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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

CloudFisher does exactly what it says on the tin. 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 [newyorker.com]. 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.

Reliable access to freshwater would, of course, provide a host of benefits to rural, water-poor districts in North Africa. According to the World Health Organization, a community requires about twenty gallons of water per person per day in order for its residents and their crops and livestock to thrive. Even a relatively small CloudFisher installation could provide a consistent water source for a group of rural families or a village. In a part of the world that is battling the progressive effects of continuous drought—exhaustion of wells, topsoil erosion, population loss as the land becomes inhospitable to agriculture—fog-water collection could be a life-altering adaptation.

The greatest benefit of the technology, though, might be time. In arid regions around the world, the task of obtaining water for the family frequently falls to women. Residents of Morocco’s rural villages commonly spend as much as four hours a day walking to and from functioning wells. The lucky families own or borrow donkeys, but often the women simply carry the barrels—five gallons each, weighing nearly fifty pounds—on their heads. In Africa alone, women spend an estimated forty billion hours a year fetching water.

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