The words the desert economy needs

From Phoenix Desert to Algerian oases, via Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. The great value that comes from the desert is invisible until you change your perspective.

How do you generate economic, social and cultural value on an arid land? How is it possible to live in environments characterized by little water, where it is difficult to cultivate and thus produce food? In other words, how does the desert economy work?

The word “economy” means, etymologically, “housekeeping”. To answer these questions, then, it is necessary to look at those for whom the desert is home: that is, more than 3 billion people worldwide living in the drylands that cover 46.2 percent of the landmass.

Not least because, as global warming continues and the process is called “desertification,” these questions will increasingly resonate in the daily lives of 1 billion people in 200 different countries around the world¹.

Between 2015 and 2019, recalls the UNCCD, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, at least 100 million hectares of healthy and productive land were “degraded”² worldwide, affecting food and water security globally³.

An annual loss that is equivalent to twice the size of Greenland and impacts the lives of an estimated 1.3 billion people who are directly exposed to land degradation.

The extractive economy breeds desert: what if from the very desert we could find regenerative solutions?

The uninvited guests of the desert

«There is this feeling that the desert is empty and cruel, and it can be, but I have learned that the desert is rich. There is variety and life, just happening underground».

Alejandro Acierto, an artist and lecturer, left leafy Chicago in recent years to move in front of the Sonoran Desert in the Phoenix (Texas)⁴

He thought he was facing an abandoned space but discovered the richness of the desert. «To know the desert, it is necessary to experience it. By observing, you learn that there is much more than we can see. There is a lot of growth in the desert».

It all started with the terricolous owls living in the Sonoran Desert and the rapid urbanization affecting these territories.

Alejandro Acierto, artist, videomaker and professor of Interdisciplinary and Performance Arts at Arizona State University, accompanied by designer Andy Mara and together with a Canadian research team began to investigate the impact of some specific construction and urban expansion projects that required the destruction and thus displacement of natural habitats for desert wildlife near Phoenix.

It was both a work of conservation and enquiry: «We asked ourselves how we think about wildlife in these projects and how we relate» he says. «I was interested in this tension between how we as humans negotiate the value of the land and how we value the relationship with these natural or native inhabitants».

In 2023, Acierto then inaugurated an art project called Uninvited Guests⁵, an installation of photographic works, videos, sculptures and excavated materials that chronicle the environmental consequences of urban sprawl in the desert’s fragile ecosystems. A current and ongoing project.

«Uninvited Guests is expanding. I literally dove into the historical archives to study the evolution of land value and land use, and I’m going back to shoot additional scenes in west Phoenix, where they are building large luxury apartments and where you can find many openings, burrows, tunnels of animals that have their habitat there. I’ve documented everything and I’m able to visualize the terrain as consisting only of burrows».

A commitment, that of Alejandro Acierto, that shifts the focus from an anthropocentric view of the land, the main cause of extractive economy policies, to a socio-ecological dimension (as The Economy of Mangroves teaches us), decisive in triggering new mechanisms of generative economy.

Making the desert perceived not as a space to be occupied but as an already rich place has thus become a goal. «Over time, I designed and made large visual installations applied to the very fences that mark off construction sites».

Those that are usually occupied by advertisements or promotions of what is being built became spaces to tell the story of what was being destroyed. «I made a scale image of the burrows and tunnels of the animals that lived in those places in order to make the animals’ presence known. The fences are located right in front of the freeway and have generated great resonance in people. They will be exposed again in the coming months, but always for short periods, even just a few hours». A desert not to be conquered but to be preserved.

«Things are meant to be here, and what has been fascinating for me is to think that this is not a desert in the sense that it is an empty space; rather, it is a full and inhabited place»

Oases as a relational model

Acierto’s art and conservation project thus highlights the importance of knowing what is already happening on an area before any intervention, of entering into a relationship with who and what lives there, and of investigating the difficulties and expectations of the communities that inhabit it. This can only be the first step in building economic and social value in a desert area or, more generally, in territories facing an ecological and economic crisis.

Architect and urban planner Pietro Laureano,⁶ in the late 1970s, went to Algeria and lived for two years in the oases of the Sahara: here he learned how oases are not due to chance, but to the skillful action of human beings who have found ways to collect water in obviously hostile areas. Areas that, however, as prehistoric paintings testify, have not always been deserts but have become progressively desertified.

How is an oasis formed? If a small depression is dug in the sand, condensed drops of moisture in the night can allow plants to take root: the sprout must be protected with dried palm leaves, which attract insects and form humus that slowly makes the sand fertile. In order to grow, palms need to be fertilized by hand by humans, as well as water. This process is therefore accompanied by skillful systems of underground tunnels, canals (qanāt in Iran, foggara in Algeria) built with filtering materials such as stone and earth that drain the underground flows of water and through specific slopes channel them to the palm groves. These channels are interspersed with wells that serve not to extract but to maintain the microclimate and absorb moisture from the soil and atmosphere. The water is then distributed in the oasis through cleverly calculated systems, right where the algorithm originated. 

The creation and maintenance of an oasis is the result of a circular economy process of water management: captured under the dunes, it is piped under villages built of rammed earth and returned to the oases, which the more they grow the more they increase the humidity and consequently the water available to the system. 

Despite these results, there is still much to be done. «The effectiveness of the Zero Oil Plan remains uncertain. Achieving success depends on peace, which is essential to our efforts.» Telling us the context within which to read these numbers is Professor Dahiru Hassan Balami, professor of economics at the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), a member of the Nigerian National Bank’s “Monetary Policy Committee” and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Arid Zone Economy.” «An enabling environment, characterized by peace, respect for the law and access to water, is crucial for environmental preservation».

A peace that is built on a more robust economy. «The main challenges for drylands stem first from resource scarcity, then from lack of capital and financing, and finally from the soundness of the agricultural system», Professor Balam explains. «Added to this is the impact of climate change, especially manifested through intense heat waves that pose significant health risks to people and agriculture. Addressing these challenges primarily requires strengthening infrastructure, improving irrigation systems and workforce training».

For Laureano, Italy’s representative on the Technical-Scientific Committee of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and now a UNESCO consultant for drylands, Islamic civilization and endangered ecosystems, the creation of the oases is an example of traditional knowledge, that is, of «techniques and practices in common use in a territory for soil management, the use and protection of natural areas, rural and monumental architecture and for the organization of urban centers» ⁷.

A multifunctional, long-term, contextualized, relational knowledge in which aesthetics, functionality and, often, sacredness are expressed together for the preservation of one’s living conditions. And they become, in a word, culture.

Through the International Traditional Knowledge Institute, Laureano has promoted the creation of the Traditional Knowledge World Bank⁸, an archive in open source and wikipedia format that classifies with special tabs the different techniques of forestry and animal husbandry, agriculture, water management, soil protection, architecture, resource management, social organization and art.

Traditional knowledge and its sharing is thus the first step toward sustainable management processes of complex territories, including through cooperative tools and methodologies.

It is from here, from the rediscovery of traditional knowledge and thus from the sustainable enhancement of a territory’s natural resources that the future of the economy for arid and desert areas passes.

Beyond the fossil economy

Just as the world of culture today addresses the issue of “beyond fossil culture”, similarly, and with greater determination, a number of ambitious economic projects to go “beyond” the fossil economy are being born. 

Even today, the exploitation of the desert as a major hydrocarbon deposit effectively determines the wealth of the major extracting countries. Global oil consumption reached a record high in 2023, and forecasts are to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C⁹. But something is changing.

The IEA (the International Energy Agency) itself ¹⁰«dependence on oil is set to weaken further in many parts of the world in the coming years. The shift to a clean energy economy is picking up pace, with increasing sales of electric vehicles, improved energy efficiency and other clean energy technologies advancing rapidly».

And when demand changes, so does supply. One example of this is Vision 2030¹¹, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious program with the goal of diversifying the country’s economy by reducing its dependence on oil. A plan that focuses on the economic transformation of the world’s second-largest oil extracting country through the development of sectors such as tourism, technology and innovation.

So does Nigeria’s No-Oil Export program, which was activated with World Bank support as early as the 1980s¹², but is only now registering surprising results. According to the Nigeria Export Agency (NPEC), the national export of non-fossil products grew by 39.91 percent in 2022, touching an all-time record¹³.

Despite these results, there is still much to be done. «The effectiveness of the Zero Oil Plan remains uncertain. Achieving success depends on peace, which is essential to our efforts.» Telling us the context within which to read these numbers is Professor Dahiru Hassan Balami, professor of economics at the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), a member of the Nigerian National Bank’s “Monetary Policy Committee” and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Arid Zone Economy.” «An enabling environment, characterized by peace, respect for the law and access to water, is crucial for environmental preservation».

Thus, the care of the land and its natural resources remains crucial. «Efficient management of existing water resources is critical, given current inefficiencies. Using rainwater and cultivating drought-resistant crops are practical measures that can significantly help mitigate the impacts of climate change. So can using groundwater resources and implementing simple but effective technologies such as generators and water pumps. However, the predominant concern lies in social insecurity, encompassing infrastructure inadequacies, low incomes, socio-economic disparities and lack of financial resources».

«In the context of desert economies, the main challenge today lies in achieving peace, which is essential to their potential prosperity. Despite their considerable productivity, social insecurity is a significant obstacle to development. Peace is indispensable»

The process of cooperation that policymakers and national governments are called upon to adopt with their communities in managing ecological crises in the territories ultimately gains even more importance in light of the social responses that can be triggered when resources are degraded and communities begin to compete for them.

If “economy” is “administering the house,” it is essential that this, before everything else, does not burn down.

This article was written with the collaboration of Giulia Melchionda

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1. Ansa, R. (2022, June 17). Giornata desertificazione: 1 miliardo le persone colpite. In ANSA.it. https://www.ansa.it/canale_ambiente/notizie/clima/2022/06/17/giornata-desertificazione-anbi-1-miliardo-persone-colpite_05872e2e-f244-442e-9c06-8d7042c4e776.html. ↩︎
2. By “degradation” the UNCCD defines negative changes in one of the indicators between land cover change, soil productivity dynamics (LPD) and soil organic carbon stock (SOC) ↩︎
3. UNCCD Data Dashboard. https://data.unccd.int/land-degradation. ↩︎
4. The Sonoran Desert, an arid region covering 120,000 square miles (310,800 square kilometres) is located in southwestern Arizona and southeastern California in the United States and includes much of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, part of the state of Baja California, and the western half of the state of Sonora. See Britannica. Sonoran Desert. https://www.britannica.com/place/Sonoran-Desert.  ↩︎
5. Acierto, A. (2023). Uninvited Guests. https://alejandroacierto.com/uninvited-guests. ↩︎
6. Wikipedia. Pietro Laureano. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Laureano. ↩︎
7. International Traditional Knowledge Institute. Cosa sono le Conoscenze Tradizionali.In ITKI. https://itki.org/it/le-conoscenze-tradizionali/cosa-sono-le-conoscenze-tradizionali/. ↩︎
8. TKWB – Traditional Knowledge World Bank – TKWB – Traditional Knowledge World Bank. https://tkwb.org/index.php?title=TKWB_-_Traditional_Knowledge_World_Bank.
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9. SEI, Climate Analytics, E3G, IISD, UNEP. Production Gap Report 2023. In UNEP – UN Environment Programme. https://www.unep.org/resources/production-gap-report-2023. ↩︎
10. Graham, R., Atigui, I. (2024). A strong focus on oil security will be critical throughout the clean energy transition. In IEA. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/a-strong-focus-on-oil-security-will-be-critical-throughout-the-clean-energy-transition. ↩︎
11. Saudi Vision 2030. https://www.vision2030.gov.sa/en/. ↩︎
12. World Bank. (1982). Nigeria Non-Oil Export Prospect. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/560521468110650315/pdf/multi-page.pdf. ↩︎
13. Nigerian Export Promotion Council. (2023). Non-oil exports rose to $4.8bn in 2022 – NEPC. NEPC. https://nepc.gov.ng/blog/2023/01/14/non-oil-exports-rose-to-4-8bn-in-2022-nepc/. ↩︎