Dust storms are a scourge of modern life in much of the world.
In order to produce a dust storm,
you need wind and you need soil particles.
- RADIO: - 'Come off the road.'
We look at what a dust storm is...
The dust storm is actually when the visibility is less than a kilometre.
..and how human activity is making them worse.
We focus on the Middle East...
About to be engulfed!
..one of the world's worst hit areas.
During the dust storm season, patients get severe attacks
of asthma that require hospital admission and intensive care.
We'll see how NASA satellites can track dust storms as they
sweep across the Earth.
The dust can be lifted up to three or four miles in altitude
before it is really kind of carried away by the winds.
Every year, the current estimate is anywhere
from two to five billion metric tonnes
that moves around some distance in the Earth's atmosphere every year.
So that's quite a bit of dust.
Dust isn't always bad.
Scientists are researching the impact of dust crossing the
ocean from Africa to Florida.
I think the fact that we can see these impacts
so far away is really exciting.
In the rainforest, many of the plants derive their nutrients
and are fertilised from dust.
In Kuwait, they are pioneering new ways of tackling the problem
- of dust storms. - This plant can reduce the negative effect of dust.
While technology brings the prospect of daily
dust storm forecasts.
This is the Sand and Dust Storm Warning System for
Northern Africa, Middle East and Europe.
As the world's climate becomes more extreme,
scientists are urging action.
It is the number one killer,
number one non-communicable disease that we are trying to tackle today.
It is coming your way. It is a case of, are you going to be suffocated?
Oh, my God, it's crazy!
Wow!
Dust storms are frightening and dangerous.
They can occur without warning,
bringing transport to a standstill and disrupting daily life.
Uh-oh, about to be engulfed.
Dust can make people sick and it can kill.
Sand and dust are generated in dry regions across the world
but the greatest source is the Sahara Desert.
The Sahara probably produces round about a half,
something of that order, of the Earth's dust.
The reason it is there is because there is an old lake that was
there when conditions were wetter that's
dried up and it is the material from the floor of that old lake,
silt and little silica organisms called diatoms,
that get blown away high up into the air and can travel huge distances.
There's a range of countries primarily neighbouring the Sahara,
because this is the major source of sand and dust storms,
both to the north and south but equally to the east,
where we're talking of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Kuwait,
the Emirates, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia.
But increasingly moving to the east, we run into the Stans,
as we call them - Afghanistan, Turkmenistan.
And here the difficulty is that they're affected in both directions.
Sand and dust being driven to the south from the Gobi Desert,
from the Tibetan Plateau and all through Asia.
So there is a whole range of countries with a long plume,
starting from the western edge of the Sahara, all the way
through and up to China.
Dust has been blowing around the world for millennia.
Dust storms are a natural phenomenon but the world is getting
hotter, and in many places, drier.
Scientists see clear evidence that human activity is making
dust storms worse.
The science behind dust storms is fascinating.
We think that 20-25% could be attributed to human activity.
So something called the dust bowl syndrome which is
associated with poor land management,
where the topsoil becomes aerosolised, like tiny little
aerosols, which means that the slightest amount of energy or
wind can lift up the soil and effectively take those
topsoils many thousands of kilometres.
Clouds, rolling seas of anger, move across vast
territories and drop their tragic burden of burning dust.
We had a big phenomenon, or a tragedy, called the Dust Bowl
of the United States in the 1930s.
The American Dust Bowl is famous as a human-induced
environmental disaster.
In the 1920s and '30s, crops were planted on newly created
farms on former grasslands, but drought and over-farming on
poor soils meant the crops failed year after year.
With no vegetation, thousands of tonnes of soil blew away,
creating choking storms of dust for days on end.
How did it happen?
Some unusually wet period made people think that water is
available and you can plough anywhere you like, and water
would follow it, this was the dominant thinking.
The dust bowl primarily was due to a drop in rainfall in the area.
At the same time, the human population was migrating and using
that area for agricultural purposes.
They were doing strip farming of the topsoils and leaving them exposed.
Farms were abandoned and people were forced
to leave their homes for good.
The dust storms got so bad because of that, it drove legislation
in 1935 to pass the Soil Conservation Act
that Congress passed.
That prohibited that type of farming.
The big driver of why the severity of the dust storms dropped
over time was because it started raining again.
The Americans instituted various things like shelterbelts and
windbreaks which really dampened down the dust storm activity
in the 1940s and onwards.
That does show that we can do something about it if we wish,
in the right circumstances.
Today, the Middle East is one of the areas worst affected
by dust storms.
It is in the path of sand and dust blowing from the Sahara,
but the region itself
is increasingly becoming a source of dust.
Decreasing rainfall, combined with the overuse of water for
agriculture, are making the soil dangerously dry.
Why don't we get dust storms any time we have wind?
Because we have a higher soil moisture.
So soil moisture acts like a glue, it keeps the soil particles
connected to each other and so the wind cannot lift them.
As soon as you lose the moisture, you disconnect these particles
and these particles are blown away easily whenever you have wind.
So when you have a drought, when you have stronger winds and when
you lose your soil moisture, you have a dust storm.
PANICKED VOICES
We have seen in the Middle East and North Africa more and more
frequent dust storms and one of the reasons is that water
resources in the region have become more scarce.
Human intervention is one of the major reasons for this scarcity.
Until 30 years ago,
the marshlands of southern Iraq looked like this.
The marshes occupied 15,000 square kilometres between the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers.
The wetlands were deliberately drained by former Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein.
They were partly restored but are now again threatened by the
diversion of water for agriculture and the oil industry.
Satellite maps show a gradual drying of the land over the
past 15 years.
Nations the world over see the control of water as key to
growth and prosperity.
Middle Eastern countries have ambitious programmes to build
dams and water pipelines for drinking water,
crop irrigation and hydroelectric power.
Turkey has had a massive long-term project to harness the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers which start in Turkey and flow through
neighbouring Syria and Iraq.
The Ataturk Dam, completed in 1992,
and a source of huge national pride, is one of the largest in the world.
One third of the Euphrates' former flow
is now diverted for irrigation.
Turkey's latest project is the Ilisu Dam on the River Tigris.
When completed, it will submerge the ancient city of Hasankeyf,
whose history goes back 12,000 years.
Once, people travelled on the Tigris from here to Nineveh,
Mosul and Babylon.
There are international agreements promising Syria and Iraq
a minimum amount of water.
But inevitably the volume of water flowing downstream
will be decreased.
Most of this water goes into agriculture
so we want to irrigate and produce food in a dry area.
The amount of water we have in the Middle East is enough for
satisfying our drinking and sanitation needs,
it is not enough to produce food with it or make the region
self-sufficient in food production.
But this is something that the region has not understood well.
If you dry your soil,
if you use a lot of water and waste a lot of water then you
should expect a punishment which is called a dust storm,
and that is something we have been punished for in the
Middle East because of not using our water properly, because of
losing soil moisture.
One example of the consequences of poor water management is
Lake Urmia in Iran.
The lake, the largest in the Middle East,
once supported wildlife and a tourist industry.
With no outflow, its water became many times saltier than the oceans.
Since the completion of dams restricting the inflow of water,
Lake Urmia has shrunk dramatically.
Lake Urmia is a good example of a modern environmental tragedy
that was created by humans.
We had a salt lake which was one of the largest in the world.
The dominant thinking was that rivers are flowing into the
lake, this terminal lake which has no effect,
and water gets salty, let's use the water for a good purpose,
let's use it for farming, let's use it for the urban areas.
What happened was that the lake got smaller and it becomes
a big disaster that the whole region has been affected by and now
a lot of investment should be made in order to restore the lake,
if that is not only a dream.
Sediments are very fine soils and once they dry out,
they are easily mobilised into the atmosphere.
Some of the dustiest regions on the planet are usually due to dry
lake beds. A good example, the United States.
In the early 20th century,
the city of Los Angeles tapped Lake Owens
as a source for drinking water.
A short time later that lake was dry, or almost totally dry.
To this day, that is the number one source of dust in the
atmosphere in North America.
Kuwait.
This city lives under the shadow of dust storms, with around 21 a year.
In summer, almost every day people are breathing in dusty air.
Kuwait is in the main pathway of winds bringing dust.
It blows in from the Sahara in the west and in summer,
the shamal winds from the north-west bring dust from Syria and Iraq.
It is one of the worst, in fact, in the region.
Most of the trajectories of dust storms are passing through Kuwait.
Dr Ali al-Dousari's
research team know all about dust from first-hand experience.
Dust builds up on cars and windows and on other surfaces such as
solar panels.
And it is getting worse.
Inhaling all this dust has serious consequences.
They have a great impact on human health.
It is very bad for you to breathe in fine silica dust.
It carries allergens which can be fungal spores or bacteria
which can affect you
and cause hospital admissions or even death.
Dr Ahmed al-Khabaz
is an allergy specialist and consultant at
the Kuwait Child and Allergy Clinic.
Most of his patients suffer from the effects of dust and air pollution.
Dust affects all people, regardless of the genetic predisposition.
When you think about the air in Kuwait,
the air in Kuwait is full of dust as well as chemicals that come
from the oil industry, as well as pollution from cars.
At the same time, you have a lot of pollen in that air.
So if you like, you can say you have
a cocktail of chemicals into that air.
Almost one in five of Kuwait's residents suffer from asthma.
People live with the condition year round but doctors see
a spike in admissions when the dust storms arrive.
During the dust storm season, the number of patients
visiting our clinic increase to double the usual day.
Some of them, they get severe attacks that requires hospital
admission and intensive care.
Kuwait resident Mokhtar al-Khidra
has suffered from dust related asthma for 15 years.
But it is hard to escape the dust, even inside.
Resident Khaled al-Amiri
shows some of the measures Kuwaitis use to try to prevent dust
particles getting into their homes.
Countries across the world see an increase in hospital
admissions because of respiratory problems.
The very young and the very old are particularly vulnerable.
For them, poor air quality can be life-threatening.
With nearly seven million people dying prematurely because of air
quality, much of which is a complex mixture of dust that
has got pollutants carried with it,
means that it is the number one killer,
the number one non-communicable disease
that we are trying to tackle today.
Back in Kuwait, Dr al-Dousari's team
collect dust for analysis from nearly 50 sites across the country.
Dust is complex material.
Its chemical and mineral composition varies depending
on where it comes from.
These variations have a bearing on its health impact.
The size of dust particles is key in assessing their impact on health.
The Kuwaiti scientists measure the size range by looking at the light
scattered when a laser beam is shone through the sample.
The size of the particle is very important in causing
respiratory problems.
85% of dust size in Kuwait is 10 micrometres and that is the
size that usually causes respiratory complaints and exacerbation
of asthma.
When we breathe in dust, particles smaller than 10 micrometres,
the PM 10 particles,
become lodged in the lungs causing breathing difficulties.
Even smaller particles,
PM 2.5, can actually cross directly into our bloodstream.
The small particles, they interfere with the gas exchange of the lung
and result in severe respiratory diseases.
Scientists at institutions across the world are doing further
tests that add to the analysis.
Claire Corkhill is a mineralogist at the University of Sheffield
in the UK.
She leads a laboratory studying soil and dust particles.
What we are looking at now is the dust under
a scanning electron microscope.
At the moment we are magnified by 300 times.
The scale bar on this image is 50 microns across.
So these particles are really very small.
We have some individual ones but they also agglomerate all together
in big clumps.
You can see there is a whole different distribution of sizes,
some of them very small and some of them a lot larger.
With another technique, X-ray diffraction,
Claire can tell what mineral types are present in the dust sample.
Minerals are highly structured and different ones can have
different effects when we breathe them in.
This is the diffraction pattern from the dust sample.
What we have been able to identify are four different phases and
these are gypsum, which is calcium sulphate.
There's also calcite which is calcium carbonate.
There is quartz which is probably the main phase that is
present in this material.
And also a very small amount of a type of mica called muscovite
which is a clay material.
Quartz in dust can be in the form of tiny sharp crystals which
can cause severe irritation.
Quartz is responsible for upregulation
of the inflammatory cells in the respiratory system.
Aluminium and magnesium in the dust are responsible for causing
mucous irritation in the upper and lower airways.
The dust isn't purely mineral.
Sticking to these dust particles,
there may be materials such as pollen and bacteria.
Studies show that these contaminants can make breathing problems worse.
You go out to the desert,
you see a lot of dirt and topsoil and you don't see any growth.
No trees, no brush, no anything and you think it's sterile.
Well, it's not. Even in the most inhabitable regions,
if you reach down and you pick between your index finger and
your thumb, that would be about a gram of topsoil, you would
have anywhere between 10,000 to a billion bacterial cells.
Dust is clearly a major hazard, so there's an urgent need to understand
the behaviour of dust storms to help people cope with their impact.
Three, two, one. Ignition start and lift off.
One of the best ways to study dust storms is by satellites
orbiting the Earth.
People didn't understand the intensity and how far these
storms could move until we have satellite imagery.
NASA has over 20 Earth-observing satellites that are
monitoring constantly different components of the energy and
water and carbon cycles.
Using satellites, we're able to get
a global picture of the land surface
and different components of the land surface.
For example, you can monitor the type and amount of vegetation.
In addition, you can also tell how wet the soil is,
by using microwaves.
So if you know how wet the surface is, you have a better idea of
the intensity and duration and locations of potential dust storms.
NASA's Goddard Space Center is the largest organisation
in the world monitoring the Earth, the solar system and the universe.
10,000 people work here and several hundred scientists specialise
in looking at the Earth.
With the information satellites gather from land,
sea and the air, scientists build computer models that help
them simulate past and future conditions.
Dr Peter Colarco is one of the teams
studying particles in the atmosphere.
So this is an animation from
a global Earth system model that we run here at NASA.
What we're simulating in this are the distributions
of what we call aerosols or particles in the atmosphere.
And the different colours represent different kinds
of these particles and they come from all kinds of different sources.
So the blue colours are from sea spray,
that's blown up by the winds at the surface of the sea.
The greener colours come from smoke sources and
so there we have individual fires that are going off in the
model and emitting smoke into the atmosphere and it's
transported over long distances.
The whiter colours correspond to what we would call anthropogenic
pollutants, so things that come from power plants or car emissions.
And so you can see places, especially in China,
or in the east coast of the United States or even Europe where
a lot of these pollutants are emitted and transported.
And then, finally,
the redder colours that we have correspond to dust storms and
so in that case what we're looking at is the effect of the surface
winds blowing across a region that has a lot of fine particles
that can be blown up into the air and blown by the winds over
very long distances.
Using models like this helps scientists understand what is
happening in the Earth's atmosphere.
Other projects concentrate on collecting actual data about
atmospheric particles.
Dr Robert Levy has been working on a long-term global aerosol record.
So this is a timed series from the MODIS Terra satellite.
We are trying to create global observations of aerosol.
These are not models. These are based on camera-like images.
How it works is satellites measure light reflected from the
Earth and you can see that there's places on the globe where you
see lots of aerosol, which is a bright orange colour and you
can see the hotspots around the globe.
You see the dust in Africa, biomass burning in the Amazon.
What we don't have from the satellite is exactly
what it's made out of.
You get a sense of what kind it is, if it's dust, smoke, pollution.
One place that you do see,
at least in the 15-year record that we have,
is there seems to be an increase in the Middle East, along the Arabian
Peninsula and that region and it seems to be a significant increase.
NASA studies back up what people on the ground can see for themselves.
Oh, look at that, look at that!
These satellites studies are now being put to practical use.
NASA shares its data with other research groups,
who are developing a global sand and dust storm early warning system.
This former church in the Spanish city of Barcelona is now
a world centre for science.
The interior is taken up by the massive MareNostrum III
supercomputer, used by research scientists across the world.
One project is to predict dust storms,
in this case for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
Other centres in China, Japan and Korea cover the Asia region and the
aim ultimately is to alert people when a dust storm is expected.
The role of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre is to provide
everyday forecasts of sudden dust storms over North Africa,
the Middle East and Europe.
The dust storm or the dust forecasting is very similar to
a weather forecast - precipitation, but also the wind regions, right?
You know, based on different meteorological scenarios.
If you have more wind or less wind,
you're going to have more or less dust, depending on these anomalies.
Basically, what we're producing now are three-day forecasts.
This is a forecast from the Barcelona group
for three days in June, 2016.
The high concentrations are yellow and brown,
but the resolution and accuracy aren't yet up to the standard
or detail of weather forecasts.
Probably - and this is what's going to probably happen in the
future - we're going to have probabilistic forecasting,
so we're going to have an ensemble of forecasts with different
regional conditions and very high resolution and we will be
able to provide probabilistic forecasts as this is
happening now for weather forecasting for precipitation.
For example, you have seen that we have
a 30% chance of precipitation in this area or a 70% chance
so that's the idea also with dust storms in the future,
particularly these storms that are really very difficult to capture,
which are the finer scale but that can be particularly intense.
In fact, our dust forecast requires even more computing time than
a weather forecast would require.
It's only by having a machine like the one we have behind us
that we can afford performing the best dust forecasts
and not only the dust forecasts themselves but the archiving
and the management of the data that is being produced,
which is in the order of gigabytes of data every single day.
The Barcelona and NASA scientists know their forecasts would be
helped if they had better local data from the countries concerned.
Of course, the other thing that we need to bring in is more data
that comes from the ground, that will help us refine things
like the maps we use for our dust sources.
And even have them evolving over time by including some
information about vegetation and economics and how that will
influence things like dust sources.
War makes data collection impossible.
Conflicts in Iraq and more recently Syria have actually worsened
the problem of dust storms.
And the energies of the people are consumed by conflict and survival.
The problem that we have in our region is the conflicts,
the instability and the ongoing violence and terrorism.
And that is aggravating the situation.
Unfortunately, a lot of the tracked vehicles and the driving over the
desert surfaces by the combatants has disturbed the desert
surface and made it worse.
The effect of war activities, especially in Iraq and Syria,
cause a huge amount of vegetation to have been destroyed.
I'm talking about native vegetation,
which made huge sources of dust, never there in the past.
If we have a dust storm generated in a place like Syria and Iraq,
it is very different from a dust storm which is generated from places
like Oman or UAE because in places like Iraq and Syria we have had
conflicts for years, so we have toxic elements which could be
attached to the surface.
Dust moves many thousands of kilometres, and in moving
picks up all kinds of what we would call legacy chemicals.
It could be depleted uranium, it could be pesticides,
could be hazard chemicals, heavy metals, contaminants.
And the dust itself becomes like a small nucleus,
it attracts and sticks together and brings pollutants together.
So as those big areas of dust get lifted and moved, they become
part of the ambient air quality problems that many cities have.
Scientists have also observed an increase in temperature in
the Middle East over the past 80 years.
And over the same period, a decrease in rainfall.
Even before the wars, these conditions were damaging,
particularly for agriculture.
Many farmers abandoned the lands, particularly in Syria,
and those farmers went to the cities
so there's a lot of land abandonment as well.
This creates wind erosion in what we had before as agricultural fields.
These are now exposed to wind erosion.
Syria wasn't before a source area. Now it's a huge area of dust.
Also, the area between the Atlas mountains and the Tigris river,
we found a huge amount of...
Because this was affected by war activities, multiple war activities.
So trained farms and abundant farms became this huge source of dust,
in fact, from this region.
Once the land is dried up, any sort of wind,
any strong wind in dry times
can blow the dust particles.
So people in Khuzestan now have one third of their days a year dusty
and, you know, living in those areas is not pleasant any more.
The city of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran is now one of the most polluted
cities in the planet, partly because of dust blowing in from Iraq.
We've been witnessing a steady increase
in the number of incidences but also in the intensity of dust storms.
Maybe in the past two decades.
So it's not only affecting our border cities but now
sometimes the dust storms are moving ahead into the capital, Tehran.
On June 2nd 2014, Tehran was hit by a spectacular dust storm.
Five people were killed and 30 injured. Flights were cancelled.
There were numerous car accidents
and the city was plunged into darkness.
When this happens in a nation's capital, people take notice.
As well as the social impact,
the economic cost of events like this is devastating.
Economists calculate that dust storms cost the Middle East
and North Africa around 12 billion every year.
So there's a pressing need for practical remedies.
One of the first priorities is to tackle desertification.
In Kuwait, Ali Aldosari's team are experimenting
with native desert plants to try to stabilise the soil.
These drought-tolerant plants have extensive root systems which
help prevent soil from blowing away.
This was a quarry area in the past in Kuwait.
The quarrying was prohibited in Kuwait in 2003,
so all the quarries were dumped and zero vegetation
was in this area before.
Now, the area's rehabilitated again by using native plants in
order to form a very good native life in the region.
We planted about 110,000 native plants in the area.
These native plants captured a huge amount of dust and sand
around the plant.
It wasn't there before, so this kind of sediment is formed by the
dust and sand transported by wind. It contains a lot of nutrients.
It reaches up to 9% of organic matter inside it.
Native plants is a measured solution of that. Let's give an example.
Haloxylon salicornicum is a plant which can control
up to 10 cubic metre of sand and dust.
This is a single plant. What if it's thousands of plants?
Satellite data can also play a role in improving land
and water management.
In 2015, NASA launched a new satellite.
The satellite makes direct measurements
of the soil moisture every few days.
If you understand how much water's in the land surface,
that can really help you forecasting and monitoring droughts and floods.
What we're seeing here, the red and yellow colours represent
precipitation and the orange and blue colours are the changes
in soil moisture from the average.
Blue colours represent wetter areas
and red colours represent drier areas.
So, if you have a direct observation of the amount of moisture
in the land surface and you can improve your understanding
of the amount of moisture in the root zone, that's a very, very
important variable for improving your understanding of crops.
NASA hopes that when this information is made available
to farmers, it will improve land management,
reducing the need for irrigation.
For people living in dust storm areas, new technology could help.
Nowadays, it's possible to check the dust forecasts online.
These forecasts from the Barcelona website
are part of the global early warning system.
They're updated daily.
It provides a map with details of dust concentration in the
Middle East and North Africa. If you zoom in around Syria and the
southern part of Iran, you see a high concentration of dust.
The yellow colour shows higher concentration.
The dark brown is very high concentration of dust which
is beyond, well beyond WHO limits.
So you will see what happens every hour in the next 72 hours.
The forecasts are becoming ever more accurate.
In future, they could help airports,
schools and emergency services to plan ahead.
Atmospheric dust has always been with us,
and there are some benefits.
There's some very positive impacts from dust storms blowing
around the planet.
Many of the soils in the Caribbean islands,
the clays came from North Africa
and it enabled the pre-Colombian Indians to build clay pottery
and without the dust blowing across,
building up in the soils, the clay wouldn't be in the Caribbean.
You wouldn't find it.
Dust also contains valuable nutrients for plants.
Some of the rainforest, from North Africa, the dust blows over,
it goes in to South America during the Northern Hemisphere's winter
and moves down in there, and many of the plants derive
their nutrients and are fertilised from dust.
And the same with Asian dust blowing across,
fertilises some of the northern Hawaiian island rainforests
and sustains them, so there's some very positive things.
Scientists in America are investigating the effect
of Saharan dust, which blows across the Atlantic every summer.
Dr Erin Lipp's team are looking at whether this dust has an impact,
good or bad, on the coral reefs off the coast of Florida.
The dust that we see in South Florida is from the Saharan
region and really July and August is the peak time
when we tend to see dust events.
Typically, it'll look like a hazy day and to somebody
that doesn't know that there's dust in the air,
or isn't thinking about it, they'll just say, "It's a hazy day".
But you can tell, and if you're collecting aerosol samples on
filters, you can actually see that your filters start turning
orange during dust events.
Each summer, the scientists return to the same coral reefs to
study the health of the coral.
They've seen worrying changes.
The economy of the Florida Keys is almost entirely based on
having a healthy coral reef,
whether it's because commercial or recreational fishers are going
out to the reef and that's where the fish stocks are or because of
diving and having a picturesque place to be in the water.
We've seen a very large declines in the corals in the last 20 years.
They're not in a particularly good state right now.
The dust might be involved in the deterioration.
At least it's a hypothesis that we have.
We're looking at changes to the water chemistry
as the dust is deposited.
We're looking at changes in the amount of trace metals
that are there, especially iron, which is very limiting in marine
waters, and there's a lot of organisms that require iron to grow.
The Saharan dust contains iron and this irons stimulates an
explosion in bacterial populations.
The team wants to know if this contributes to the damage
to the coral. It's a complex picture and it's not yet clear.
I grew up in South Florida and it was quite common in news
reports for the weather forecast to say, "Oh,
"there's Saharan dust and there's going to be beautiful sunsets".
That was image of Saharan dust,
so I think there may be a particular draw.
It's a unique aspect that people don't necessarily think of
here that makes for, you know,
very picturesque views when you're on the water.
Science can play a part in understanding,
predicting and preventing dust storms.
This knowledge then needs to be used by policy makers.
We're very good in developing technologies,
launching satellites and doing things,
but when it comes to policies, many times we act stupidly.
We become stupid.
We don't understand the realities on the ground or we don't care
about the long-term consequences of our policy.
Very, very clearly,
desertification is something we need to tackle at a very local level.
And it's mundane things - planting trees,
using proper irrigation, making sure that we have
a vegetative cover that avoids the aerosolisation of the topsoil.
Of course, dust is a natural phenomenon.
It's always going to be there.
We're going to have the natural desert,
it's going to blow up dust,
it's going to transport this dust over different regions.
But we can do a lot with land conservation practices.
They still have some dust storms in the US but not of that size,
because they have better land management practices.
The same has to happen in the Middle East.
This is a multi-national problem and it needs
a multi-national solution, so countries in the region
have to come together and solve this problem.
Dust storms are part of a wider environmental problem.
The wars and conflicts of the region will eventually be over.
When they are, the environmental problems won't have gone away.