion, scientists know what needs to be done:
curb global warming and the overexploitation
of our soils and deforestation in areas
where soils are at risk of degradation.
That will keep the planet's land mass healthy
and able to maintain humankind –
and itself.
"Don't get me wrong, deserts are absolutely fascinating
and unique ecosystems worthy of protection.
The problems begin when fertile soils
turn into dust and sand.
Fun fact: The biggest known
underground water source
lies under the Sahara.
What do you think about greening deserts?
If you liked the video, subscribe to our channel
and give us a like.
We have new videos for you every Friday.