The Date Palm and Its Role in Reducing Soil Salinity and Global Warming

The date palm is a blessed tree that is known for its various benefits. It plays a big role in achieving environmental balance, as it grows in a harsh climatic environment and even in highly saline sand. Moreover, the date palm absorbs carbon dioxide to a significantly greater extent than other trees, due to its large size. It also on average stores more carbon than other trees of similar size. This potential makes the date palm an important tool in the fight to stave off global warming, which is mainly caused by carbon dioxide emissions. Consequently, this paper proposes a massive date palm tree planting exercise in the Arab world, in order to make it the world's future lungs that would transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and food, in a similar way to the Amazon's rainforest. The paper makes a number of recommendations, including the need for taking good care of this neglected tree, the provision of government incentives for growing it, and the inclusion of the planting of date palms as part of carbon offset projects which would be incorporated into an overall sustainable development agenda.