Water cycle management and ecological restoration in the Sinai

Introduction

Weather Makers is a group of international engineers and scientists. For the past three years, they have been working on a restoration project in the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt) involving ecological regeneration through the creation of a robust water cycle in the region.

The holistic multidisciplinary project has the potential to restore a declining aquatic ecosystem on the Mediterranean coast and address the problem of desertification.

This fascinating case study is particularly useful when studying management issues associated with the water cycle, a core topic at A level. It includes a number of excellent illustrations.

Here is an update (November 2021)

Since 2017, several studies have been carried out to investigate the conceptual approach to regenerate the northern Sinai watershed. For explanation we can divide the research into three main fields: – Coastal zone – Terrestrial zone – Atmospheric zone For the coastal zone we focused on regenerating the lagoon and wetlands of Lake Bardawil. The design is brought to a concept design level and peer reviewed by renown international, including Egyptian scientists. The design for the lake is prepared and presented on Presidential level and currently under negotiations. For the terrestrial zone research has focused on the potential for the re-use of sediments. The adopted methodology uses the fertile coastal sediments and sea water to grow aquatic food webs that naturally produce freshwater, grow biomass (trees, plants, etc.) and build liveable soils by recycling the available nutrients and reactivate the microbes in the sediments. With building soils, we mean that an optimal composition of soils can be obtained by dredging sediments from different predefined locations on the basis of soil investigation campaigns. The composition of these sediments can be improved by different dredging and mixing techniques, which then will be used as input to the process of natural fertilizing and biomass growth in dedicated facilities. For the atmospheric zone we have setup research with WETSUS institute. The role of evaporation within the watershed is investigated, eventually leading to understand how to efficiently regenerate the water cycle.

https://theweathermakers.nl/elementor-1898/

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