Reporter Jon Miller: Every day, hundreds of tanker trucks line up at the Mazrouah pumping station outside Doha, in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

They start rolling in at 6:30 in the morning and keep filling up until 10 at night.

Their cargo is not oil or gas -- the resources that have given Qatar the highest per capita income in the world -- but water from an underground aquifer that’s quickly drying up.

Jonathan Smith: We’ve got about two years left of an adequate supply, a usable supply of high quality fresh water in this particular aquifer.

Reporter: Jonathan Smith has been thinking about water since he was a kid. He grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, where his grandparents lived through the Dust Bowl. He came to Qatar in 2012 after making documentaries about water problems in the American southwest. Now he’s a spokesman for Qatar’s national food security program.

Smith: It’s a very exciting time to be in a place that is struggling with food security and water security and really trying to rethink what it means to have a long-term and durable prosperity.

Reporter: Qatar is growing incredibly fast. But the growth masks some troubling numbers. The population -- just under 2 million -- has more than doubled in the last ten years. The country imports 93 percent of its food. It gets less than 3 inches of rain a year. Temperatures top 120 degrees in the summer. Climate change is just going to make things harder.

Smith: Qatar is in many ways ground zero for many of the challenges we’re going to see in the next century.

Reporter: Already, 99% percent of the water people use for farming, drinking or swimming comes from the sea. It takes a huge amount of energy to remove the salt. And a huge amount of money.

For now, Qatar has both. But the country’s leaders know the oil and gas won’t last forever. So they’re taking a radical step: Planning ahead.

And not just for themselves. Worldwide, more than 2 billion people live in dry areas, where climate change poses an urgent threat to food, water and energy supplies. Qatar’s leaders say they want their country to be a laboratory for solving those problems before it’s too late.

Joakim Hauge is happy to take up the challenge.

Hauge was a biologist working for a Norwegian environmental group when he heard about a plan to green up the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Now he’s the CEO of a company called the Sahara Forest Project.

He says it was founded not on a specific product or technology, but on an idea.

Joakim Hauge: And that was, well, let’s take what we have enough of, like seawater, like sunlight, like sand, like CO2, to produce what we need more of -- food, water, energy, in an environmentally friendly way.

Reporter: In 2012, with backing from two big fertilizer companies, the group built a 7.5 million dollar pilot site next to a giant ammonia plant in an industrial zone outside Doha.

The design is meant to mimic a natural ecosystem, where the waste product from one component provides the food or fuel for another.

The raw materials are sunlight and salt water.

These curved mirrors intensify the sun’s heat to power a thermal desalination unit.

Soon algae will be growing in these ponds, to be harvested for biofuel and, possibly, to feed fish or shrimp...

Seawater runs through cardboard panels, cooling the air in this greenhouse, where cucumbers grow in coconut fiber...

And CO2 is pumped in from the factory next door, making the plants grow dramatically faster.

Virginia Corless: These plants, I was here three weeks ago and the plants were this big...

Reporter: Virginia Corless had gotten her PhD in astrophysics and was working at the US Senate when she first heard about the Sahara Forest Project.

Corless: I gave the first brochure to all of my science friends in DC and said, ‘Tell me what’s wrong with this, because it sounds great, is there anything I’m missing?’ And our consensus was no, it actually, it all holds together.

Reporter: Today Corless is the project’s research director.

Corless: The core innovation in the Sahara Forest Project is the integration of technologies. So while many of the individual technologies have been developed individually elsewhere in the world, they’ve never been brought together in this way.

Reporter: Corless says she’s most excited by an experiment to cool and moisten the air outside the greenhouses ever so slightly, so shrubs and trees and even food crops can take root and grow.

Corless: And as they grow, they’re adding organic material to the soil, to the sand...

Reporter: If it works -- and results have been good so far -- she can imagine vegetation spreading out into the surrounding desert, creating an ecosystem of its own.

The goal? A system to produce food and water and energy that actually reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Corless is quick to point out that this pilot site is for testing ideas, not for making money. Once the kinks are worked out, the goal is to build much bigger commercial facilities around the world.

Corless: The technologies that are being developed here can be applied anywhere that is a desert with a hot and relatively dry climate and where you have access to salty water. That’s a lot of regions in the world.

Reporter: But it’s a risky business. In a complex and expensive system like this one, if one thing goes wrong it can sink the whole enterprise. Qatar’s Jonathan Smith says it’s great to think big… but you need to spread your bets.

Smith: The question of whether it’s a responsible technology to bring up to scale, and whether it provides a resilient enough solution to call it the silver bullet for food security for a country, I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think that any single technology is going to do that. It’s going to take a mix of things.

Reporter: And a lot of those things can happen with existing technology, right now.

To illustrate the point, Smith takes us to see Nassir Al-Kuwari on his family’s farm about an hour from Doha.

He’s covered his crops with mesh to shade them from the blistering heat. And he’s built hundreds of low-cost plastic greenhouses. Plans are to build hundreds more.

Nassir Al-Kuwari (Arabic with voiceover): “People think that Qatar is nothing but desert. But when they come here, they see that we have fertile soil. If we protect our crops, I think agriculture will only get bigger in the coming years.”

Reporter: In the meantime he’s cut down on water and waste.

With temperatures rising and groundwater falling, Al-Kuwari knows he’s in a race against time. But he thinks he’s winning.

Reporter: The next few years will bring enormous challenges for the world’s driest areas, in energy, food and water.

There’s no telling where the search for solutions will lead.

But it will likely be fueled by renewable resources -- like ingenuity, imagination and perseverance.