Oil triggered the First Gulf War, but it is not the only liquid source that can lead to wars and global crises. Water (or rather its absence) will be the cause of future conflicts as it is the most valuable natural resource that can be manipulated by humans. In 2018, amid a brutal drought, authorities in Iran concluded that someone had stolen their water from the clouds. They said Israel was making efforts to prevent Iranian clouds from making it rain.

As regions like the Middle East dried up, countries raced to develop chemicals and techniques to compress clouds. And it causes international conflicts.

Conflict. Countries are no longer worried that their aquifers will be drained by a foreign country, but that their water will be stolen directly from the clouds. “Both Israel and another country are making an effort to stop our clouds from making it rain,” Iran said a few years ago. The other country was the United Arab Emirates, which has been running a cloud seeding program for years and where chemicals are injected into the clouds to force precipitation. And the purpose was not actually to steal water, but to make it rain on arid lands.

lack of water. About 2.7 billion people experience famine for at least one month of the year. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face drought and food rationing will become the new normal. According to this New York Times article, 12 out of 19 countries in the Gulf region receive less than 10 inches of precipitation per year (a 20% drop over the past three decades). That’s why their governments are desperate and see a solution in artificial cloud production.

Why is it controversial? Basically, if you place clouds in your area to combat drought, those clouds can’t carry rain to the next area, they need water there too. In this article from Harvard University applied physics professor David Keith, DW, “If you make it rain somewhere, then it reduces the downstream rain.

In other words, the experts’ concern is that one country is drying the clouds at the expense of others. Mainly because the useful life of a rain-producing cloud hardly exceeds a few hours. And seven countries in that region are very close to each other, so conflict is guaranteed.

How does it work? To understand the process, you have to know how precipitation works. Clouds form when air containing water vapor rises into the atmosphere, cools, and forms icy particles. These particles mix in the clouds and when they become large and heavy, they form droplets that fall to the ground as rain, snow or hail depending on the temperature.

In cloud seeding, small particles of silver iodide are injected into them. This can be done from an airplane or drone, or by shooting from the ground. What the method does is “trick” the water vapor inside the clouds to form droplets around the silver iodide particles. When they get heavy, they fall from clouds like normal, regular precipitation.

a trend. Many countries are experimenting with this technology. Saudi Arabia has launched a large-scale program and six other countries in the Middle East and North Africa are implementing it. The world’s most ambitious program is China, which wants to revive the rains on the rapidly drying Yangtze River. Russia is also known to use cloud seeding before festivals so that the rain does not spoil the public celebrations. Drought-affected states such as the USA, Idaho and Wyoming also use these methods.

Problems. Although it may seem like a simple science, in practice it is not. Not all clouds can produce rain, and even a cloud that seems suitable for planting may not have enough moisture. Also, in hot climates, raindrops sometimes evaporate before they even reach the ground.

Not only that: sometimes the impact can be greater than expected and produce a lot of rain or snow. Or the winds may change, pushing the clouds away from the planting area. This happened in the UAE in 2019, when cloud seeding caused so much heavy rain in Dubai that water had to be pumped through flooded neighborhoods.

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