Making The Desert Bloom

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2019

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the threat of climate change looming, and growing ambivalence about whether the world can meet its stringent carbon emissions reduction targets to limit global warming, many people are searching for new solutions. But some people think they’ve already cracked it, as well as the solution to world hunger, simply by growing plants in salt-water. Dr. Dennis Bushnell, NASA's Chief Scientist, explains the potential he sees in the salt-water loving plants, known as halophytes. We'll also hear from two scientists, Dr. Dionysia Lyra and Dr. RK Singh who are working to make that potential a reality, at the Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: Low chenopod shrub, Samphire (Salicornia europaea), a kind of halophyte. Kalamurina Station Wildlife Sanctuary, South Australia. Photo credit: Auscape/UIG via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello there, I'm Ed Butler.
0:03.1	Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.
0:05.5	Coming up, what is our reporter tucking into today?
0:09.4	It's a really strange texture is like rubber.
0:13.6	And juicy.
0:14.9	Yeah, I think it's a bit like sweet, sour.
0:17.4	Mmm.
0:18.4	The answer, she's eating a type of juicy green veg grown in salt water.
0:23.9	Today, we're looking at all kinds of saltwater farming.
0:26.5	Why it could, just could, be the solution to the world's toughest environmental problems.
0:31.2	We can solve land water, food, energy, and climate.
0:34.8	We're talking about solving world hunger.
0:37.2	Yep, we just might have cracked all of that. Business Daily from the BBC.
0:44.9	It's frankly been a fairly depressing few months for anyone tracking the climate change problem
0:49.8	around the world. urgent action is needed and it's needed fast, the UN says, if we are to avoid a
0:55.4	disastrous two-degree rise in global temperatures in the coming decades. Countries have to expand
1:01.4	their targets, limiting their emissions by a factor of five, its warning. Little sign of that.
1:07.3	The latest carbon emission figures from the US, for example, the world's second largest polluter, are heading up, not down. So what is the answer? Well, we do like to focus,
1:16.5	if we can, on solutions here on Business Daily. So how about this one? I've been speaking to
1:21.4	Dennis Bushnell. He's the chief scientist of NASA, the US Space Agency, which takes a keen
1:25.8	scientific interest in matters terrestrial as well
1:28.8	as astral. And he reckons when it comes to reversing some of the Earth's most intractable
	...

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