The feisty fog-catchers of Chile

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IN THE school playground in Los Tomes a lone child, José Ossandón, plays with his emboque, a ball-and-cup game. The eight-year-old is the school’s only pupil. His teacher, Nilda Jimena Gallardo, herself a former pupil, says that enrolment has dropped from 65 when she started teaching 43 years ago. Drought has driven families away, she says. “Only the old remain.”

Los Tomes is an agricultural co-operative, one of 178 in Chile’s Coquimbo region. Nineteen comuneros try to grow wheat and raise sheep and goats on 2,800 hectares (7,000 acres) of semi-arid scrubland. A decade-long drought has made that harder. Hilltop springs where the animals once drank have dried up. As herds shrank and yields fell, farmers’ children moved away to take jobs in cities or at copper mines.

Hope for Los Tomes comes in the form of three 60-square-metre (646-square-foot) nets stretched between poles on a ridge above the community. These atrapanieblas capture droplets from the fog that rolls in from the sea 4km (2.5 miles) away. They trickle down to a pipe, which channels the water to two troughs at the foot of the ridge, from which livestock drink. The banner-like nets can harvest 650 litres (140 gallons) of water a day. “We’re content: it’s produced the results we wanted,” says José Ossandón, the child’s father and the president of the co-operative.

Chile has been investigating fog capture since the 1950s. The dense fog that arises from the Humboldt current, called the camanchaca, can be harvested with the help of a coastal mountain range and strong winds. Earlier attempts to turn the mist into usable water failed. In 1990 fog nets at Chungungo, a fishing village north of Los Tomes, captured 8,000 litres a day. Villagers argued about how to share responsibility for maintaining the atrapanieblas.

Climate change, which is expected to decrease rainfall in the region, has spurred a new quest for unconventional sources of water. The project at Los Tomes is part of an attempt to revive fog capture by encouraging better governance. A government development fund has put up cash. A team from the Catholic University of the North (UCN) sought out agricultural co-operatives whose members have shown that they can work together. “The question is not whether the fog collectors work but who’s going to provide and maintain them,” says Daniela Henríquez, a sociologist who leads the UCN team.

At Majada Blanca, a goat-herding community north of Los Tomes, three 150-square-metre fog catchers feed a plantation of young olive trees, a splash of green in the brown scrub. When the trees mature they will produce 750 litres of organic olive oil a year, which the comuneros will be able to sell for about $12,000. They reckon the water source will be a big selling point. “We’ll be pioneers in the production of quality olive oil made with fog water,” says one of them, Ricardo Álvarez. A privately owned brewery in Peña Blanca was quick to spot fog water’s marketing appeal. It is the main ingredient of its artisanal beer, called Atrapaniebla.

It makes a profit, but most fog-harvesting projects require subsidies in their early stages. The development fund paid 5.6m pesos apiece to put up the structures at Majada Blanca; when the nets wear out, the villagers will have to replace them at a cost of 100,000 pesos each. Coquimbo has more than 40,000 hectares of land with the right conditions for putting up fog-catchers. If it were fully exploited, the region could harvest 1,400 litres a second, enough to supply all its drinking water.

That might lure back educated young people from the cities. A chance to develop tourism near the Fray Jorge national park, a remnant of temperate rainforest which has survived thanks to its own natural fog-collection mechanism, brought Salvador Velásquez to his birthplace of Peral Ojo de Agua. Enrolment in the school has dropped from around 20 when he was a pupil to five. The village has teamed up with an agricultural co-operative to put up man-made fog collectors, which water a semi-arid conservation area. It offers tours, cabins and a campsite. Stands selling handicrafts line the road. “Roots, the land and the desire to start this brought me back,” says Mr Velásquez. If parched Coquimbo is to catch more people, it will need more fog-catchers.

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