Page 4 - Perspective Paper

1 Key message

The existential threat of climate change is humanity’s most urgent challenge, but all too often the problem
has been split into separate issues: greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, unsustainable production and
consumption, environmental degradation. Proposed solutions to these problems have been similarly
disjointed.

The Bardawil & Sinai Initiative offers a holistic, nature-based solution to a multitude of problems. As well as
restoring the Sinai’s ecosystems, providing substantial human and environmental benefits, the Initiative aims
to dramatically transform the entire region, restoring the water cycle, altering weather patterns, and bringing
regular, predictable precipitation to areas that are currently arid. In so doing, it could be a framework for
ecosystem restoration across arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) of the world. With time running out and urgent
challenges ahead, the Initiative invites and encourages further academic consideration, discussion and
collaboration with policy makers, engineers and local communities most affected by climate change.
On a continental and planetary scale, long-term human pressures on green water (defined as terrestrial
precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture) in the form of e.g. land-use change has contributed to the
deterioration of ecological, climatic and hydrological Earth system (Wang-Erlandsson et al., 2022). Research
indicates that as recently as 4,000 to 7,000 years BCE, the 60,000sq km Sinai Peninsula was green and hosted
significant reservoirs of biodiversity. Today it is largely a dry and denuded landscape, partly as a result of
human activity such as deforestation and overgrazing. The Bardawil & Sinai Initiative seeks to effectively
reverse this process. The initial intervention would be the regeneration of Lake Bardawil, on the Sinai’s
Mediterranean coast, which would rapidly improve estuarine ecosystems and fish stocks. Through an
engineering intervention process, nutrient-rich sediments produced from the rejuvenated estuary will be
removed from Lake Bardawil to regenerate coastal and inland areas over coming years.
At the heart of the Bardawil & Sinai Initiative is an enlightened approach to living systems and the energy
embodied within them. Given the opportunity, living systems have an inbuilt capacity to organise and
regulate themselves on every scale, from a pond to a planet. Prior to the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch
of Earth where human-driven processes have overwhelmed natural processes, planetary biofunctionality
relied on such forms of self-regulation. The more such interconnected systems are re-established, the more
dynamic and resilient the entire ecosystems will become.

Once established, the restoration process in the Sinai is expected to be primarily self-sustaining: as the
landscape of the Sinai regreens and retains more moisture, a stable hydrological cycle is predicted to return,
thus improving conditions for further regreening and agriculture, and, by extension, economic and political
stability in the face of anticipated population pressure. Some degree of management in the form of ‘green
1
jobs’0F will maintain the equilibrium of the system and be a secondary benefit to the initiative.
In addition, a regreened Sinai Peninsula could significantly alter weather patterns across the wider region. At
present, in summer, the hot, dry Sinai draws moisture-laden north-westerly winds from the Mediterranean
out into the Indian Ocean, where it fuels extreme weather events. A cooler, moister Sinai would reverse the
direction of these winds, distributing this moist Mediterranean air more locally. This would result in
dramatically increased precipitation to surrounding areas such as eastern Egypt, western Saudi Arabia, Israel,
Palestine, Jordan and beyond.

As such, the initiative could possibly be the first large-scale intervention that embodies the concept of Earth
stewardship – “the proactive shaping of physical, biological, and social conditions to sustain, rather than
disrupt, critical earth-system processes in support of nature and human wellbeing at local-to-planetary

1 Green jobs are broadly defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as decent jobs that contribute to preserve or
restore the environment

A strategic ‘living systems’ approach to climate stabilization 4/26