There's an interesting paper [3] about building 40,000 Sorek style plants to sequester excess water in arid areas and avoid problems with sea level rise. Without any savings at scale, this would be around 20 trillion dollars, but that's clearly cheaper than building infrastructure to protect coasts around the world, with the side benefit of creating jobs and food in areas that are in the most need.

I've been working (in the script-writing sense) on a narrative around EarthStations -- molten salt solar towers powering desal plants and green tech manufacturing, surrounded by highly efficient farms, and further out in the ring, forests that eat the desert. Since they are located on coasts, all the infrastructure can be delivered by ships, and all the goods created easily shipped out once they are up and running.

One big technical problem is what to do with the brine -- I'm not sure how much could go into molten salt heat storage. But they could serve as an engine to keep sea levels stable.

This is a longwinded way of saying I think the project in Egypt is a good example of the terraforming we need to be doing instead of dreaming about for a planet like Mars. Even though it is small scale, turning deserts into forests is pretty impressive, and something we need to do learn how to do well to fight climate change.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

[2] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-ide-wins-sorek-2-desalina...

[3] https://f1000research.com/articles/5-889

As they try to develop out in to the desert, most of the projects have nothing to say about this critical resource. These developments are therefore totally unsustainable as it requires constantly importing water by truck, building enormous infrastructure from the Nile or desalination facilities plus the transport infrastructure. Even then the cost to actually change the soil composition from desert to anything less arid have absurd water costs, to say nothing of what happens when these theoretical cities have to start providing for demands of the expected hundreds of thousands or millions people.

To make matters worse, development around the city continues, and the prime agricultural lands, where water use is most efficient per calorie grown, has all but disappeared.

In Egypt, like so many other places, but especially in Africa, are increasingly vulnerable to compound effects of man-made and climate change crises. Books have been written on the corruption, but the combined effects with climate are truly frightening to contemplate.

Whatever transpires there after the proverbial well runs dry is going to make the January Revolution look like child’s play.