How Fog Harvesting Could Bring Water to the World’s Driest Places

Water is the world’s most precious resource. All living things from the smallest insect to the largest animal require water to live. It is literally the source of all life. 

That is why a new study in Frontiers in Environmental Science assessing the potential for fog harvesting in one of the world’s most arid places is so exciting. The study estimates that this simple, but ingenious technology could produce nearly a gallon of water a day per square meter. That is quite a bit of water. 

Not Enough Rainfall
The study was conducted in one of the driest places in the world. The BBC, reported that the Atacama Desert in Chile gets less than 0.19 inches of rainfall a year. On the edge of this arid desert sits the poor city of Alto Hospicio. Many of the city’s residents do not have access to clean water networks and survive off of water delivered by trucks. 

In fact, according to Vice, only 1.6 percent of the about 10,000 residents of Alto Hospicio have access to the local water system. Luckily, the  researchers believe that the fog that regularly rolls through the city could be a source of water that has yet to be utilized. 

All You Need is a  Piece of Mesh and Some Fog
As the BBC pointed out, fog harvesting is not a new technology. It has been used on a small scale in South and Central America, as well as North Africa. However, the study mentioned above, is the first study to calculate how much water fog harvesting can bring to an area like Alto Hospicio if implemented on a larger scale. 

Fog harvesting, in its essence, is quite simple. All that is needed is some fine mesh hung between two poles. When the fog hits the mesh, water droplets form and then that water is then harvested into pipes and tanks. 

According to the study, 17,000 square meters of mesh could provide 300,000 liters of water a month, which is the amount of water that is delivered by truck to Alto Hospicio. The fog water could also be used to irrigate hydroponic agriculture which could produce from 33 to 44 pounds of food a month. And a mere 110 square meters of mesh could help the city’s green spaces grow and thrive.

While this is really amazing, this technology, Vice points out, is very geographically limited. It cannot be used anywhere. It needs specific conditions, such as high elevation, predictable and sustainable wind patterns, and of course, fog, to be a reliable source of water. 

Still, for the places where these conditions occur, fog-harvesting could truly be a game-changer. And though it seems like something that would be very complex, it is actually a very simple technology to implement. Sometimes, all that is needed is some mesh and some ingenious thinking.