Business
We are ‘not too late’ to fix climate change, says Nobel Prize scientist who extracted water from the desert air
The era of “global boiling” is here, with United Nations scientists warning that drastic steps are needed to prevent a climate change catastrophe. But reversing the terrifying trend isn’t a lost cause, according to a Nobel Prize scientist Prof. Omar M. Yaghi.
“We’re not too late,” the UC Berkeley professor, known as the inventor of reticular chemistry, said at Fortune’s Global Forum in Riyadh. “I think that once society decides that there’s a problem, we will get to work and those problems can be solved.”
This year, Yaghi became the first Saudi national to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The Jordanian-American, who also holds dual U.S. citizenship, won the 2025 prize together with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for their groundbreaking discoveries on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). His research group succeeded in extracting water from desert air in Arizona—and he thinks that scientists, like them, are key to solving climate change.
“All these technological problems, once we decide, once we have the will to fix those problems, solutions emerge just like the solution that just received the Nobel Prize,” Yaghi added, while pointing to new breakthroughs in his field. “MOFs are already deployed to capture carbon dioxide from flue gas or cement plants.”
“We also have another device that can deliver 850 liters of water a day with no energy input aside from ambient sunlight or the use of waste heat,” he continued. “So these are energetically very favorable conditions and the water that is delivered is ultra clean and has no contamination in it whatsoever. It’s drinkable after it’s mineralized, but also could be used for agriculture, for household use, for hygiene, and it’s just water that is produced every day—clean, clean water.”
From a one-room home in Amman to Nobel Prize winner
Half of the 2025 U.S. Nobel Prize Winners in science were immigrants—including Yaghi, who immigrated to America as a teenager.
Born into a family of Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan, with little schooling, the Nobel chemistry laureate previously revealed he grew up in “a very humble home,” with no electricity or running water. The large family of 12 shared one small room with cattle. At 10 years old, Yaghi happened to discover molecular structures in a book in the school library.
His father had only finished sixth grade and his mother could neither read nor write. On the advice of his father, he left Jordan for the U.S. alone at just 15 years old. He worked several jobs and attended community college before pursuing his PhD at the University of Illinois and later became an American citizen.
In an interview with The Hindu earlier this month, Yaghi called science “the greatest equalizing force in the world.”
“Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere,” he added. “That’s why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity.”
