Such is the case in Yemen, on the southern flank of the Arabian Peninsula, where the desert now looks like a whole new world. Satellite images showed about 100,000 solar panels gleaming in the sun, surrounded by green fields. The panels are connected to water pumps, providing farmers with free energy to pump out ancient groundwater. They are irrigating crops of khat, a shrub whose narcotic leaves are the country’s stimulant of choice and chewed by millions every day.
For these farmers, Yemen’s solar irrigation revolution was inevitable. Most crops can only be grown with irrigation, and the country’s long civil war has damaged the country’s power grid and made supplies of diesel for pumps expensive and unreliable. As a result, they are collectively turning to solar energy to ensure their supply of khat.
Helen Lackner, a Middle East development researcher at SOAS, University of London, said the panels were an immediate hit. Everyone wants one. But in a hydrological melee, the region’s groundwater – water left over from rainy times – is being depleted.
According to a recent analysis by Leonie Nimmo, a researcher working at the Center for Conflict in the UK, solar farms are pumping so much water that they have triggered “significant groundwater declines since 2018…despite high rainfall below the average level”. and environmental observatories. He said the spread of solar power in Yemen “has become an important, life-saving source of electricity” both for irrigating food crops and generating income from selling khat, but it has also “rapidly depleted the country’s scarce groundwater reserve”.
In the central Sanaa Basin, the agricultural heartland of Yemen, more than 30% of farmers use solar water pumps. In a report with Musaed Aklan, a water researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies in Sana’a, Lackner predicted a “complete shift” to solar power by 2028. But the basin may only have a few years left of recoverable water. Farmers who once found water at 100 feet or more now pump water from 1,300 feet or more.
In Afghanistan’s desert province of Helmand, about 1,500 miles northeast, more than 60,000 opium growers have abandoned malfunctioning state irrigation canals over the past few years and instead use solar-powered pumps to tap groundwater. As a result, groundwater levels typically drop 10 feet a year, said David Mansfield, an expert on the country’s opium industry at the London School of Economics.
A sudden ban on opium production in 2022 by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers may bring some relief. But the alternative wheat farmers grow is also a water-scarce crop. As a result, Helmand’s water bankruptcy may only be delayed.
“Very little is known about aquifers [in Helmand]its charge or when and if it might be depleted,” Mansfield said. But if the pumps run dry, many of the desert province’s million-strong population could be pushed into poverty because of this important desert resource (rainfall during wet periods legacy) will be lost forever.