Fog Harvesting Tech Offers Solution To Water Scarcity

Can harvesting fog help solve water scarcity?

For the past year, Dar Si Hmad, a Moroccan NGO, and several German partner, have teamed up to bring potable water to southwest Morocco using a technology called CloudFisher. They deployed the technology in the arid region of Aït Baâmrane, which borders the Western Sahara, The New Yorker reported.

Cloudfisher technology does exactly what its name suggests.

“On the slopes of Mt. Boutmezguida, in the Anti-Atlas range, the project’s organizers have erected a series of tall steel poles, hung with rectangular black polymer nets. These are the fog harvesters. They look like the flags of long-buried pirate ships, standing out from the slope of the mountain, the only man-made thing for miles around, but they behave rather like Echinopsis cacti. Built on arid, rocky ground at an elevation of more than four thousand feet, they can, in twenty-four hours, collect up to seventeen gallons of water — condensed fog from the nearby Atlantic — per square yard of netting,” the report said.

Dar Si Hmad claims it is the world’s largest fog collection and distribution system. The organization claims the technology can have an enormous benefit in dry communities.

“Delivery of fogwater significantly reduces women’s laborious water-gathering chores, and help foster stable communities... Specifically, water-gathering chores took up to 3.5 hours/day and often interrupted, or prevented, girls from regularly attending school. And, water availability allows poor farmers to keep their livestock which they previously might have sold during increasingly frequent droughts that lowered the water table, forcing livestock sales and driving farmers into cycles of poverty,” the group said.

This is not a new idea. In fact, fog harvesting dates way back, Dar Si Hmad reports. The original inhabitants of the Canary Islands collected fog-water “under large trees that had foliage large enough to allow fog droplets to condense and fall into previously dug holes,” according to Dar Si Hmad materials.

To read about other novel water generating tech, visit Water Online’s Water Scarcity Solutions Center.