Even in the driest of deserts, there’s a hidden water source: the air.

That's the insight of this year's Dyson Award winner. The annual prizes call on “design and engineering students from 18 countries to create innovative, practical, elegant solutions to some of humanity's greatest challenges,” according to The Huffington Post. This year the award went to Edward Linacre for his groundbreaking solution to agricultural catastrophes caused by drought. He won £10,000 for his invention—the Airdrop—and so did his school, Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology. The Airdrop pulls air into a network of tubes underground, where it is cooled to extract moisture and then funneled down to plants’ roots. See his “elevator pitch” for the project below:

Harvesting water from the air isn’t a new idea; National Geographic reported on the ancient technique of fog harvesting back in 2009. Linacre told the Daily Mail that his design is a unique solution for agricultural issues because “other systems of harvesting water from the atmosphere usually require massive amounts of energy, as they run refrigeration units. Airdrop simply uses the temperature difference between the air and the cool earth beneath the surface.” The Airdrop, he says, is a good solution for rural farmers because it’s low-tech: they can install and maintain it themselves.

Whether or not this design can practically translate to the developing world is still up in the air and probably depends largely upon its cost. Still, the simple idea of tapping into the water that’s present in the air in even the driest of environments could be very promising for increasingly parched areas of the globe.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

The Ganges River Delta, in Pakistan, could be feeding a lot more people. Photo: Lunar Planetary Institute (Flickr)

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

The next century is going to leave the planet parched for drinking water. But a new study asserts that the problem isn't water scarcity -- it's water efficiency.

The global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says we need to increase food and water production by 70% if we are to feed that population. Can we do that with the resources we have?

Yes, says the study, published by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Researchers looked at 10 major river basins to assess how the world uses its water, and concluded that with refined practices, we can sustainably exceed the needs of current and future generations.

It is not how much water we have, but how we use that water, that will drive resource politics. According to CGIAR, most of the world considers different uses of water in isolation from one another. A more integrated approach to the water needs of food, industry, and energy would lead to more efficient allocation.

Dr. Simon Cook, of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture described the current practice as one of “complete fragmentation of how river basins are managed amongst different actors and even countries where the water needs of different sectors – agriculture, industry, environment and mining – are considered separately rather than as interrelated and interdependent.”

Today, for example, water rights are allocated to hydroelectricity in the Mekong, leaving farmers and fishermen up and down the river bereft of water. There's no shortage of Mekong water. It's just being unevenly distributed. CGIAR recommend water institutions take a more integrated approach, one the total needs of water within a region, rather than having compartmentalized institutions working independent from one another.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where the land is regularly parched and massive droughts like the current one in East Africa may become more commonplace, improving methods to save and store rain for agriculture use would also boost food production.

So the problem may not be an issue of resource scarcity or carrying capacity. But with this news comes responsibility: if the problems lie with us, then so must the solution.

In the early 1990s Saddam Hussein drained what biblical scholars believe to be the Garden of Eden. With the water went the people, known as the Ma’dan, and their way of life. Now, Iraqi-American hydraulic engineer Dr. Azzam Alwash and his organization Nature Iraq, are working with the Ma’dan to restore the marshes of southern Iraq, in a project Alwash calls “Eden Again." He hopes the exiled people will come back as water and wildlife return to what had been turned into a desert, according to a segment on the PBS show, Nature.

For thousands of years the Ma’dan called the marshes home. They lived on floating islands made of reeds that grew in the marshes. They caught fish, hunted birds, and kept water buffalo, says an article from Spiegel Online. Without water this life wasn’t possible and the Ma’dan people either migrated to the city or suffered in poverty.

Alwash returned to the marshes in 2003 after Hussein fled from power. He found that those that had remained in the area had already begun to dig through the man-made embankments that diverted the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers away from the marshes, he explained in a recent NPR interview. Flash forward seven years and the Ma’dan have destroyed up to 98 percent of the embankments, Alwash tells the Guardian. Their motivations more economic, than anything else.

Not because they are tree-huggers or bird-lovers, but because it's a source of economic income to them, because they can harvest reeds and sell them. They can fish and feed a family or sell them to earn extra income.

Hundreds of thousands of Ma’dan people who have been living in urban exile are now used to many aspects of modern life, Alwash explains in another article in the Guardian. They’ve become familiar with electricity, television, air-conditioning and wifi. But Alwash sees no reason why comforts such as these can’t be incorporated into the traditional Ma’dan way of life. Once services are in place Alwash anticipates a flood of “reverse migration.”

Right now, the biggest stressors to the marshes are ongoing drought and hydro-dams in Iraq's northern neighbor, Turkey. In the NPR interview Alwash explains that the drought has reduced the marshes to about 35 percent of their former size. But Alwash is confident that 75 percent of the marshes can be restored despite the drought and dams in Turkey.

When Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the early 1990s he attempted to turn a paradise into a desert and wipe one of the oldest civilizations on earth off the face of the earth itself. He nearly succeeded. But with the help of Dr. Azzam Alwash and Nature Iraq, the Ma’dan have proved the resilient force that nature and humanity are, as a desert becomes Eden again.

Iraqi photographer Sate Al Abbasi's beautiful shots of Ma'dan people at home in the marshes can be viewed in the slideshow below.

Iraq's Marsh Arabs have coexisted with the wetlands' unique ecosystem for 6,000 years. Photo: Dr. Michael Izady, Ph.D. (flickr)

Southern Iraq is home to one of the largest wetlands in the world, where the tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates meet. But a three-year drought in the Middle East, along with dams and water projects in neighboring countries, has left southern Iraq with a serious water shortage, reports the BBC.

For 6,000 years these wetlands have been home to people called Marsh Arabs. They made their huts out of the marsh reeds, ate fish they caught in the waters, and sold the milk and cheese they made from water buffalo milk, explains the LA Times. (A beautiful slide show of Iraq's marshlands and the Marsh Arabs accompanies the The LA Times article.) But now these wetlands are roughly 30 percent of their former size, says the BBC, and they are continuing to shrink.

The marsh's dropping water levels have devastated the wealth of the region and the livelihoods of the Marsh Arabs. Jassim Asadi, of the nonprofit conservation group Nature Iraq, tells the LA Times the marshes used to supply two-thirds of the fish consumed in Iraq. Now people buy bottled water and frozen fish imported from Iran. “It is an economic disaster,” Asadi says.

Though the drought is "the most immediate cause" threatening the wetlands and their inhabitants, regional water politics cannot be ignored, the BBC says. The Tigris and Euphrates flow through multiple countries, and the rivers are the main water source in the area. A BBC video helps break down the situation:

About 70 percent of Iraq's waters originates outside the country, in Turkey, Syria, and Iran... These countries already have ambitious damn and irrigation projects, limiting how much is left for Iraq. And yet more damns are planned — further reducing the flow into the marshes.

Some scholars and politicians remain hopeful that diplomacy and cooperation amongst the different Middle Eastern countries will allow for more equitable water management. But as things stand now, there is no immediate fix on the horizon.

Sugar is a popular commodity in India, where imports are expected to rise as droughts cause sugar prices to rise by 50 percent. Here vendors make sugar cane juice. Photo: Jim-C (flickr)

Sugar rushes tend to be followed by sugar crashes.

The western Indian state of Maharashtra has been called the "sugar bowl" of India, but that may be changing. A New York Times video sheds some light on the problems farmers in Maharashtra face as sugar production decreases, causing prices to rise.

India is the world's second-largest sugar producing country. But factors like insufficient rainfall, small plots of land and government regulation of the market are impacting sugar production in India and therefore driving up the price, making imported sugar a more affordable option in India.

Millions are on the edge of starvation in the Horn of Africa due in part to severe drought. Photo: Filipe Moreira (flickr)

Somalia and Ethiopia are hovering at the edge of famine.

The Washington Post reported on the crisis in the “hungry horn” of Africa last week. In Somalia, U.N. officials predict that half of the population, about 3.5 million people, will need food aid. The New York Times explains the hunger is driven by rampant political insecurity, spikes in global food prices, devaluation of the local currency, and a severe drought.

The World Food Program is struggling to keep up, having already doubled the amount of food it distributes in Somalia and needing an additional 369,000 metric tons of food in Ethiopa. But Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid organization, says the situation just keeps getting worse as cereal prices in the Horn in the last year surged by as much as 375 percent. To make things worse, the drought has killed of most livestock, forcing formerly self-sufficient people to wait in line for food aid.

The next rainy season isn’t due till October, and the wells and watering holes that the people and animals depend on during the dry season are already drying up. Even the camels are hard pressed to survive.

Mercy Corps' country director in Somalia says "It's a life or death situation right now." A 72-year-old herder says it's "the worst I've ever seen."

International Medical Corps, another international medical aid organization in Somalia, is predicting grave starvation risks, with a recent 400 percent rise in the number of severely malnourished young children.

And the current drought — and its problems — are probably here to stay. Researchers have discovered that global warming is drying out the Horn of Africa — and it's happening much faster than anyone anticipated.

What will happen when current drought becomes a permanent shift to desert conditions? Somalia is only the first. Ethiopia is soon to follow.

Whether it is Somalia’s food crisis, the multi-year drought in Australia, or flooding in the American bread basket, climate change is going to vastly affect the world’s food markets.

Photo: Rob McDougall (flickr)

Access to cheap energy underpins modern societies. Finding enough to fuel industrialized economies and pull developing countries out of poverty without overheating the climate is a central challenge of the 21st century. — Michael Wines, New York Times

Sub-Saharan Africa is perilously close to an energy crisis.

Massive drought across Kenya and Ethiopia has slowed hydropower production to a trickle. Rickety electrical infrastructure in South Africa and elsewhere has led to huge rolling blackouts expected to go on for years in some regions, according to the International Herald Tribune. The World Bank says Africa's "lack of reliable power has already begun to hamper the region's development." The worst-hit African economies have seen economic growth slow by more than two percent.

Energy shortages impact a broad array of activities in these countries. In Uganda, for instance, power shortages are causing gas stations to run low on diesel. The environment suffers as well. For the 80 percent of sub-Saharan Africans who lack electricity, Inter Press Service News Agency says:

The destruction of natural vegetation could lead to desertification when there are no water catchment systems to feed rivers and streams. And when there is no water, the population in such an area suffers in many ways. They cannot plant crops and their animals die.

Solutions to the energy crisis still seem far off. India and China have begun funding new power generating facilities — in one instance providing Zambia's energy producer, Zesco, with $1.2 billion for upgrades and new capacity creation. But the sheer size of the problem suggests a multinational approach. "The best answer, most experts consulted agree, would be for nations to cooperate on regional power solutions," the New York Times reports. "One or two large regional plants, they say, could supply power more cheaply and efficiently than dozens of smaller ones."