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With EU Funding, Tunisian Farmer Revives Parched Village

Tunisian farmer Abdallah Gadgadhi, 54, irrigates his pepper patch with a hose bringing water from a nearby small dam built by locals in the northwestern Ghardimaou region on September 26, 2024. (AFP)
Tunisian farmer Abdallah Gadgadhi, 54, irrigates his pepper patch with a hose bringing water from a nearby small dam built by locals in the northwestern Ghardimaou region on September 26, 2024. (AFP)
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With EU Funding, Tunisian Farmer Revives Parched Village

Tunisian farmer Abdallah Gadgadhi, 54, irrigates his pepper patch with a hose bringing water from a nearby small dam built by locals in the northwestern Ghardimaou region on September 26, 2024. (AFP)
Tunisian farmer Abdallah Gadgadhi, 54, irrigates his pepper patch with a hose bringing water from a nearby small dam built by locals in the northwestern Ghardimaou region on September 26, 2024. (AFP)

With parched crops on one side and lush green plants on the other, a small farming project in northwest Tunisia demonstrates how foreign funding coupled with dogged local efforts can help tackle the impact of climate change.

A local dam built by woman farmer Saida Zouaoui in the village of Ghardimaou after years of effort has turned her into a local hero for her fellow smallholders, who say it helped increase their production despite a six-year drought.

Zouaoui's stone and cement dam was constructed with European Union funding and technical support from the International Labor Organization, illustrating how such assistance is helping vulnerable nations adapt to climate change.

The COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan this November will focus on global funding by wealthier, high-polluting nations to help poorer countries adjust to a warming planet. But deep divisions remain over how much should be paid, and who should pay it

"We must adapt to climate change," Zouaoui, 44, said as she cleared fallen branches and debris from a stream flowing off the dam.

"We know the region and its water-related issues, but we must come up with solutions and not lose hope."

As a child, Saida Zouaoui saw both her father and grandfather attempt to build a makeshift reservoir using sandbags in her village of Ghardimaou near the Algerian border.

But without proper infrastructure and money, their effort failed.

In the meantime, Tunisia's water stress worsened.

- EU funding -

Already the 20th most water-stressed country according to the World Resources Institute, Tunisia has seen its national dams shrink to less than a quarter of their capacity, according to official figures.

In Zouaoui's village, traditional dykes provided irrigation for up to 48 hectares (117 acres) during the 1970s and 80s but that has shriveled to only 12 hectares, Monaem Khemissi, Tunisia's ILO coordinator, told AFP.

Zouaoui said a number of farmers, and particularly younger people, left the village for urban areas.

Those who stayed were forced to "reduce cultivated areas and no longer planted crops that require a lot of water".

Zouaoui had pitched the idea of building the small dam to Tunisian authorities before her country's 2011 revolution but they turned it down as unprofitable, she said.

Heavily indebted Tunisia is grappling with weak economic growth.

"I understand the authorities have limited capabilities and do not have the financial resources to implement the idea as they have other priorities," Zouaoui told AFP.

But she persisted.

She told officials that her "lifetime project" would even "irrigate the entire area, for farmers to return and life to resume".

It was European Union funding that eventually provided 90 percent of the 350,000 dinars (around $115,000) needed to build her dam in 2019.

Local farmers contributed about 10 percent of the cost, according to the ILO, and also offered their labor and logistics.

The EU, the North African country's top aid and commercial partner, allocated $241 million in 2023 to support projects mainly linked to agriculture and water management.

Since 2021, the EU has also funded $18 million in rural development projects.

- 'Changed my life' -

ILO's Khemissi said Zouaoui's initiative was a "model of local development".

He said his organization "does not aim to replace the state but rather offer technical and financial support for projects to combat climate change and create jobs in marginalized areas".

Tunisia's northwest, though impoverished, is one of its most fertile areas, known for its production of cereals and vegetables and home to the country's largest dam.

But with an unwavering lack of rainfall, Tunisia lost almost its entire grain harvest last year, according to official figures.

Water still flows, however, through Zouaoui's canals linked to her small dam, which is about the length of one-and-a-half Olympic-sized swimming pools, and three meters (10 feet) deep.

The system irrigates 45 small farms, each ranging from one to two hectares, with a rotation system among her farmer neighbors for free access to water.

Zouaoui said the farmers had nearly lost hope, feeling neglected by the authorities as "each time an official came to visit, the farmers thought they had come for electoral gain".

"I had to convince them that we will have water unconditionally," she said.

Abdallah Gadgadhi, 54, a father of five, recalled that his cultivated field "was reduced to a third before the project was completed" due to water scarcity.

With irrigation from Zouaoui's dam, he said, he has expanded his pepper crop to use around 70 percent of his land.

Rebah Fazaai, 58, said Zouaoui has "changed my life immensely".

"We can now support our families by selling our produce," she added.

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Varieties

Control the Path and Power of Hurricanes like Milton? Forget It, Scientists Say

Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
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Control the Path and Power of Hurricanes like Milton? Forget It, Scientists Say

Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)

Hurricanes are humanity’s reminder of the uncontrollable, chaotic power of Earth’s weather.

Milton’s powerful push toward Florida just days after Helene devastated large parts of the Southeast likely has some in the region wondering if they are being targeted. In some corners of the internet, Helene has already sparked conspiracy theories and disinformation suggesting the government somehow aimed the hurricane at Republican voters.

Besides discounting common sense, such theories disregard weather history that shows the hurricanes are hitting many of the same areas they have for centuries. They also presume an ability for humans to quickly reshape the weather far beyond relatively puny efforts such as cloud seeding.

“If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would stop hurricanes,” Kristen Corbosiero, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany. “If we could control the weather, we would not want the kind of death and destruction that’s happened.”

Here’s a look at what humans can and can’t do when it comes to weather:

The power of hurricanes, heightened by climate change

A fully developed hurricane releases heat energy that is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes — more than all the energy used at a given time by humanity, according to National Hurricane Center tropical analysis chief Chris Landsea.

And scientists are now finding many ways climate change is making hurricanes worse, with warmer oceans that add energy and more water in the warming atmosphere to fall as rain, said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“The amount of energy a hurricane generates is insane,” said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. It’s the height of human arrogance to think people have the power to change them, he said.

But that hasn't stopped people from trying, or at least thinking about trying.

Historical efforts to control hurricanes have failed

Jim Fleming of Colby College has studied historical efforts to control the weather and thinks humans have nowhere near the practical technology to get there. He described an attempt in 1947 in which General Electric partnered with the US military to drop dry ice from Air Force jets into the path of a hurricane in an attempt to weaken it. It didn't work.

“The typical science goes like understanding, prediction and then possibly control,” Fleming said, noting that the atmosphere is far more powerful and complex than most proposals to control it. “It goes back into Greek mythology to think you can control the powers of the heavens, but also it's a failed idea.”

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the federal government briefly tried Project STORMFURY. The idea was to seed a hurricane to replace its eyewall with a larger one that would make the storm bigger in size but weaker in intensity. Tests were inconclusive and researchers realized if they made the storm larger, people who wouldn’t have been hurt by the storm would now be in danger, which is an ethical and liability problem, the project director once said.

For decades, the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been asked about nuclear-bombing a hurricane. But the bombs aren't powerful enough, and it would add the problem of radioactive fallout, Corbosiero said.

Bringing cooling icebergs or seeding or adding water-absorbing substances also are ideas that just don’t work, NOAA scientists said.

Climate change begets engineering — and lots of questions

Failed historical attempts to control hurricanes differ somewhat from some scientists' futuristic ideas to combat climate change and extreme weather. That's because instead of targeting individual weather events, modern geoengineers would operate on a larger scale — thinking about how to reverse the broad-scale damage humans have already done to the global climate by emitting greenhouse gases.

Scientists in the field say one of the most promising ideas they see based on computer models is solar geoengineering. The method would involve lofting aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere to bounce a tiny bit of sunlight back into space, cooling the planet slightly.

Supporters acknowledge the risks and challenges. But it also "might have quite large benefits, especially for the world’s poorest," said David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative.

Two years ago, the largest society of scientists who work on climate issues, the American Geophysical Union, announced it was forming an ethics framework for “climate intervention."

Some scientists warn that tinkering with Earth’s atmosphere to fix climate change is likely to create cascading new problems. Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann expressed worries on the ethics framework that just talking about guidelines will make the tinkering more likely to occur in the real world, something that could have harmful side effects.

Field, of Stanford, agreed that the modeling strongly encourages that geoengineering could be effective, including at mitigating the worst threats of hurricanes, even if that's decades away. But he emphasized that it's just one piece of the best solution, which is to stop climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“Whatever else we do, that needs to be the core set of activities,” he said.