How much do wars cost compared to the Saharan Forest?
Not including the cost that comes from the many deaths the Afghanistan war, when considering the cost of the conflict, the cost it has taken to support veterans, and the additional interest on the loan, the war cost the USA $2.261 trillion. This figure also does not include the future costs that it takes to support veterans for the rest of their lives or future interest. The Iraq War is reported to have cost the USA $757.8 billion. Collectively, these two wars cost the USA $3,018,800,000,000.
Conflicts in the UK also cost a lot of money. For the Iraq war, the UK spent £8,164.2 million, and for the war in Afghanistan, £21,315.7 million. Converted into dollars, they spent $11,300,069,220 on these wars.
In comparison, the Second Chechen War and the Russio-Georgian War cost Russia 5 billion rubles and 12.5 billion rubles. Converted into dollars, this makes $235,550,000.
Altogether, this gives us a figure of $3,030,333,562,000 for these three nations’ major wars. This does not include costs that were resultant of smaller conflicts or military interventions.
There are 323748513.792 hectares in the 800,000,000 acres of land I have designated for my Sahara forest. Dividing these two figures, in order to find out how much these three countries would have been able to spend on creating a Saharan Forest, if they had hypothetically spent the war money on this, we come to a figure of $9360.146635 per hectare of the forest.
Using the San Diego County’s new seawater desalination plant as a model, which produces 50 million gallons of water a day and costs $1 billion to build, I can divide the war figure by the cost of a desalination plant, and find that I can build 3030 seawater desalination plants for the forest. This means that I will be able to build 1 desalination plant per 106,847.6943 hectares of the forest.