Fog harvesting comes to the rescue in water deficient Moroccan village

Fog harvesting comes to the rescue in water deficient Moroccan village: A fog harvesting system — which involves collecting water droplets from fog — has been providing over 1.6k people in Morocco’s Ait Baamrane community with potable water for the last 20 years, The New Arab reports. In partnership with German NGO Wasserstiftung Water Foundation, local Moroccan foundation for sustainable livelihoods Dar Si Hmad set up the project on Mount Boutmezguida, where 21 collectors work on a farm that can collect over 22 liters of water per square meter on a foggy day.

How does it work: A specially developed mesh is strung up vertically between two poles perpendicular to the prevailing wind, which forces the fog through the mesh where it condenses into water droplets, the New Arab explains. The droplets then cling to the mesh and get bigger as more fog is pushed through, eventually dropping down into a pipe system that leads to a storage tank.

While low in cost, scalability is not feasible: While fog collection requires minimal operational costs and does not require any electricity, the volume available for harvest is relatively minimal and therefore unrealistic to scale up. In fact, atmospheric water represents only 0.004% of the total freshwater on the planet, with only a fraction of that water in fog at any given time, the news outlet explains, citing the US Geological Survey. This makes fog harvesting more suitable for local applications rather than country or region wide, especially as some scientists predict that fog will decrease as the impacts of climate change worsen, according to the news outlet.

Could this be replicated across the region? Given that the ideal conditions needed for fog harvesting are most often in mountain ranges, close to coastlines, and at a right angle to the prevailing wind, this makes its application limited to a few areas in the region. One example is the Dhofar region of Oman, where fog harvesting projects have taken place since the early 2000s. In 2018, the Dhofar project collected 350k gallons of water during monsoon season, the news outlet said.