Like almost everywhere in the world by now, fresh water availability and draughts are a serious issue in southern Portugal.
More and more shallow wells in our proximity run dry due to unsustainable water managment in the wider region. Drilling deeper boreholes is the go-to solution for some, but since going into deeper aquifers is just tapping into deeper savings, this can’t be the ultimate solution for all.
While water retention and rain water collections are two very important factors in the equaition to solve our water crisis, fog harvesting is another promising approach we at AlmaOhana are studying and experimenting with.
The proximity to the ocean provides us with the ideal circumstances to “milk the clouds” as this practice was once called. Trees have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years. The humidity from the air collects on the leaves and releases with the help of gravity as water drops onto the soil.
Inspired by projects like this in the canary islands and this in Chile, we are now working on creating a fog catching system ourselves. Lucila and Antonia are working on creating fog catchers using different materials and placing them in different spots to research the potential for collecting important water.
Peter Bachler experiemented using upcycles cans to harvest fog as part of his AlmaOhana Microgarden project.
More interesting reads on this here for a more general scientific overview of the method and here about a canary island project (or go wild on google ;))
<aside> 💌 Help realize this dream by donating materials, help and money here. Thank you! Gratidão!
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