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Climate Water Project

Alpha Lo

How to restore the water cycle, and how that helps with hydrating the earth and soil, replenishing groundwater, restore rains in drought areas, lessen flooding, and slow down climate change.

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Yesterday · 1 hr 9 min
Growing a water movement in Brazil: Everton de Oliveira
Everton de Oliveira was a professor of hydrology who wanted to make practical water change in the world. He studied at the University of Waterloo, where pioneering hydrogeologist John Cherry had assembled one of the world’s leading hydrogeology departments. Over time, Everton became increasingly intrigued by the ideas of slow water, the small water cycle, and water cycle restoration, some of the ideas not emphasized as much in traditional hydrology. He started Instituto Água Sustentável (Institute of Sustainable Water) to help with Brazil with water issues. He founded Hidroplan, a water consultancy that works with contaminated sites to clean up and restore water systems. Around Brazil he is known as Professor Agua for his work to educate about water. And he also had his sights set on something much bigger: building a broader water movement in Brazil. At the recent Regen Water Conference, Everton brought together people from business, government, hydrology, water cycle restoration, and finance to explore how to build this larger movement. One of the ideas gaining momentum is the Positive Water movement, which began in Spain and has since spread to Brazil. It encourages businesses to reduce their water consumption, recycle and reuse water, and invest in projects that restore water systems. Everton is working to bridge this business-oriented movement with the growing movement for slow water and water cycle restoration. I really enjoy Everton’s blend of enthusiasm, happiness, academic expertise, business acumen, and regenerative water activation. I admire his ability to faciltate cross sector collaboration, which is key to building the regenerative water movement. For the conference he brought Luis Cordoval there, who shared his experience in activating large Brazilian community movements to slow water in the landscape through swales and barranginhas, which is the Portuguese word for small infiltration ponds. Everton invited Rajendra Singh, who helped villages in India restore 23 rivers through the creation of swales and retention ponds. These simple landscape interventions slowed the movement of water, allowed more of it to soak into the ground, and helped recharge aquifers. Rajendra Singh was an absolute ball of love, hugs, and hearty laughter, filling the conference with wonderful energy. I was invited too, and had the pleasure of connecting with many of the people involved in this emerging movement, and loved my time getting to know Rajendra. [me sharing about water cycle restoration and the drought-fire-flood cycle] The conference had fascinating conversations about using a variety of blended finance approaches to get water restoration projects off the ground. There were people from local government looking to see how they could implement these water projects into their communities. Some of the members of the water community at the conference : Ana Paula Trevizan, Isabele Oliveira, Marcio José, Luis Fernando Magalhaes, Anna de Souza Aranha, Marcos Bensoussan, Diogo Taranto, Anna Luísa Beserra, Zelmute Marten,Bruna Soldera, Adriano Fidalgo Yamamoto One of the larger issues Everton is bringing key players around, is to deal with the government’s plan to build a massive aqueduct to redirect water from the water-rich regions of Brazil to the drought-prone northeast. This proposal is problematic for many reasons. It would divert water from other regions, require enormous amounts of energy to pump water over long distances, create contamination issues, and further centralize control over water. Everton and others have a very different vision. They want to demonstrate that Brazil can address water scarcity by restoring its natural water cycles rather than relying on massive infrastructure projects. Their vision is to slow water down across the landscape, allowing it to soak into the soil, recharge aquifers, and keep the land hydrated throughout the year. The key is to slow the movement of water through the landscape so that less of it rushes off the continent and out to sea. Rather than allowing the abundant rains of the wet season to quickly drain away, the goal is to capture and store that water in the landscape, where it can sustain ecosystems, replenish groundwater, and provide moisture through the dry season. In this way, the water from the wet season becomes the water that helps carry the landscape through the dry season. The slow water ends up increasing water on the continent, because it gets recycled around more. Think of a museum (analogous to a continent) where people spend just 15 minutes in, versus 3 hours in. There will be more people in the museum where people are ‘slower’ to leave. This is the regenerative water paradigm that Everton and his colleagues hope to bring to life across Brazil. By inviting Rajendra Singh to Brazil, Everton is helping build the connections, knowledge, and community needed to activate this alternative vision: one based not on moving water from one place to another, but on restoring the natural processes that allow water to circulate, replenish, and sustain life where it falls. We got together after the conference to record a podcast at his home in Sao Paulo. (The transcript below is an abridged, lightly edited portion of the interview. For full interview listen to the audio] Everton: Welcome to Brazil. Yeah, it’s great having you here. We finally met in person. Alpha: Yeah, it’s nice to meet in person. The reason I got here is that you invited me to speak at this water regeneration conference you’re putting on. Do you want to say a little bit about the vision of that conference? Everton: Yes. Actually, this is something that I’ve been working on in my mind for so long because I’ve been studying, just like you. I’m very anxious to study stuff, but I want to put things into practice, right? So when I learned everything, I thought, “This theory is a game changer.” And, you know, weather problems and water problems have a different view of everything. So I wanted to put in place an event where we could make an experiment and try to convince people about how we can move forward, not only by showing real science and these breakthrough ideas that have recently emerged in science, but also by bringing people who are trying to put these ideas into practice and investing money to save water for their companies. Otherwise, they could go broke. I brought many people in and convinced Rajendra Singh to come, and you to come. That was very good. Alpha: Yeah, it’s really good gathering different sectors that you’re bringing in. You brought in the businesses, the government people, the scientists, and the practitioners like Rajendra and so on. You had this vision of a water-positive movement that started in Spain and is now in Brazil, where you’re working to recycle water, save water, restore the water cycle, and slow water. The corporations are becoming part of it, and you’re trying to extend that vision even further. Everton: Exactly, exactly. Well, we are at the infancy of this whole movement because what I see is that first we have science, and then we have all the things that come from science, with people understanding it and then working with it. We’re at a time when we understand the science, and people are trying to use it and make it mainstream. At the same time, we have companies that realize that climate change and the problems we’re hearing about are very dangerous to their businesses. We had a whole hype about CO2 going on, but in the mind of someone working in a company, they might say, “Well, I can get along if we have problems with CO2. My company is still surviving. But if there’s not enough water, I’m dead.” So water is a much higher priority for people than CO2, even though everybody knows both are very important. Water is a priority for us. If we have a little bit more CO2, it’s still bad, but it’s not as bad as not having water, for example, or having bad-quality water. Companies are moving towards thi… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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September 23 · 1 hr 9 min
Can water flip the planet’s climate? : paleoclimatologist Christo Buizert
Could shifts in the world’s water cycle tip the earth’s climate? In 2023, a paper was published that exploded into a huge scientific debate. It was about the circulation of our oceans, and how it might be slowing down and changing, which was a matter of huge concern. It is called the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The paper raised the possibility that the AMOC might approach a major transition in the near future, which could have profound consequences for our climate. But why should ocean water moving around matter so much? To look at the history, let’s go back in time to the mid-20th century, when a Danish scientist, Willi Dansgaard, was looking at ice-core data that he had persisted through a military operation to gain access to. After much persistence, he was able to examine the data. He was expecting to see slow changes in the ice record, where temperature would change gradually. Instead, something very peculiar popped up. There seemed to be jumps in the record where the temperature would change very quickly. At first, he thought it might be some error in the collection or measurement. But after carefully checking, he realized it was real. The climate was making sudden shifts. Then another scientist, Hans Oeschger, went to check if these shifts were real, and using a totally different technique also found the same fluctuations. The temperature appeared to shift by several degrees Celsius over just a few decades. There were roughly 25 such events during the last 100,000 years. These events became known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. And this created a rather uncomfortable question for the scientists who were expecting something else. What could make a climate system suddenly jump from one state to another? Oeschger and his colleagues began considering whether the ocean might be involved. The ocean could store enormous amounts of heat, and changes in the North Atlantic could potentially alter how that heat was distributed. Then Wally Broecker built on these ideas and proposed that the ocean was acting something like a giant conveyor belt, carrying heat from one part of the world to another. The circulation moves in a complex, three-dimensional pattern, with surface waters flowing in one direction and deep waters returning in another. Imagine heating a kettle of water. The water stores a lot of that heat. Now imagine a bathtub with hotter water coming in from the faucet, and cooler water further away from faucet. If you swish the bathtub, it changes where the distribution of heat. Now imagine the bathtub is the whole ocean. Its water now has different temperatures and different amounts of salt, and those differences determine how dense it is. Dense water tends to sink; lighter water tends to stay near the surface. That simple fact, repeated across an ocean thousands of meters deep, helps drive some of the largest flows on Earth. And now imagine changing that balance. Put more freshwater into the North Atlantic, and you’re not simply adding water. You’re changing the salinity, and therefore the density, of an enormous body of ocean. If enough of that happens in the right place, it can alter where water sinks. If you alter where water sinks, you can alter the circulation. And if you alter the circulation, you can alter where heat goes. And if you alter where heat goes, you can alter the climate. Its perhaps surprising that something as seemingly simple as water sinking or rising in the ocean could help determine the climate state of an entire planet. Which raises a question: How much of Earth’s climate is really being controlled by where the water goes? Broecker’s ideas helped lead toward today’s concern about the AMOC and whether anthropogenic climate change could weaken or reorganize this circulation. If the ocean transports different amounts of heat from one part of the world to another, the consequences need not be confined to the ocean. They can propagate through the atmosphere, sea ice, and the rest of the climate system. Why might AMOC slow down in the future? A warmer world changes the water going into the North Atlantic. As the planet warms, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, changing rainfall and freshwater input to the North Atlantic. At the same time, Greenland is losing ice, adding freshwater to the ocean. Both processes can make surface waters in the North Atlantic less salty and therefore less dense. If the water becomes less dense, it becomes harder for it to sink. And if less water sinks, the overturning circulation can weaken. There are other influences too. Changes in winds, aerosols, ocean heat, and the broader hydrological cycle can all affect the circulation. Climate models generally project a weakening of the AMOC as greenhouse gases rise, although there is substantial uncertainty about how large that weakening will be. (nature.com) If the AMOC weakens, it means that the distribution of heat across the planet can change. The North Atlantic could cool relative to the surrounding world. Rainfall patterns could shift. The position of major atmospheric circulation systems could move. European and North American climate could change, while tropical rainfall and monsoon systems could also be affected. And if the circulation has something like the multiple states suggested by the Daansgard-Oeschger record, there is another possibility: a gradual forcing could produce a sudden transition. We don’t know that the AMOC is about to collapse. In fact, the IPCC’s assessment has been that a complete collapse is unlikely during the 21st century, while more recent studies continue to disagree about how close the system may be to a critical transition. I was super glad for the opportunity to talk to Christo Buizert of Oregon State University, who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the Daansgard-Oeschger (D-O) shifts, work for which helped win him the European Geosciences Union Early Career Scientist award. Christo Buizert and his colleagues looked at ice cores from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and found a striking relationship between the timing of Greenland and Antarctic climate changes. Greenland warming was followed by Antarctic cooling with a lag of roughly 200 years, while Greenland cooling was followed by Antarctic warming with a similar lag. This suggested a long-timescale seesaw in the distribution of heat between the hemispheres associated with changes in the ocean. At the same time, Buizert and colleagues found evidence that the atmosphere could respond much more quickly, meaning that the climate system was communicating these changes through more than one pathway. This is the strange thing about the climate system. A change that happens relatively quickly in one place can leave a signal that unfolds over centuries somewhere else. In addition to discussing his work on the Daansgard-Oeschger shifts, Buizert and I also discussed the nature of regime shifts in climate in general. When you push a complicated system, how do you know when it’s about to start behaving differently? Where are its tipping points? And what roles does the water cycle play in creating these shifts? We also discuss how the Sahara was once green, with lakes, rivers and grasslands; and how wobbles in the earth axis, and shifts in the water cycle, lead to Sahara becoming a desert. We discuss how there are two metastable states that the Sahara can be in. A desert can be the result of feedback loop, where less trees means less rain recycling, which then leads to even less trees. Here is some of our conversation (edited for clarity) Alpha: Today I’m super excited to have Christo Buizert with me. He’s going to talk about paleoclimate, the water cycle, and regime shifts. So welcome. Christo: Pleasure to be here. Paleoclimate is studying the history of the past. When it comes to our understanding of our climate system and our Earth, we really have quality observations going back maybe only 150 years for some of them, like… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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September 9 · 1 hr 9 min
Animals help regulate water, land, and climate : ecologist and wildlife consultant Simon Mustoe
I was excited to finally be able to interview Simon Mustoe after three years our initial effort. I think he presents a very important perspective of importance of animals to land, water and climate. There is traditional, simplistic view often held, that says climate sets the stage for the water cycle, the water cycle sets the stage for vegetation, and vegetation sets the stage for animals. In recent decades there has been a perspectival shift and enlargening, in that much more work on how vegetation also affects the water cycle and climate in turn. Simon Mustoe has been putting forward yet a further perspectival shift and enlargening, and that is that animals are the key regulators of vegetation, the water cycle, and climate itself. I really like his ability to frame this shift and emphasize its importance. He has also been putting these ideas into action, as he goes into different bioregions facilitating the community to self-empower themselves into doing ecological restoration. Integrating vegetation’s evolving impact on climate was already a difficult step for climate models over the last two decades, since vegetation grows leaves and roots, multiplies, and dies back, adding significant complexity. If animals are so important, it seems to me, climate models won’t be truly accurate until animals are integrated as well, and that raises the complexity further still, since it would mean modeling how animals move, reproduce, and engage in a wide range of behaviors, something current climate models do not attempt. I had previously discussed Daisyworld, the original toy model simulation proposed by James Lovelock, where black and white daisies would help regulate the temperature of a toy planet. If the planet got colder, more black daisies would grow, and their heat absorption would heat up planet. If the planet got warmer, more white daisies would grow. The planet hence self-regulated its own climate via vegetation. Researchers then added more complexity to the planet - they added different colors of daisies, they put in rabbits which ate the daisies, and they added in foxes which ate the rabbits. With more biodiversity it might seem that there would be more fluctuations in the temperature of the planet. But most curiously, in many of the simulations, the extra biodiversity and larger trophic network actually caused the planet to self regulate its climate even better. Simon Mustoe argues in his book Wildlife in the Balance that animals, not just plants or physical processes, are the essential engineers of a habitable Earth. He makes the case that humanity's survival now depends on shifting our relationship with wildlife from one of domination to one of cooperation, treating conservation not as a moral extra but as a practical necessity. Despite the scale of our crisis, the book is quite hopeful, it frames restoration as achievable and even fast-acting rather than a lost cause, e.g. beaver reintroduction in Norfolk producing measurable flood reduction within five years. Plants turn sunlight into stored chemical energy. Animals distribute and restructure that energy across landscapes. Plants help convert the energy input. Animals regulate how that energy concentrates, cycles, and amplifies. The animals are key to understanding the thermodynamics of the planet, and how energy and order emerge. Reading his book three years helped clarify for me the animal regulatory perspective on ecology and climate. Our conversation presented here, stimulated more thought. After our interview he sent me an essay where he further elaborated on the role of animals to the water cycle. In the essay he described how water covers most of the planet, yet the water which actually sustains life is remarkably scarce. Surface freshwater, the rivers, lakes and wetlands people depend on, makes up only a sliver of a percent of Earth’s total water. The rest is saltwater, locked in ice, or buried underground in ancient reserves that barely renew. Mustoe argues that keeping this small share usable and available has never really been a matter of rainfall or geology alone. It has been the work of animals. He traces this back to Earth’s fortunate place in the solar system and its magnetic, iron-rich core, conditions that allowed water to stay on the surface rather than boil away or never form at all. But Mustoe distinguishes between water simply being present and water being available for life. Water becomes unavailable, he says, when it arrives as extreme weather, turns polluted, fails to soak into soil, evaporates too fast, doesn’t linger long enough in lakes and reservoirs, or rushes back to the sea before it can be used. Making water usable in that deeper sense, he contends, is something animals have done gradually, over an immense stretch of time, by building the ecosystems that regulate it. Mustoe says it took roughly thirty million years of continuous evolution for these ecosystems to reach a stable, self-supporting state, one where the maintenance of water and climate became tightly bound to the needs of living things. Human civilization, in his account, arrived only recently, inheriting a water cycle that animals had already spent millions of years calibrating. He acknowledges this can sound like a chicken-and-egg question, but resolves it in favor of animals: water existed before life, but the water cycle relied on today exists because of life. Mustoe lays out several ways animal behavior shapes water availability. Burrowing and soil-disturbing species, from bandicoots in Australia to beavers in England, help prevent flooding by giving water somewhere to soak into the ground rather than run off and overwhelm rivers and towns. The same processes work in reverse during dry periods, he explains, as animals that loosen and aerate soil create a kind of sponge that holds moisture underground for longer, easing the risk and severity of drought. He extends this even to the ocean, arguing that blue whales, by feeding and moving through different thermal layers, help regulate sea temperature in ways that influence rainfall on nearby continents. He also argues animals filter water indirectly, by sustaining the plant diversity that keeps rivers and forest systems clean. Mustoe cites the clear blackwater rivers of Bornean rainforest, shaped in part by orangutans, in contrast to the polluted waterways near palm oil plantations where animal life has been displaced. Healthy, biodiverse catchments upstream of cities like Melbourne and Kathmandu supply cleaner water, he says, precisely because the animals within them maintain nutrient cycles that keep pollution and disease in check. That same biodiversity, Mustoe notes, reduces the need for pesticides. When ecosystems lose their animal diversity, a small number of opportunistic species tend to dominate and become what people call pests, prompting chemical control that eventually pollutes waterways. Maintaining even modest levels of predator and prey diversity keeps that imbalance from occurring in the first place, he argues. He extends the pattern to the atmosphere itself, noting that seabird colonies are among the largest natural sources of ammonia on Earth, a substance that combines with ocean-surface compounds to seed clouds and influence rainfall across entire continents. Below is part of our conversation (edited and abridged) Alpha: We’re going to talk about animals and ecology and why animals are so important, and why animals are so crucial for the water cycle. What do you say is the importance of animals to everything? How would you frame it? Simon: There are effectively three things that enable life on Earth for animals like us. We depend on food, water, and shelter. None of those three things can exist without animals. Planet Earth has ecosystems, and we can be distracted by vast structures like forests or reefs (reefs are slightly different because reefs are made of animals), but if we look at forests generally, because we’re land-living animals, we t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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March 24 · 1 hr 12 min
Activating a global network of water restorers and advocates : Zach Weiss
Restoring the world’s water cycles is a craft, one that takes time to learn, and a community to grow within. That community is being built. Water Stories is an education platform, community network, and hands-on career pathway dedicated to restoring the world’s water. It has been quietly growing, building a network of extraordinary people, advocating for landscape-scale change, and educating a new generation of practitioners in the art of working with water. Water Stories is following a similar path. It is a learning, training, and action platform focused entirely on water cycle restoration, offering a community-centered approach to some of the most pressing environmental crises we face: drought, flood, fire, and polluted water. Its award-winning films tell the stories of people who have raised their communities out of extreme environmental crises, and are available free to its online community. That community now numbers over 3,000 people from around the world, concerned about the future of fresh water, learning from one another across different landscapes and contexts, and supporting each other toward a better common future. Founded by Zach Weiss, Water Stories was created with a bold vision: to train a global force of water cycle restoration practitioners, equipped to heal landscapes wherever they are needed. Zach Weiss spent years learning to restore the water cycle from the ground up, studying under mentors including the legendary Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, who urged him to take what he had learned and teach it to as many people as possible. That call to multiply the work is what drives Water Stories today. The methods Zach developed are focused on helping the land receive rainfall more effectively, slowing water down, guiding it into the ground, and recharging aquifers so they can feed springs and streams throughout the dry season. They are rooted in reading the landscape, observing where water flows, how slopes behave, where it pools or rushes away, and then working with those patterns rather than against them. In practice this means building terraces, planting strategically, putting in check dams, and creating water retention features that follow the land’s natural contours (in title picture above, are terraces leading into a water retention pond, that helps recharge groundwater, that Zach helped create in Montana USA). It is about restoring soil, restoring vegetation, and restoring the slow, generous movement of water through living landscapes. Farmers using these methods have withstood wildfires while neighboring properties burned, because their land was deeply hydrated going into summer. Others have seen vegetation flourish as rising groundwater reaches plant roots. The core idea is simple but profound: get the earth to receive water better, and life follows. Now, rather than doing that work alone, Zach is focused on training others to do it too, spreading these skills as widely and as fast as possible across the world. A groundswell takes hold when networks begin to form, when decentralized centers of activity emerge around the world, when people step into leadership, and when knowledge spreads person to person. Permaculture did exactly this through its Permacultue Design Courses, which perhaps half a million people have now completed, with many millions more practicing its principles worldwide. It spread like an octopus reaching into every nook and cranny of the globe, quietly shifting paradigms and transforming both landscapes and lives. The groundswell that Water Stories is one of the forces helping to build is beginning to feel like that. Yoga offers another useful parallel. It took off in the 1980s when enough teachers had been trained to make a living from their practice, creating a self-sustaining wave of growth. That is exactly what the Water Stories platform makes possible, a genuine career path in watershed restoration. Practitioners already report having more projects than they can handle, more land asking for attention than there are trained hands to tend it. Across the world, a broader awakening around water is underway. Scientists, farmers, indigenous communities, and restoration practitioners are all converging on the same understanding: that healing the water cycle is one of the most powerful things we can do for the planet. Water Stories sits right at the heart of that, with the tools, the community, and the vision to become one of its many central forces carrying that groundswell forward. Here is a lightly edited, abridged version of of our interview: Alpha: Cool, I’m excited to have on here again. You came on two years ago….. Maybe you could just start out by saying a little bit about the larger global water problem, and then how you came upon this path of actually trying to help the whole water situation in the world. Zach: When we look globally, I think the easiest, most succinct way to look at the challenges we’re facing is that right now, we’ve built landscapes that reject the rain, and what we’re seeking to do is help those landscapes receive the rain. The greater picture is of water cycle restoration, of rebalancing the full cycling of water through living ecosystems, of water retaining on the lands, of being circulated in the small water cycle, of being circulated slowly through the larger water cycle. But in daily practice, it really is just helping landscapes receive the rain instead of reject them. There’s just so much need for this around the world, there’s so much interest and demand for this work, way more than I could ever service on my own, and so we really started looking at — and Sepp Holzer pushed me towards doing this — how do we give capacity to people to do this work all around the world? I took my 5-year journey to getting where I am, and tried to condense it into 6 months, and we basically give people all of the essentials with none of the unnecessary stuff, so that by the end of that, they’re further along in activating these changes in their community. And it’s different for different types of people, you know, it’s really not a course where it’s like, come in and you’re gonna leave being an earth mover. That might be one route that you take, and that’s a route that we need lots of, but we need advocates, we need stewards, we need all these different people helping out in all of these different roles to make the changes that we’re really trying to make globally, around the world. And so we really try and just help people in that journey. The way I look at it is it’s one thing to get a map and say, okay, I can kind of figure out where I’m going here. It’s another to get a map and then have someone grab your hand and drag you along the trail, and teach you how to orient, and teach you how to read the map. And then you’ve already started that journey by the time something like the course is finished. And it’s just amazing — we just had a webinar earlier today, and within one year, people are making real changes in their communities. They’re becoming an expert in the field in their communities, because they’re actually practicing and engaging with it every day, and have this really great community of support to lean on and learn from one another as well. Alpha: One of your central teachings is this idea of the Watershed Death Spiral, and then also how we can restore it via the Revived Water Cycle. For instance, all the wildfires around the world are, in part, tied to this problem with hydration. Could you say a little bit about the wildfires, and also this idea of Revived Water Cycles and the Watershed Death Spiral? Zach: Yeah, definitely. I oftentimes joke that Australia and California are in this race to the bottom of the Watershed Death Spiral. Those two places are getting so severe, the fires are getting so crazy, and it frustrates me to no end that people aren’t even addressing the root problem of the issue. When everything’s drying out, all of the organic matter is oxidizing and turning into fuel for fir… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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March 6 · 53 min
Rewilding, beavers, and water restoration : Derek Gow
The idea of bringing back the beaver to the UK was an idea that was scoffed as too eccentric, even by environmentalists. But Derek Gow, against a lot of opposition, has pioneered bringing the beaver back, so that they are now once again part of the UK landscape, restoring the wetlands and rivers. Born in Dundee in 1965, Gow left school at seventeen and spent his early years in agriculture. He was inspired by the writing of Gerald Durrell, and jumped at the chance to manage a European wildlife park in central Scotland before moving on to develop two nature centres in England. That early immersion in wildlife conservation set him on a path that would eventually make him, in the words of George Monbiot the person who has done more to restore Britain's missing fauna than anyone else in the country (words written in the blurb for Gow’s memoir). Gow was the first to import and quarantine beavers for projects in the UK, sourcing animals from Poland, Bavaria, and Norway. It was the opening salvo in what would become a long and often maddening battle against institutional resistance. Since the early 1990s, in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites, and even some conservation professionals, Gow imported, quarantined, and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland, while responding to the opposition with characteristic bluntness, charm, and what his supporters describe as an almost reckless willingness to keep pushing when anyone else would have given up. Beavers were once common throughout England, Wales, and Scotland but became extinct in the sixteenth century, hunted for their fur, meat, and castoreum - a secretion used in perfumes, food, and medicine. Their disappearance was the removal of a keystone engineer from the landscape. Beaver dams create wetlands, slow water flows, filter pollutants, and provide habitat for an extraordinary range of species. Through gnawing on stems and coppicing trees, beavers stimulate regrowth that provides homes for more insects and birds, while also enabling more constant water flows and better water retention during droughts. In 2015, several families of beavers were reintroduced in Devon, in the UK, as part of the River Otter Beaver Trial - the first legally sanctioned reintroduction of an extinct native mammal in the country. Over the following five years, the two original breeding pairs expanded to at least eight, and researchers found 28 dams built across the catchment, impounding water across nearly two kilometres of watercourse. Findings from the trial showed that beavers reduced flood flows by up to 60%, even during very wet weather, by holding back water in newly created wetlands and allowing it to trickle out slowly rather than surge downstream. In the flood-prone village of East Budleigh, a family of beavers constructed six dams upstream, with the measurable result that peak flood flows through the village were significantly reduced. The animals were also found to clean water supplies, removing large quantities of soil, manure, slurry, and fertilisers from rivers and streams. Beavers have been steadily increasing their numbers over the years. There are now over 2000 in Scotland, and around 500 in England. Wildlife trusts are looking to release more this year. Today, Gow farms a 300-acre property on the Devon-Cornwall border that he is transforming into a rewilding haven, while continuing to be influential in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole, and the white stork in England. He has written about the whole extraordinary saga in his book Bringing Back the Beaver. Here is an edited, abridged section of our interview Alpha: This whole field of water restoration and rewilding - how did you get into it? Derek: I started working with water voles which are a very small animal in Britain. Water voles are one of the characters in Kenneth Graham’s book The Wind in the Willows. The character of Ratty, sculling up and down the idyllic English River with his friends, used to represent a very common animal. They were incredibly common in British waterways from the beginning of the twentieth century, and writers at the time referred to their overwhelming presence. Around 100 years ago water voles prospered. But by the 1960s and 70s, canalization of rivers, concrete banks, pollution, and the introduction of North American mink from fur farms caused massive declines. The animals once lived in chains of colonies along waterways. When those chains break and populations fragment, they can’t find unrelated mates and they disappear. Today the species has lost around 97% of its British range. The remarkable thing is that they are extremely robust. If you reintroduce them correctly with the right gene base and numbers, they recover easily. Their decline shows how harshly we’ve treated the Earth. I began working on water vole reintroductions about thirty years ago. We’ve learned a lot, though we haven’t saved them entirely. Early in that work, digging ponds and cutting trees to create wetlands, we began to realize something else must once have been doing this before us. And somebody eventually asked: do you understand what beavers do? At the time, I really didn’t. So in the early 1990s I went to Poland and spent a month visiting wetlands where beavers had been reintroduced in the 1960s. Wading through these incredible ponds with floating islands of vegetation, orchids flowering, frogs jumping away, dragonflies landing on your head—you reach the great beaver lodges in the middle of this living world. You quickly realize the animal that created habitat for water voles and many other species is the beaver. People call them a keystone species, but beavers are bigger than that. They are a function of nature itself. Apart from humans and elephants, they may be the third most impactful species on the planet in terms of habitat creation. That was my first journey into understanding beavers. Alpha: So you were a farmer when you started introducing the voles? Derek: Yes, on and off. I was also working on conservation projects. And water voles and beavers became central to those. When I started talking about bringing beavers back to Britain in the mid-1990s, people laughed. Most conservationists thought it was ridiculous. Yet when I traveled to Poland, Germany, Russia, and the United States where beavers had been reintroduced, I realized it was perfectly feasible. Much of Britain still has the trees beavers need. The problem wasn’t ecology—it was misunderstanding and inertia. Historically beavers were heavily hunted for fur and for a substance called castoreum in their scent glands, which contains salicylic acid, related to pain relief compounds. Because of hunting, their populations collapsed. By the early twentieth century only about two thousand remained in Eurasia. Governments eventually protected them, and slowly populations began recovering. Alpha: And there are two species of beavers, right? The North American and the European? Derek: Yes. When Europeans arrived in North America there may have been about 100 million beavers. The fur trade reduced them to around 2.5 million. In Eurasia the collapse happened over a longer period but was just as catastrophic. Ecologists studying North America have been able to track the environmental impact of removing beavers. Rivers eroded, floods increased, soils washed away, chemicals flowed into waterways, and ecosystems collapsed. Our pursuit of beavers was ruthless. Yet ancient cultures understood their importance. Leaders of the Zoroastrian religion in Iran over two thousand years ago forbade killing the “water dogs,” warning that deserts would advance if they were destroyed. Alpha: Wow. They figured that out that long ago? Derek: Yes. But modern societies largely forgot. Alpha: So when beavers build dams, how does that affect rivers and floodplains? Derek: Beavers are lazy animals. When they first arrive in a landscape with wetlands,… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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February 2 · 1 hr 15 min
Supply chains & insurance: the secret levers to restore water - Stephanie Betts
I met Stephanie Betts a couple of months ago and was struck by her dynamic and enthusiastic energy. She had launched a pioneering, ambitious, and viable project to restoring the water cycle in a large scale systems way. Last week we sat down and talked about her project and her life. Stephanie Betts had worked in law and investment banking and was leading meetings between M&G (global investment manager) , the Bank of England and NGOs like Client Earth, looking at best practice governance for climate. Then came her first aha moment: the CEO of AXA, a major French multinational insurance company, declared to her that a world at plus four degrees would no longer be insurable. Insurance, she realized, wasn’t just a financial instrument. It was the key to dealing with climate change. She pivoted into insurance, becoming Head of Climate Alliances, Coalitions & Reporting for Aon - an insurance broker, that matches risk with capital, clients with underwriters, and counts major corporations and governments as clients. Insurance, at its core, is about understanding and pricing risk. The industry runs on calculating probabilities and turning them into prices. Stephanie started looking at something more fundamental than individual premiums. She was seeing entire sectors, entire geographic regions, becoming uninsurable. When water systems fail, it’s not just one farm or one business that becomes too risky to cover. It’s everyone who depends on that watershed. The insurance industry had been tracking this for years through their payouts: floods and droughts accounted for a large proportion of their disaster claims. But what Stephanie realized was that this wasn’t just about paying out more claims. It was about approaching a threshold where the risk becomes so high, so unpredictable, that insurance itself breaks down. Whole classes of people, whole industries, would simply have no coverage available at any price. The system only works if risks are manageable and calculable. Even before joining Aon, she had realized that water was important. But now it was getting clearer it was the fundamental risk underlying everything. Water runs through so many industries, from agriculture and technology to manufacturing and energy. It is the foundation of our society and the basis of our food security. As she puts it: “The risk isn’t just to the individual crop; it’s the dependency of our entire society on water. If the watershed fails, the entire economic system becomes uninsurable. We have to treat the water cycle as the ultimate infrastructure.” From within Aon, who initially just saw Stephanie’s interest in water as a hobby, she started to educate and convince the network around her of the importance of water. Then came her next aha moment: she realized farming was key to the whole water issue. Agriculture uses a large percentage of our total water supply, and the water footprint of regenerative agriculture was much smaller than industrial farming. Regenerative agriculture was the way to deal with water. She began to focus intensely on this connection. She saw that insurance could be a way to unlock investments, to get money flowing toward solutions. For the food industry, a switch to regenerative agriculture would make them less risky to insure. As she explains: “Insurance is the seed of resilience. By leveraging risk analytics, we can move from simply paying for a disaster to incentivizing the prevention of one. We are matching risk capital to the transition.” In other words: instead of just writing checks after disasters happen, insurance companies could lower premiums for farmers who prevent disasters from happening in the first place. But more importantly, by fixing the underlying water risk, they could keep entire sectors and regions insurable. The claims data said that regenerative farmers filed far fewer insurance claims than industrial farmers. They were more resilient. Through decades of heavy machinery and chemicals, industrial soil had become compacted and lifeless. When heavy rain hit, the ground acted like concrete. The water ran off, taking the topsoil and crops with it, leading to massive flood claims. Regenerative farmers, using cover crops and avoiding tilling, had rebuilt the organic matter in their soil, creating a sponge effect. High-carbon, aerated soil can hold up to ten times its volume in water. In a flood, the soil sponge absorbs the excess. In a drought, that same sponge slowly releases stored moisture back to the plants. Regenerative crops often stay green for weeks longer than neighboring industrial crops during heatwaves. For an insurer, it was key that a single farming practice lowered the probability of having to pay out claims on both ends of the extreme weather spectrum. Both floods and droughts. As Stephanie explains: “When we restore the soil sponge, we aren’t just fixing a farm; we are protecting the collateral. Healthy soil is an appreciating asset because it builds its own resilience against both flood and drought.” In financial terms, collateral is what backs up a loan. If a farmer borrows money to operate, the land is the collateral. If that land becomes degraded and can’t produce crops reliably, it becomes worthless as collateral. But healthy soil that can weather both floods and droughts? That becomes more valuable over time, not less. Industrial plants had “tiny little roots” because they were “spoon-fed” fertilizers at the surface. They didn’t need to work for their food. During extreme weather events, these shallow-rooted plants were easily uprooted. In healthy soil, plants had to reach deep into the earth to find nutrients and interact with fungi. Some of these roots could be a meter long, creating a massive underground anchor system. When storms hit, these plants stayed put. Industrial farming also created economic volatility. Wild swings in costs and income. It depends heavily on expensive, energy-intensive inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. If gas prices spiked or supply chains broke, the industrial farmer’s costs skyrocketed. If they couldn’t afford the inputs, the crop failed. Regenerative farmers used the soil’s natural biochemistry to provide nutrients, creating more stable, predictable business models. For an insurer, a farmer with lower, more stable costs is less likely to go bankrupt during a bad year. Stephanie applied this to what she calls the earth’s “first mile.” The beginning of the supply chain, where raw materials are actually grown in the soil. Industrial farming had turned fields into a toxic cocktail of compacted dirt. “Industrial farming has created a toxic cocktail of soil degradation,” she says. “From a financial perspective, this turns the land into a depreciating asset. It’s essentially mining the future to pay for the present.” A depreciating asset is something that loses value over time, like a car. Industrial farmland, stripped of its nutrients and ability to hold water, becomes less and less productive. It’s like slowly destroying the machine that makes your money. When rain hit these degraded fields, it ran off like it would from a parking lot, causing the downstream floods that insurance programs struggled to cover. The realization was that they needed to pay farmers to deal with flood and food security. To fix the problem at its source. Then came the next step: to shift this system, we needed to focus on supply chains. To understand why this matters, you have to step back and look at the fundamental question: what are the levers for large-scale change to restore water on this planet? Economics is one of the fundamental driving forces of societal behavior. And supply chains (the networks that move commodities from soil to shelf) are the basis of how the economic system actually works. They’re not just logistics; they’re the invisible architecture that determines what gets grown, how it gets grown, and who profits from it. If you’re looking for an innovative leverage point to shift the whole system, suppl… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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January 18 · 1 hr 13 min
Precipitationsheds and the socio-economics of rain: Patrick Keys
In Bolivia, farmers wait anxiously for rains. Meanwhile, Bolivian consumers buy beef and soy from Brazilian suppliers whose operations are clearing the very Amazonian forests that generate Bolivia's rainfall. The atmospheric connection is real but the economic feedback loop is invisible. If Bolivian businesses and policymakers could see this connection as clearly as they see a map of trade routes, would they make different choices about whom to buy from? Would Brazil negotiate differently if it understood that the forests it's clearing don't just affect its own climate, but control a neighboring country's water supply, a country that happens to supply a significant percentage of Brazil's natural gas? These are the questions that the work of Patrick Keys, a professor at Boston University, raises. He is taking the work of moisture recycling (aka the small water cycle, aka precipitation recycling) in exciting and pioneering directions. He is making the geographical sinks and sources of rain clearer, and then transforming moisture recycling from atmospheric physics into something socio-politico-economic: maps that show which upwind regions supply a location's rainfall, and frameworks for understanding how economic decisions in those distant regions create invisible dependencies. He's building the conceptual infrastructure for embedding atmospheric connections into the social and economic systems that actually shape land use. Working with Ruud van der Ent (interviewed here previously), he developed the precipitationshed framework, which maps how much rain falling in a particular location comes from which upwind regions. A city might receive portions of its rainfall from countries A, B, and C, or provinces D, E, and F. By making these connections spatially explicit, the framework transforms vague atmospheric dependencies into actionable geographic information. This required inventing new vocabulary - terms like precipitationshed and evaporationshed had to be coined to discuss atmospheric source regions, linguistic innovations necessary for thinking clearly about phenomena that previous frameworks couldn’t adequately describe. From their paper, precipitationshed is ‘defined as the upwind atmosphere and surface that contributes evaporation to a specific location’s precipitation (e.g. rainfall). We apply the precipitationshed as a tool for better understanding the vulnerability of rainfall dependent regions (e.g. dryland rainfed agriculture).” [Keys 2012]. The precipitationshed gave moisture recycling the same kind of geographical grounding that watersheds gave to rivers. Keys then applied this framework to map mega-cities worldwide, identifying which might be most vulnerable to land-use change in their precipitationsheds. His 2018 paper combined precipitationshed boundaries, rates of land-use change in source regions, reliance on terrestrial versus oceanic moisture, and robustness of municipal water infrastructure to create a vulnerability index. It was the beginnings of a translation exercise of sorts: how to convert land and atmospheric physics into the kind of comparative risk analysis that could sit alongside assessments of aging pipes or aquifer depletion in a city planning document. The mapping of atmospheric vulnerabilities built the platform for his next stage of work. Together with Lan Wang-Erlandsson (also interviewed here previously), Keys pushed the framework into new territory: moisture recycling as an ecosystem service embedded in social and economic systems. Places downwind buy from businesses upwind that affect the land. Economic behavior affects how businesses treat the land, which then affects the rain downwind. It’s a feedback loop where economic behavior is integrated into the hydrometeorological flow. In their 2017 paper “On the social dynamics of moisture recycling,” they propose a new field: socio-meteorology. And they write: “this paper provides insights for resource managers, particularly land and water managers, who are searching for new leverage points within their dynamic social–ecological systems. Understanding where key feedbacks, bottlenecks, and potential cascades are located within a system can provide managers with better information about the consequences of direct or indirect intervention within their systems.” Keys and Wang-Erlandsson analyzed three countries with different social-ecological configurations. Mongolia recycles 13% of its own moisture and receives 29% from Russia. Its precipitationshed is geographically vast but socially isolated - the moisture comes from remote Siberian forests and Kazakh steppes with little economic or political connection to Mongolia. Niger generates only 9% of its own rain, depending on moisture from Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and across the Sahel. Here, multiple neighboring countries with active trade relationships, migration flows, and shared resources all influence each other’s rainfall through land-use change, creating a regionally interconnected system. Bolivia recycles 18% of its own moisture and receives 28% from Brazil. Brazil’s soy and beef production drives Amazonian deforestation, reducing moisture available to Bolivia. Yet Bolivia supplies a signficant percentage of Brazil’s natural gas imports, creating economic interdependence. Global commodity markets, international conservation programs and distant financial actors all influence land-use decisions in Bolivia’s precipitationshed - what Keys calls a tele-coupled system, where spatially disconnected actors drive local change while experiencing no feedback from the atmospheric consequences. Through these case studies, Keys and Wang-Erlandsson mapped the complex networks of interactions, categorizing different network topologies as isolated, regional, or tele-coupled, and showing how each creates distinct governance challenges. Their work sits at the intersection of economic geography, which examines how location shapes economics; spatial economics, which studies the role of distance and place in economic systems; and ecological economics, which constrains economic analysis by biophysical realities. The rain falling on your city isn’t just a weather event. It’s the downstream consequence of land-use decisions made by people you’ve never met, influenced by market forces you don’t control, mediated by institutions that don’t know you exist. And your economic choices -where you buy your food, what you consume - are propagating back through that same system, affecting rainfall patterns elsewhere in ways you can’t see. Economic activity in one location, such as deforestation for cattle ranching, reduces moisture available to another location through reduced rainfall for agriculture, creating invisible water transfers mediated by the atmosphere rather than by shipping containers. Every economic transaction that changes land use is simultaneously shifting hydrometeorological patterns - a causal chain that conventional economics typically ignores. Keys describes his vision for a coupled model that could simulate these systems dynamically - tracking not just moisture flows but also economic networks, political institutions, social dynamics, and climate change, all interacting in real time. “If you think it’s actually a social ecological system, some sort of complex adaptive system with feedbacks, then you have to be able to do that,” he explains. “You have to be able to kind of have the other part of that connection. Otherwise, it’s like only it’s like half of a simulator, right?” Building such a model would require bringing together network scientists, economists, political scientists, and climate modelers together to connect the dots. Here is an abridged, edited version of our interview into the exciting fields of precipitationsheds and the socio-economic-political dimensions of rain Pat: I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University and I have been doing moisture recycling research since 2010. My bac… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 14, 2025 · 1 hr 50 min
The big groundwater crisis - food, water, pollution, and social unrest : John Cherry interview Part I
I was mesmerized listening to John Cherry talk about groundwater, so absorbed that I didn’t notice that two hours had gone by. With lucid clarity, he laid bare the massive groundwater crisis engulfing us. Cherry speaks from a place of gravitas. He’s won the Stockholm Water Prize, known as the ‘Nobel’ of water, which is awarded in conjunction with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the same institution behind the Nobel Prize itself. He wrote the seminal Groundwater textbook that shaped our modern understanding of groundwater hydrology. He essentially pioneered the entire field of groundwater contamination. In our conversation, he poignantly pointed out that the water crisis is really a crisis of groundwater. 99% of liquid freshwater is groundwater, and groundwater supplies 40% of our food, and 70% of irrigation, but many major aquifers are already overdrawn. The Ogallala, which grows a sixth of the world’s grain, could be largely unusable within decades. Once natural buffers against drought, aquifers are now drained, leaving regions like California, Spain, São Paulo, and Cape Town vulnerable to even short dry spells. He noted that the Agricultural ‘Green’ Revolution of the mid 20th century wasn’t just about using synthetic chemicals and high-yield seeds to produce more food, it was also withdrawing more groundwater. Cheap pumps fueled massive irrigation, temporarily boosting yields but eroding soils and depleting aquifers. Today, exhausted soils and collapsing aquifers are twin legacies of that mid-century surge. Global “virtual water” trade has been hiding the growing groundwater crisis. Wealthy nations import crops grown with disappearing groundwater, from Peruvian blueberries to Arizona alfalfa for Saudi Arabia. Far from increasing food security, globalization has made local water crises a global problem. There was so much rich material in our interview that I couldn’t squeeze it all into one written article (Substack has length limits), so I’ve split this into two parts. Part II will go further into the crisis, and also explore solutions - regenerative agriculture, rainfall harvesting and managed aquifer recharge. The audio podcast remains one complete episode. Here is a lightly edited, abridged version of the interview : Part I Alpha: Lets give you a little bit of an intro. You’ve written a very widely regarded textbook on groundwater, and you were a pioneer of contaminant groundwater. John: Yeah, I wrote that book Groundwater with a colleague, published in 1979. There weren’t any other modern books on the market, so it became a widely used book for many decades. It’s on the Groundwater Project website and it’s one of our most highly downloaded books, even though it’s very old. Alpha: Yeah, it’s very readable. At some point you began exploring the bigger picture idea of why groundwater is so important to the world. John: Yeah, I started the Groundwater Project as a follow-up to the textbook by Al Freeze and myself. The idea was to just publish a few books on the web and then it grew and grew, and that got me into looking at the bigger picture. Bigger picture lectures are what I’ve been giving for the last four or five years. First I was talking about the bigger picture of the state of groundwater science, and now it’s really about the bigger picture of groundwater in the world and how it’s kind of ignored and unappreciated and mostly pictured incorrectly. Alpha: You’ve won some of water’s biggest prizes. The Lee Kuan Yew Prize and then the Stockholm Water Prize. John: I won the Lee Kuan Yew Prize of Singapore in 2016, and then the Stockholm Water Prize in 2020, rather late in my career. But it kind of caused me then to want to develop responses to broader questions. Really, it was the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize when the interviewers would ask me, “Why is groundwater important?” The technical things for which I won the prize were entirely irrelevant in terms of the big picture. So I realized I had to develop responses to the question of why groundwater is important. Alpha: I think for a lot of people, when they first hear about groundwater, they don’t really realize they should have any significant thoughts about. It’s just this water deep underground which we don’t see. And yet, I think you’re saying there’s actually this whole groundwater crisis that’s looming that has repercussions for many things—from our food to our water systems. Really key to human society. John: Yeah, and it’s now recognized that there’s a global water crisis. The World Bank and UNESCO and all the global organizations pay lip service to that, that there’s a global water crisis. But they never get to the point of what’s the nature of the crisis. It’s primarily a groundwater crisis because groundwater makes up 99% of all liquid fresh water. The number you see in the textbooks is always less than that because they include ice. But when you take ice out of it, it not being a liquid, groundwater is 99% of all liquid water. And most of the time, all of the water that flows in streams and rivers is groundwater. It’s called base flow. All wetlands are fed by groundwater, and most ecology that’s water-related has a groundwater feed. People just don’t recognize that because you don’t see it. About half the people in the world drink groundwater to some degree or another. And 40% of the food these days is produced by irrigation, but 70% of the irrigation water is groundwater. The standard number you see everywhere is 40%. But if you include the groundwater that’s flowing in the rivers nearly all the time, if you include that in the irrigation number, then it’s 70%. So groundwater, the 99% number, you almost never see that mentioned. The number for food is always underestimated. There’s just misunderstanding of the importance of groundwater. There’s the concept of peak water, which isn’t given much attention, but then there’s the concept of peak groundwater and the depletion of aquifers around the world. So it’s the heart of the global water crisis and it’s becoming the heart of the food crisis from the water point of view. Alpha: Can you give us some of the basics of groundwater? Like how much groundwater there is relative to freshwater? I don’t think people realize exactly how groundwater comes up and that streams are fed by groundwater. Can you give us some overview? John: So when it rains in most areas, rainwater infiltrates through the soil and gets to the water table. The water table is the first free water. If you were to go out in your backyard and dig a hole, eventually you’d find free water in the hole—where the water level would come. If you take a post hole auger and make a hole, and if you’re in a part of the world where there’s enough rainfall, then not far down—five, ten feet or whatever—you’ll have free standing water. That free standing water level is the water table. In the upland areas of the landscape, the water table has high energy water and that water flows toward the low-lying land in a flow system. Just like streams have a flowing regime, groundwater has a flowing regime. The water flows from higher elevation to lower elevation areas that are called discharge areas. Streams and rivers are almost all discharge areas. Wetlands are almost all discharge areas. By that term, we mean that there’s water seeping up and discharging into the surface water body. What people don’t realize and what schools don’t teach is that groundwater is beneath us everywhere. It’s very unfortunate in the schools—there’s not a well outside the door. Students could have been measuring the water level at least at about any school in the world, seeing what’s happening to it over a long time. Sometimes when it rains, the rainfall gets down to the water table and recharges groundwater, but in many cases when it rains, water doesn’t get all the way to the water table and that water goes back into the atmosphere. The most important—one of the most important concepts in the so-called water cycle—is the water ta… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Oct 12, 2025 · 51 min
The planetary boundaries of green water : Lan Wang-Erlandsson
Lan Wang-Erlandsson is a researcher studying moisture recycling. She focuses on the large-scale interactions between land, water, and climate, and their implications for social-ecological and Earth system resilience. She has conducted work on the planetary boundaries of green water, where green water is defined as water that vegetation uses, or more formally as ‘freshwater from precipitation that is stored in the soil and used by plants through transpiration’. She helped society understand moisture recycling as an ecosystem service, and collaborated with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) on reports examining how moisture recycling intersects with the future of agriculture. Her work has emerged from two scientific lineages. Science often evolves through such lineages. Hubert Savenije was working in the Sahel region of Africa when he wondered why rainfall did not keep decreasing further inland, as it should if the air rained out water closer to the coast. He concluded that there had to be moisture recycling, where moisture evaporated back into the air and then fell again as rain. (Other lineages have called this moisture recycling phenomenon by the names precipitation recycling, or the small water cycle.) Two decades later, Ruud van der Ent (who appeared here on the Climate Water Project podcast), a graduate student of Savenije’s, built on his work to create a map of global moisture recycling. Lan Wang-Erlandsson would eventually collaborate with van der Ent, as would Patrick Keys, who would work on hydrosocial aspects of moisture recycling (he will appear in a future podcast). Lan Wang-Erlandsson completed her graduate work at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which brought its own scientific lineage. The Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) was founded in 2007 by Johan Rockström and Carl Folke as part of Stockholm University. Its intellectual roots reach back over half a century, drawing on ecological economics, systems thinking, resilience science, Earth system science, and work on sustainability, tipping points, and the interplay between society, economy, and the biosphere. From this foundation, the planetary boundaries framework emerged. In 2009, Johan Rockström, then director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, led a group of 28 scientists to formulate the concept of planetary boundaries in the paper “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” The idea was to identify critical Earth-system processes (such as climate change, biodiversity loss, nutrient cycles, land-use change, and freshwater use) that regulate the stability and resilience of the planet, and to estimate thresholds or “boundaries” for those systems that should not be crossed if humanity is to avoid large-scale, abrupt, or irreversible environmental changes. Here’s an abridged, lightly edited version of our interview: Lan: I’m a researcher and team leader of the Anthropocene Dynamics theme at the Stockholm Resilience Center. Alpha: And when you say Anthropocene, that is the era where people are affecting the Earth. You’re studying how people are affecting the water, and how that then affects the whole Earth. Lan: Yes, exactly. You know, the human impact on the water cycle is really very severe and widespread now. You could say that in the past 12,000 years during the Holocene, it’s the only time in history that we know for sure that has supported modern civilization and agriculture the way as we know it, right? The Earth system has several tipping points. So the transition could be non-linear. And so whether we exit this, what we call the safe operating space, of the Holocene-like conditions, if we depart from these conditions, it could be in an abrupt way, or it could be in a more gradual way. The boundaries are a set of guardrails. So you could imagine that you’re standing at the cliff, you don’t want to stand precisely at the cliff, but a few meters away, right? So the boundaries are the guardrails. So now we are somewhere between the guardrails and the cliff, and it’s an uncomfortable zone we want to get out of. Alpha: And then one of the nine planetary boundaries is the water, right? And so that’s what your working on. Lan: Yes, so the planetary boundaries identify nine Earth system processes or components that are vital for the system resilience to function, for the Holocene-like conditions to continue, to support humanity. Freshwater is one of them. And of course, you could say that some other boundaries also relate very much to water, such as biogeochemical flow that deals with phosphorus and nitrogen pollution, for example. And eutrophication is a big problem. You have the novel entities about chemical pollution, and you know, microplastics in river systems is a big issue. And then the same goes with land system change, biosphere integrity, that also includes life in aquatic systems. We know are much threatened. And then climate change, obviously, that is the main culprit behind the water extremes that we see. So they’re very much interconnected, I would say. But yes, my work so far focused on the freshwater change boundary that was previously called freshwater use. Alpha: How did you get into the whole water field? Lan: I’ve always been interested in environmental issues. I remember when I came to Sweden, it’s like 1990. It was a huge transition. So at the time in China, the water, the environment was very polluted. And the only place that was green, I grew up in the city of Guiyang, the only place that was green was the park. So when I came to Sweden, I realized everything is so green, like the whole country is a park. So I think that’s sort of where it started. Oh, you can have it this clean. Is that possible? So I think that ignited my interest for environmental issues. So it wasn’t necessarily water, but I was very interested in sustainability, sort of how we can make the environment more livable. And also just seeing that it is possible. But then the more I thought about it, I find myself kind of obsessed with the thought somehow that we live on this unique planet Earth in this universe. And we are kind of the only conscious ensemble of molecules and atoms. And that somehow it comes somehow with a responsibility or like just so precious that we live, right? And water somehow is tied to everything that is alive. It was the basic element that made life possible. If you go on Mars looking for life, you would look for water. And water is connected to climate, it’s connected to pollution. It’s very much connected to everything on Earth. So it suited me well to work with water as a person who is very interested in our living conditions as a whole. My master’s was in civil engineering. Then I did my PhD with water in Delft University with Hubert Savenije and Ruud van der Ent. Alpha: So you and Ruud were together in graduate school? Lan: Yes, and Patrick Keys. So we were kind of a trio working very closely together on moisture recycling-related issues. Alpha: What was the issue that you worked on? Lan: The aim of my PhD was to figure out sort of how land is quantified, how land-use change affects rainfall. So Ruud has a really cool model that could track moisture, but it didn’t necessarily tell us a story of how land-use change affected rainfall. So my PhD started a couple of years after his. And so the question then was what does this mean in the time when humans, if we look at historically, humans have affected, well, affected basically all land systems on Earth, but transformed around half of the land surfaces, turned it into pasture or agricultural land and with massive irrigation. So how does that change this water cycle? This was my thing I was dealing with. Alpha: And were you looking at for that social-ecological as opposed to the purely ecological aspects, or you were looking at both? Lan: Yes, I guess when I started, it was very biophysical in the sense of just looking at the quantitative water flows. And of course, conceptually, Pat and I, we… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Aug 23, 2025 · 57 min
The forest-water connection: ecologist Douglas Sheil
In this podcast, I had the wonderful experience of talking with Douglas Sheil, professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, about forests. Douglas's academic adventures took him on a journey from his homeland to places like the rainforests of Indonesia, where he studied how local communities can help protect forests. He has studied forests in many forms of their complexity and wrote a well-regarded textbook on tropical rainforests. He became interested in questions of forest and water and helped clarify a big issue in the ecohydrology field about whether trees were contributing to or depleting the water in ecosystems. His results showed that when tree cover is done right, and not as dense invasive monocultures, then there would be an increase of water in the ecosystem. As he worked on forest water issues, he discovered Victor Gorshkov and Anastasia Makarieva's work on the Biotic Pump, and collaborated with them on explanations of their theory. Here an explanation he wrote about the Biotic Pump: “For centuries we’ve believed that temperature differences generate the pressure gradients that drive winds and carry moisture inland. The sun heats the land, warm air rises, drawing in winds. These winds carry moisture laden air inland, where it eventually warms, rises, and condenses as rain. There are complications, such as Earth's rotation and atmospheric cells, but overall temperature differences underpin our understanding of how wet inland areas of the planet stay wet. But there’s an alternative: the Biotic Pump. An idea developed and championed by colleagues Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov. Given common misunderstandings, I thought I would try a simple intuitive summary without equations. Here goes: Imagine two vast areas of atmosphere next to each other: one wet and one dry. Both are at equilibrium with the same surface temperature. Atmospheric pressure follows a roughly similar near exponential decline with altitude in both, but there are small differences. In the wet column, the presence of moisture means that air pressure is slightly lower (compared to the neighbouring dry column) in the lower atmosphere (up to 3-4 km height) and becomes greater above that. These pressure differences mean that if the columns are brought together, and the pressure differences maintained, a circulation is established: At the surface, air moves from the dry to the wet area. At higher altitudes, it flows in the opposite direction. This circulation causes air to rise over wetter regions and descend over drier regions. In the real world, “dry” areas may be just a little less moist. As long as it is sufficiently moist the moister region draws in air from surrounding drier areas. As this incoming air rises, it cools and reaches saturation, producing rainfall. This process maintains the moisture contrast with neighbouring areas, where the now-dry high-altitude air returns and descends. As long as the wet column stays wetter, and has sufficient moisture to maintain the pressure differences, the circulation continues.Forests are key here. Forests generate water vapour more effectively and rapidly than most other land cover types, maintaining a moist atmosphere that is effective at drawing in air from elsewhere and sustaining this circulation deep inside continents. Energy derives from the sun evaporating water vapour. Heat energy still features (because condensation releases latent heat), but in this case overall pressure differences depend on condensation and the removal of water molecules from the air.” For more info here is a link to a paper where is a co-author with Makarieva & Gorshkov. Douglas Sheil and I discussed a variety of topics, like how forests evolve, how to restore forests, and his work on the intermediate disturbance theory for forests. Here’s an abridged edited version of my interview with Douglas Sheil: FOREST ECOLOGY AND WATER SYSTEMS Douglas: My background is very much as a forest ecologist, somebody who's been looking at how we can do conservation, particularly in remote parts of the tropical rainforest. How can we actually work with communities, for example, to actually protect these incredibly rich communities that are often under threat from large-scale industrial transformation, etc? My preoccupation has often been with the biodiversity, the rich species richness of these forests, which of course is famous. But if you're working with communities and stuff, talking about things like water, that's something that really matters to everybody. Everybody needs reliable water, even in wet parts of the world. If there's a big drought, that's a problem. So everybody cares about water. So I guess I've come into the water topic, partly because I see it really matters. Alpha: You grew up in Ireland. Did you then get into forestry immediately, or was it a little bit of a winding route? Douglas: It was winding. When I was young, I thought I was going to be an astronomer or a physicist, because I kind of like these elegant relationships. So I've always had a broad interest. But I think I got jealous of some of my colleagues when I was a student who went on these amazing field trips and stuff. So I thought, well, I really want to do that. That looks like way more fun than living under fluorescent light bulbs for the rest of my life. So I was kind of doing that in my holidays. And then I thought, how can I make people actually pay me at the same time to do what I do in my holidays? So that's kind of been my career trajectory. And I guess I've been super lucky, because it kind of worked out for me. Alpha: Cool. So when you went to graduate school, which department were you in? Douglas: At that point, I had done molecular biology. And then I actually went to a course called Forestry and its Relation to Land Use at the University of Oxford. It doesn't exist anymore. But it was a pretty practical applied kind of research. And I thought, OK, this is a real change of direction, but really exciting. I'd done a bit of holiday work in various remote places. And I thought I really need a solid grounding, some kind of expertise that people are going to employ me for. And then I did a PhD also in Oxford on long-term change in tropical rainforest. Alpha: Cool. And then you ended up writing a textbook about rainforest, right? Douglas: Yeah, that's right. So that was about 15 years ago. I did it with Jaboury Ghazoul - he's at ETH in Switzerland. I'd known him previously. We had worked together a little bit. So that was a real opportunity to actually think more broadly and more widely about tropical rainforest and how they work and why they matter and what we can do to try and protect them in the future. So that was a really nice opportunity to really look around these topics. And that's actually also when I got very much more interested in this forest and water topic. Alpha: As you go about your research, how do you select your problems and how do you then try and tackle them? Douglas: I guess I've been lucky that it's a mixture of curiosity and practical opportunity. I guess a lot of my career early on, I wasn't actually in academia. I spent 10 years in Indonesia with a place called Center for International Forestry Research. That's very applied work, really trying to look at how we could protect forests and also protect the poor and vulnerable people who depend on them. So that was very much a goal for 10 years. I really appreciated that because I think that's so fundamental to what we're trying to do to protect forests. It can't be ignoring the people, it has to be including the people. So it was a real opportunity to go and spend time with these communities and with teams of researchers. I was leading teams of researchers there and trying to look at how we could come up with ways to protect these forests in the long term, that the communities themselves would support. Maybe just to clarify that so much of the cost of conservation around the world is the squabbling and the… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Aug 1, 2025 · 1 hr 14 min
Making the map of the small water cycle : van der Ent
Where does the evapotranspiration that rises from forests and grasslands come back down as rain? This was the question that Ruud van der Ent asked as a hydrology graduate student. He wondered if he could make a map of the world that would show this flow of moisture around the world. Van der Ent worked with his professor, the renowned Hubert Savenije to make this map. They published this in a paper called “Origin and fate of atmospheric moisture over continents”. Their map has been quite influential and attracted quite a lot of attention. One of the most popular articles in this newsletter has been on their work. This is the map they made. It shows where evaporation that goes up, will become rain again on the same continent. Red areas means 60%-80% of the evaporation that rises from that area will come back down as rain on that continent. So you can see that a lot of the evaporation rises from the west coast of North America, will come back down as rain somewhere in North America. A significant amount of the evaporation from Brazil and the Amazon rainforest, will come back down as rain somewhere in South America. Much of the evaporation from Congo and East Coast of Africa will come back down again as rain somewhere in Africa. Much evaporation in northern India and western China will come back down on the continent. This is a map they made showing the origin of rain. It shows the amount of rain in that area that came from evaporation off the land. So in the Rockies in the US, you can see that a lot of that rain there originated as land evaporation. In northern China, you can note that a lot of the rain there came from moisture that evaporated off the Eurasian continent. I was really happy when I managed to track down Professor Ruud van der Ent, and he agreed to do this interview. Below is an edited excerpt from the interview. Alpha: When you were doing your Master's, was that when you first met Hubert Savenije? Ruud: Yeah, he was a professor in hydrology, a very inspiring person, very enthusiastic, full passion for hydrology and how things work. In one of the courses that I took, we had to read papers. I think the majority of the papers we had to read were his own papers. He did some work in the 90s on moisture recycling in the Sahel. He developed his own approach to the question of where does the rain come from and how much of the evaporation comes back to the land surface. Savenije took the perspective of let's follow the trajectory of moisture and then calculate along that trajectory how much is being recycled. His estimates were rather kind of surprising to me, eye-opening. As you go from the coast of West Africa up north into the drier parts, the amount of precipitation in those drier areas that stems from land sources is actually greatest. So they have a region which actually depends on the land for rain. When he did his moisture recycling equations in the 90s, the computational power was much less than we have today. Also open data was also much harder to access. You couldn't access the big climate mobile data sets, reanalysis data sets that we can access now. So he did it all with analytical equations. I said, I want to pick up this research for my Master thesis. Alpha: Savenije was very much his own independent thinker, right? He was positioned in Africa during his early days. And because there was no internet back then, he had to figure out everything himself. He was trying to figure out this whole precipitation recycling thing. Around that time researchers had just discovered that the sea surface temperature seemed to correlate with the droughts in the Sahel in Africa, and so these researchers thought most of the rainfall was due to the oceans. But then Savenije plotted the amount of rain as you move inland, and he found the rain didn't go to zero. It would have dropped off to zero if precipitation was only due to moisture from the oceans. So he figured out that the land moisture was creating precipitation. . [Hubert Savenije] Ruud: I think sometimes, maybe its a blessing, you know, back when we did not have access to all the information on the internet, because you spend more time actually thinking about your own theories and develop your own methods, which is pretty cool. People also find it very difficult to kind of get their head around that there's moisture coming from Europe that could contribute to rainfall in the Sahel because how's it possible that the moisture crosses the Sahara? There is no rainfall there. There's no rainfall there, but there is still there is still moisture in the air, right? It still crosses the desert. And that's really amazing. Alpha: Yeah, it just doesn't reach the dew point to rain out over the desert. Ruud: Exactly. Yeah. Alpha: Savenjie came up with this idea of quantifying the amount of moisture recycling or precipitation recycling by how much it came back down on the same continent. He was saying the amount of water that transpires off the continent, that then comes back down on the continent is the best way to measure the moisture recycling ratio. Ruud: Yeah, so there's also been a bit of a discussion where people were we just draw a box and we calculate how much recycles within the box. His point is that close to the coast, there is not a lot of moisture recycling. The further you go inland, the more recycling you get . Alpha: So he was talking about this in class when you were in class. And did you somehow think, you want to take one of these ideas as a stimulus for your research? Ruud: Yeah. I did a bit of searching on this moisture recycling topic. A lot of Amazon work pops up. But I had the feeling the global picture is missing. I just wanted to know what the global picture of moisture recycling looks like. And that's why I said, okay, I want to pick up this moisture recycling work. There was also a lot of other literature on this. I think I had a very unusual approach to to to my research compared to to a lot of students in my own class or the kind of students that I see doing their their thesis. They spend only a tiny amount of time on the literature review and and and want to immediately dive in do calculations. I spent like two three months, just reading. If I want to push the edges of what is known, I felt I should first have a complete understanding of what is known about this topic. Alpha: Was this for your Master's topic or for your PhD? Ruud: For my Master's. But the Dutch is a bit different than the American system and in our system you really have to finish your master's before you could start a PhD. For my master thesis I got such interesting results that Savenije said - I have some funding available, do you want to turn this into a PhD? I very quickly had my first paper and then this turned into a PhD. Alpha: When you're choosing your topic in your Masters you don't want to choose something that's too ambitious because you only have like one or two years right. Were you worried that this was a very ambitious topic when you were looking at it? Ruud: Yeah. Yeah, I was worried a little bit because what if things are complicated? But I also thought maybe this is the only time in my life that I have a significant amount of time that I can default to what drives my own curiosity. Alpha: Did you have to learn some of this climate modeling because you were in hydrology? Ruud: Yeah, for sure. I taught myself along the way. I was doing a kind of a bookkeeping approach of the atmosphere. I learnt from friends and colleagues in the the moisture cycling field that had more meteorological background. Sometimes I would teach them about hydrology and and and the land surface and how those things work. Alpha: So how exactly do you calculate how much evapotranspiration is happening off the land? How did you figure out where that water went? Do you run a climatological model? Ruud: My work is running a moisture tracking model. But it's not a mo… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Jun 19, 2025 · 1 hr 8 min
'Our Blue World' documentary : Paul O'Callaghan
A wonderful new documentary, Our Blue World, is out, and it offers a panoramic exploration of how communities across the globe are learning to live in greater harmony with water. The film highlights a wide range of innovative and traditional practices—from China’s sponge city initiative, to New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person, to the ancient Peruvian techniques for guiding water into mountains so it reemerges as springs. It also delves into the Biosphere 2 project, where twelve people lived in a sealed dome for two years and had to rely on constructed wetlands to purify their water. The documentary further explores the shift along the Mississippi River from a levee-centered approach to one that embraces wetland restoration, as well as efforts to restore Ireland’s bogs—offering a hopeful vision of how we can reimagine our relationship with water. The film is produced by Paul O’Callaghan, directed by Ruan Magan, and narrated by Liam Neeson (the action movie actor) in his voice that oozes gravitas. The movie has beautiful images, and wonderful music that connects us to the local geography and culture. [Peru: still from movie]. I think documentaries are a great way to movie the word out about the water cycle, so I was glad for the chance to chat with producer Paul O’Callaghan about the movie. Trailer: Here are some abridged excerpts from our conversation, which covered topics from the movie: On sponge cities Paul: The idea of a sponge city was very evocative. It captures your imagination. It's like, what is it? It's these two words that you're familiar with, but not together in that context. So anytime I would have talked about this, people became very curious. I was really lucky that we got introduced to Kong Jin. And I remember the day we had the call. It was chaotic in my house at the time. But we had this really great call with Kong Jin and struck up a very good rapport with him. And he kindly was willing to take part in the film. This was just post COVID-19. So China was locked down pretty much for two plus years. We were at the embassy trying to get our visas and get in, which wasn't easy. Kong Jin is a revolutionary, a visionary, something of a rebel, and a landscaper architect who felt that China was going in the wrong direction. They were following the West blindly. They were pouring concrete at an absolutely incredible race. And when he looked at that, he thought, that's not the right way to go. [Kong Jian : still from movie} He'd grown up in the 1960s in China, where it was a beautiful wonderland. It was a paradise. But nobody listened to him when he said we should embrace traditional ways of managing water like rice paddies, for example, which are stepped and terrest, the nearly room for water to ebb and to flow. That was how people lived for 5000 years along the banks of the Yangtze, the Pearl and the Mekong, where in actual fact, the fitness to govern in China was correlated with your ability to control water or at least live with the ebbs and the flows of those mighty, mighty rivers. So it's always been something fundamental to Chinese philosophy and political systems. He wrote 500 letters to 500 mayors and it landed on deaf ears. He was cast out as a pariah. Until one mayor, who later became a minister for the environment later on reached out back out to him and said - I'd love to try that idea that you had in Hainan. That was where the first sponge city was created. And these things look beautiful. When you think about China, oftentimes we think of concrete high rises, skyscrapers, maybe a lot of road traffic and air pollution. Well, these aren't like that at all. Certain parts of the city have tree lined along the streets. They may have mangroves on the coast. There large areas that are allowing rivers to ebb and flow, with constructed wetlands that look like parks. Alpha: Yeah, it's amazing that he had the persistence to do 500 mayors. It's like sometimes to make these paradigm shifts in work, you really have to push. It reminds me of little Peter Andrews, the Australian guy who did natural sequence farm. He just kept pushing, pushing against and all these people say no. But yeah, it's interesting. Not everyone has that ability to push so hard. And sometimes it takes that to get it out there. Paul: And you never know, it only has to land with that one mayor, 499 would never have listened to him. When you write these letters, when you advocate, when you communicate, none of us can really understand the wrinkles that are going to take effect downstream of this. He engendered a spirit of pride in a harkening back to perhaps a wisdom of a 5,000 year old culture. In doing so, he wasn't alienating people with some theory that they wouldn't understand. He was advocating for traditional wisdom. Alpha: And what is some of that traditional Chinese wisdom? Paul: We've been trying to flatten a variable signal, particularly in monsoon type climates in South Asia, where you get these incredible flows, certain times of the year, which can cause rivers to burst their banks. Nowhere is that more true than in China. They had names for these rivers. One was called the Scourge of the Sons of Han. People began to come together and work together in collaboratives, particularly in an agrarian society where the most fertile places are along the banks of these rivers. We saw that in Egypt along the Nile, which, you know, sustained a very rich culture for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And China for five thousand. One of the reasons they haven't had a collapse, like many civilizations have had, is because the rivers constantly replenish nutrients on the lands. They do that by flooding and edding and leaving room for the river. The concept was don't try to canalize it, channel it, control it, straighten it, put it underground and make it move in straight lines. That's not what water wants to do. And Erica Gies, extremely eloquently, captures this in the idea that ‘water always wins’. It's about the power of a tree to break the fall of the water, slow it down. In the root zone of these plants, you've got at least the same area taken up as the complete canopy, not to mention the mycorrhizae structure in the root zone, which is acting like an incredible sponge to hold water. He has been able to integrate this into modern cities. He's got at least over 50 sponge cities, if not more now. Others adopting and embracing the same idea, Bangkok and Thailand. You'll see examples in South Korea. I would say what we see happening in New York, and Copenhagen. Same as in Hamburg, in Germany, New Orleans. And that was one of the interesting things about this film project—you always learn something. We saw stuff that you could join, but they were arising independently, in synchronicity with one another, without anyone really having got together and come up with any particular master plan. What they found was a swampy area that maybe was low-value property—you know, nobody wants to live there. It was kind of almost wasteland, duck land. But when they went in and regenerated it, rehabilitated it, actually the price of the property increased dramatically—because people now wanted to live there. In China people were embracing this. Elderly people are out there in the morning, in this wetland natural park, where you can eat fruit from the trees, and there are fireflies buzzing. It sounds idyllic. You’d see young couples on a date walking together, holding hands through this area. You know, people pushing strollers with babies. The city came alive—through a combination of walkways and boardwalks—in an area that was functioning to protect the city from the disastrous effects of flooding. It was also purifying water. And if you come from a background in water engineering, and you look very closely, you can—you can totally see how the levels are being adjusted, and how it’s flowing from one pond to the next pond, and how it’s all connected. But you know, f… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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May 11, 2025 · 1 hr
Putting rocks in rivers to lessen drought, fire & flood: Laura Norman, physical scientist
Laura Norman works for the USGS (United States Geological Survey), a US science bureau, studying water flow through our rivers and landscapes. There is a slow water movement underway, being spread by permaculture, agroforestry, Natural Sequence Farming and regenerative agriculture, promoted by people like Erica Gies, the author of ‘Water always Wins’, and its essence captured by Brock Dolman’s phrase ‘slow it, sink it, spread it’. Laura Norman has been helping make the impact of slow water more scientific with her hydrological modelling and observational studies, and helping bring these slow water ideas to US governmental agencies. It is perhaps a surprising idea that putting rocks in streams would have an impact on hydration of land around it, but slowing down flowing waters, can give them a chance to seep into soil and aquifers, and then spread sideways. It is also perhaps unexpected that the creek flow can increase by about a quarter as a result of putting rocks into it. A common assumption is to think the rocks are blocking the water from going to downstream people. But it actually increases the water available to downstream folk, because it reduces peak flow during big storms in the winter, and parcels out that water to flow more in the future - the creeks flow four weeks longer and with more volume into the dry season. Whats further intriguing, is this simple idea of putting rocks in streams can actually lessen wildfires. This is because the water now has a chance to seep laterally into the floodplains through the soil and aquifers, allowing the plants to be hydrated into the dry season. Its a similar effect to what beaver dams do to the water flow. There are a number of famous photos floating around the internet, of the vegetation in the floodplains around beaver dams being unscathed by fire, while the area around them is burnt. Norman studies how gabions and check dams, rocky structures that slow the flow of water in our streams, impact how water flows through other parts of the watershed, how they help farmers deal with droughts and floods, and how it provides us with a more nature-based way of water management. Here;s our interview (lightly edited): Alpha: Today I'm excited to have Laura Norman from the USGS, the United States Geological Survey. Welcome. Laura: Thank you. Alpha: Cool. What is it that you do with the USGS? Laura: I am a physical supervisory research physical scientist. I've been working at the USGS Geological Survey since 1998. And I study watershed modeling and all of the components of the water budget related to dryland regions. And so my research has been looking at how people can impact water budget parameters in models and trying to develop scenarios that are beneficial for management. Water budget meaning like the water cycle. So I look at all the components of the water cycle. So everything that comes into a watershed, what happens to the water when it is here and how it leaves. Alpha: How did you get interested in water and land? Laura: Well, I am originally from the swamps of Rhode Island. And so I grew up in a wetland in the coastal region of New England and went to school at Oregon State where I studied forestry. And I was very interested in the big trees in the Pacific Northwest and maintenance of big trees. And I ended up learning about watersheds when I was there. So I took a job with the state parks and some other jobs in between and ended up coming back to school to the University of Arizona, which is a water-limited area here in the desert, the Sonoran Desert. And that started studying watersheds here in the arid lands and trying to figure out how to best manage water. Alpha: Cool. And then did you work for a while before you ended up with the USGS, or you were already there? Laura: Well, I had a couple of seasonal things, internships and such. But when I came to Tucson, I got a job working for the University doing geospatial analysis. So my expertise in my master's degree in watershed management was the advanced resource technology option. I was using GIS. When I did my dissertation, I started employing remotely sensed data. So using satellite imagery within a GIS, within models. I worked for the University of Arizona for a couple of years and then started volunteering at the USGS until I was finally contracted on. Alpha: Do you want to explain to the audience what GIS is? Laura: GIS is geographic information systems. And so it's basically making maps. So I use a lot of different data. I mentioned satellite imagery, but a lot of people these days are most familiar with GPS, so global positioning systems. So using that type of geospatial data within a computer software to develop maps and do analysis in a spatial context. Alpha: Cool. And then the USGS, which is the United States Geological Survey, which is kind of an intriguing name because I don't think most people know what a geological survey is. What does it do exactly and how big is it? Laura: I think the USGS has 6,000 employees all over the country. And we currently have six mission areas. I work in the core science systems mission area, but we have biological resources, water resources, geologic resources. And so it's divided out into these types of things. Most people that are familiar with the USGS are familiar with us because of our topographic maps. So when you go to go for a hike in the forest, you get out your your map. And that's the USGS map. And we've, you know, been kind of made popular with the laypeople for that reason. But we also have our hazards and minerals explorations. And so when you hear about an earthquake or a flood event or volcano, that's the USGS will be the first person to be contacted in response for that. So we have a lot of different science. We're the science arm for the Department of Interior. So we do all the science for the parks, the BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service and BIA, Bureau of Reclamation. So that's our hat. Alpha: BLM is Bureau of Land Management. Laura: Yeah, yeah, a lot of the national land, but not the Department of Ag. So Forest Service falls in that part, but we're the Department of Interior. Alpha: OK, cool. And Geological Survey, I take it means surveying all the geographical features like the land, the rivers, how the water is working. Laura: Yeah, that's what it has has become. I think originally we were a little more focused on the geology. But of course, we still are focused on geology, which has kind of broadened our scope to include some more of the geographic features. Alpha: So the people who are doing the water resource management in the US, they need to know some of the signs of how the water is moving through the landscape. And so that's where the USGS comes in play, right? They try to understand the hydrological cycle and how it interacts with the ecosystem. Laura: Yep, 100 percent. We have gauges all over the US monitoring surface water flows. We monitor wells and we have protocol to make that information available online in real time. And so it's where we are a public service agent. And so civil servants, everything that we do is is made available to the public. Alpha: What was your project when you came to the USGS? Laura: I started working on a geologic map of the US-Mexico border. So I was digitizing and putting old geologic maps into geographic information systems, started analyzing those in relationship to environmental health in the US-Mexico border. And that evolved into mapping colonias that did not have adequate infrastructure, such as sewer lines or water lines or adequate housing and trying to identify those communities, they're called colonias, on the US-Mexico border that needed to have some recognition for that lack of infrastructure. So I started working on projects like that. Funding came from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and working with partners both sides of the border to do that. Both of those are all three of those projects. And then I started doing some watershed … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Apr 11, 2025 · 1 hr 31 min
Natural Sequence Farming : Stuart Andrews
Peter Andrews, also known as PA, was an Australian racehorse breeder who in the 1970s bought a piece of property, in the state of New South Wales, to raise racehorses. However the land he bought, the Tarwyn Park property, was degraded and the water on it was salinated. After a lot of thought and experimentation he developed his own set of restoration techniques. He looked at the dried up patterns in the floodplains to figure what used to happen on the land. He saw there used to chains of ponds. So he started to work to rehydrate the floodplains. He repaired the degraded flow lines. He used willows and reeds to restore the river banks. But the neighbors keep bringing the authorities to try and stop what he was he was doing. Stubborn, brash, and confident, and because he knew he was onto something important, he continued to work anyways. The plants started bringing back the wet paddocks, and refilling the aquifers. The land turned into a flourishing, vibrant landscape. The work became known as Natural Sequence Farming. Peter Andrews went around around proselytizing the work - badgering governments, media and land owners, to get them interested. This was a process, he said, which could save Australian farming, help them stay hydrated even with the droughts. His work got on the Australian news, and word spread. The focus on getting the message out though meant Peter lost sight of running the farm as well, and the bank foreclosed on his property. But then Stuart Andrews, his son, was able to buy back the Tarwyn Park property back from the bank. Stuart had to teach himself the ways of Natural Sequence Farming to run the farm. He then worked with Duane Norris to build a training program there to teach others the same techniques. ( I had became friends with Duane a little while back, and he was very encouraging of my work during the early stages of writing this newsletter. I recruited Duane in my project three years to develop a set of principles that succinctly encapsulated the important aspects of the hydrological cycle.) Tony Coote, a successful jeweler, who had bought a property on 3 kilometers of Mulloon Creek in the 1960s. He approached Peter Andrews about restoring it. Early on the brought 6 truckloads of blackberries trees and canes to plant, which then started a feedback loop that slowed the water down, which then brought in more vegetation. Fish started coming back. And now there is a Mulloon Institute that teaches and consults on the Natural Sequence Farming work also. …………………………….. Here is info about Natural Sequence Farming from the Tarwyn Park Training site : Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) is “a regenerative practice that restores landscape function, soil health, water retention, and biodiversity by working with natural processes. It explores the principles, emphasises the role of plants and water, and provides practical insights for implementing these principles in your own landscapes. The key to NSF is that plants manage water; that's what built all the environments we see. Plants are the engineers that build everything, and water is the carrier of the nutrients that feed them. Our landscapes operate in a continuous feedback loop connecting three main areas: Accumulation - The highest area where fertility is built. Production - The area where production takes place. Filtration - The lowest area where fertility is recycled. Our landscape no longer operates like this; it has become disconnected due to the way humans have managed their land. Natural Sequence Farming is the solution to that. It is about understanding how this system works and implementing works to reconnect the pieces like a puzzle. We need to understand the landscape first. And once we recognise the landscape and how it functions, it is about setting it up to work correctly once again.” [aerial view of Tarwyn park, photo from Tarwyn Park Training] The five principles of Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) are: 1) Slow the Flow: Emphasizing the importance of slowing down water flow to allow infiltration into the soil. 2) Let All Plants Grow: Promoting plant diversity and allowing natural regeneration of the landscape. 3) Careful Where the Animals Go: Integrating livestock management with the natural sequence of the landscape. 4) Filtration is a Must Know: Understanding the role of natural filtration systems in purifying water. 5) Return to the Top to Recycle the Lot: Recycling nutrients and resources by returning waste products to the top of the soil. ….. I was really honored to get a chance to interview Stuart Andrews, the son of Peter Andrews. Below is part of our interview (slightly edited): Stuart: PA [Peter Andrews] was running a horse stud farm at the time. He wanted to expand. He wanted to be able to produce the best racehorses. So he was looking for an area where he could potentially produce the best racehorse. So he looked around and he realized that the horse market was better in New South Wales. So he then looked for a property over there. The horse salespeople told him about this property that had come up that was in the 1940s-1950s, one of the leading stud farms in New South Wales, producing some of the best horses. But it had deteriorated. It had salinity come in, so now it wasn't performing the same. Animals generally had ill health. So he was able to get it at a fair price. So he purchased that, and that's where his real experimentation started off, because he had a place now that was full of what would be determined as weeds, and that had this high water table—but saline water. So it was restricting the growth. So he had a fairly degraded landscape to work from. So he thought how do I get that functioning again? He started reading these patterns in the landscape. And once you've been out there, and you spend enough time looking at the landscape, you can realize that the patterns are the same everywhere you go. They just vary in size. You're looking for the patterns that water has created over the landscape. And in conjunction with plants, what role did the plants play to enable that transition to happen? So Tarwyn Park was predominantly, mostly what we would call floodplains. So it was probably more than half—maybe 60 or 70%—of the property was floodplain. So therefore, it had the potential to have an aquifer of fresh water underneath it. And that's how it evolved. It evolved to be like that. But since white man had come in, the landscape had deteriorated. They cut a channel right through the floodplain. So instead of the floodplain filling with fresh water, it was recharging from the side elevation with saline water out of the ridges, out of the slopes. And the fresh water all ran away out through the eroded channel. And I see the same thing in the States. It's no different. You’ve got all of these now-eroded channels which drain the landscape. Our whole landscapes around the world are set up as drainage mechanisms. So Australia, because it's such an arid environment, generally—when white man came here—they set about draining the only areas that were quite wet. And the drainage ended up being uncontrollable because the vast amount of water moving down these systems created bigger eroded channels. So he said, well, this landscape can’t function as a drainage landscape. What do we need to do to turn it around from a drainage landscape into a landscape that recharges, recharges the aquifer. He started playing around in the creeks—what we would refer to as a creek, which really is just a drainage line. It’s an eroded channel. But what our government determined this eroded channel to be—they just called it a creek, rather than recognizing that it never actually existed prior to agriculture taking place. Those creeks were never there. It was generally what was referred to as a chain of ponds—so water was ponding, slowing, then moving on and repeating this pattern as it went down the line. Alpha: The chain of ponds that disappeared by the time he got there? Stuart: Yes. Yeah. It was alrea… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Mar 30, 2025 · 1 hr 34 min
The art of water : Charlotte Qin
I had the joy of interviewing Charlotte Qin who is a water artist working to capture the emotions and spiritual essence of water through her paintings and her reciprocal performances where the audience engages in a connection with water. I was moved when I watched a performance of hers where glacial ice was brought in, and people spoke embodying the glaciers spirit, as the glacial ice melted. She comes from a physics background, and integrates science and policy into her art works, seeking to educate people about the many dimensions of water and watersheds. She writes on her Meeting of Waters project and organization site: “Water is at the heart of life, yet it remains one of the most overlooked crises of our time. Climate change, environmental degradation, and political conflicts have turned water into both a casualty and a weapon. Despite its fundamental role in sustaining ecosystems, communities, and cultures, the urgency of water issues has yet to fully resonate with the public. The complexity of water governance often keeps it siloed—separated across scientific, policy, and artistic spheres. But water is not just a resource; it is deeply woven into our histories, emotions, and faiths…. The name Meeting of Waters originates from La Jonction, where the glacial waters of the Rhône and Arve rivers merge—one clear, one sedimented—visibly illustrating the confluence of forces, ideas, and communities. What began as the artistic practice of an individual has grown into a movement—bringing together scientists, policymakers, artists, and cultural voices to reframe water not just as a crisis to solve, but as a relationship to restore.” …………………………….. I was excited to connect with Charlotte, because I’ve been working on a number of water art and dance ideas, and interested in bringing together artists, who work with water, and also dancers who would like to do dance pieces around water and watersheds. I have a still emerging idea of collectives of artists and dancers working together to activate the restoration of watersheds. Drop me a line if this sounds interesting. ……………………………… Here’s part of the conversation I had with Charlotte, for full conversation check out the podcast. Alpha : So after graduating physics, you went and studied art, is that right, or design? Charlotte: I was doing this joint course between the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. It was called Innovation Design Engineering. In my impression at the time, it was the marriage of art and science, except that everything is applied. We tend to think science and engineering, art and design, as two pairs, right? But in fact, our artists and scientists think more similarly, whereas designers and engineers were actually, you know, the similar family in terms of how they think. It was a very challenging course for me because I had to think about the users, think about solving problems. Whereas in my natural state, I would just be conceptualizing, trying to understand the system, and then going very deep in my thinking. In that course, I had to prototype. I had to think deeply about sustainability and why the world is messed up the way it is. And that was also when I found water. Not that I wasn't interested in water previously, but it around the same time I had kind of an environmental awakening. I realized I could feel the pain very deeply how water feels. And yeah, so I changed my direction completely. I was doing some cool technological projects involving water in my first year. But then until that awakening came and I was feeling the pain, I realized that water needed help, water needed healing. And it's not something that more technologies can fix. Or it's not something, you know, it's no longer, it shouldn't be used as a commodity again and again, especially by me, to further our egoistic creations, technologies, and crazy stuff we could make. You know, imagine, you know, the, there's so many incredible properties water manifest and we could apply it in so many different ways. But what's the point when the majority of the water bodies are suffering and are broken and needed help? Actually, people don't realize, right? It's the water's voice that needed to be amplified. So that was when I changed my project completely, almost failed my course in the end. Alpha: How did this come about that you felt the pain of water? Charlotte: I was in Spain. I went on a meditation trip in the middle of nowhere in Spain and then so I flew over from England. And then after three days, I think I just shed a tear at the end of the meditation and I just realized that, oh, wow, I was chasing after something shiny. My soul was not quiet enough until then to know my purpose or to hear water. So I really had to quiet down from, you know, all the crazy things going on in London and also my course, you know, imagine this bling-bling technology design course in the middle of London where the Industrial Revolution first started, right? And at that time, I was trying to reinvent more technology to solve something. Well, you cannot fix a problem using the same solution where that created the problem, right? So that was, I felt like that was what the course was driving us to do without making us critical thinkers first. So that's why like the whole designer engineer, scientist, artist complex came in because I felt like I wasn't taught in the course to think critically. I had to go back to my, perhaps my original training. I might take a bit longer than most of my classmates to get to where I need to be. But I had to think clearly because I am not here just to resolve a symptom. I want to solve the deep, deep rooted issue, the societal issues. And when we talk about climate change and ecological crisis, it's all rooted in water. Water is the first thing we need to look at. So that's something I strongly, deeply believed in until years and years later, you know, as I was in Geneva, I was an artist and advocate. I just suddenly realized that, wow, people, people, we speak about the same thing, but we don't see this the same thing at all. Like imagine, like at that time, I was before going to COP and all that, getting into climate change and all that stuff. I thought climate was water, you know, like water is climate. It's like so obvious, right? But then I was like, actually, not, not everyone thinks the same. Like maybe 90, 95% of people don't think, don't see what I see. And I was really shocked. I think like more and more, it's happening more and more now when I realize, oh, okay, I've been just in my own head. Alpha: How did you come about the connection of climate water? Was it through readings and books or articles or through your own thinking or what? Charlotte: Just through my own thinking, you know, like, because I felt like because of my, okay, long story short. Fast forward from my masters, right? Finishing my master, I tried to live like a normal person, getting a job and all that stuff. It didn't last for very long. Less than a year later, I found myself in the middle of COVID and I was just re-experiencing the pain that I was feeling for water. And I literally had to come out and become an advocate through my art because there were times and days I could only paint. And suddenly I get an exhibition and all that. And so I became an advocate. I was telling water stories through my painting. That was 2020. And because of this connection with water and I, it's almost shamanistic, right? I feel like I can feel water's pain. I can tell water's stories. I feel like water needs a voice. And I'm willing to do that through me, through my art. And then I was like, okay, let's bring it to the society. Let's collaborate with people who are also working in the water space. So that's when I slowly, more and more created this meeting of water's initiative that is making everyone do art. And so we tell the water stories through different voices. We personify water by imagining ourselves being water bodies, which w… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Feb 28, 2025 · 1 hr 23 min
Plants drink water from the air: hydrologist Sieger Burger interview
I met Sieger Burger a few years back, and we have had quite a few interesting conversations about water over that time. He is a hydrologist and writer. In this conversation we range over many aspects of the water cycle, with a focus on hydraulic redistribution (how plants bring up groundwater), and foliar water upake (the process by which leafs can take in water). During Sieger’s Dutch childhood, he became interested in water - “water was fascinating to me. Water is this weird molecule that is both bringing life and also bringing death. It's really about water—where the sweet spot is, of the right quality. Not too pure, because with water, we can't have distilled water. Also, not too salty or polluted. You need to have the right quantity, if you have not enough, then we dry out, and if it's too much, then we drown. It's this fascination with water as a life-giver.” [quotes in this essay have been slightly edited to remove conversational filler words] Burger went to Delft University to study integrated water resources management. There he took a class from Hubert Savenije, and met Ruud Van der Ent, who was Savenije’s graduate student. Van der Ent and Savenije created a map of the small water cycle (precipitation recycling), showing where the evapotranspiration in one country, comes down as rain in another country. (The article on this map was the most read piece in this newsletter last year). Burger says of their work- “I think that it is fascinating what their work has started. The whole concept of precipitationsheds was, more or less, based on Van der Ent's work [developed formally by Patrick Keys]. It shows where my precipitation comes from, you know, so that you get an understanding of the range of area where your rain has been evaporated. If you talk about having enough water, especially in drier areas, that's really useful to know because that helps you realize: if I am in Kenya, where does my water originate from? If I'm in Kazakhstan, where does my water originate from? If I'm in the Sahel, where does my water come from? I think that that work has really helped to get a much, much better understanding of the whole hydrologic cycle. And I think it also has made it possible to visualize things. One of my first lectures was ‘A picture tells more than a thousand words,’ and those pictures from Van der Ent and all the others have really helped tell that story of the small hydrologic cycle.” As a hydrologist, Burger went to work in Uganda - “Uganda - lots of people call it the paradise. Around Lake Victoria, where we were based, it was between 15 and 30 degrees. It's perfect growing conditions. Lake Victoria rehydrates the air so that you have very high rainfall. So everything grows. But at the same time, more and more forests were cleared for growing large-scale annual crops. Then, if you get your tropical rains, all the soil can erode. I tried to encourage people to go into agroforestry. I was able to implement a few agroforestry projects to really showcase the combination of the design and plant growth. The fascinating thing about the tropics—things grow so quickly. So, with the right design, with a syntropic agroforestry system, you get after a year, the fast-growing pioneering trees at like four or five meters tall, from a seedling that was 15 centimeters. The soil comes alive, and you just create this life-giving ecosystem that is productive. We got cassava growing there, and the roots were massive, bigger than most people had ever seen. It's all about how you design it in order to give life—make growth possible so that water becomes a life-giver." Curious about many aspects of the water cycle and ecosystem, Burger started a blog “A journey of discovery into the world of food, soil, and water”. ( Its in Dutch, but you can click the translate into English button.) On why he began a blog - “I started a bit in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a sad country because since '79, it's been in war. When I was there in 2011-2013, all the hills were denuded, all the trees were cut, all the grass was gone. And you just see terrible things environmentally happening because it's just a man-made desert. And that made me realize I just need to dive into how this works. When we moved back to the Netherlands, I got more into agriculture. Everyone was saying agriculture is causing lots of issues, like, what does that mean? What is it? You know? That made me first try to understand how this whole agricultural system works. It's a dive into the negatives, but you also need to have an alternative. And that where I started to dive into all the aspects that nature is providing, is giving us, and that we can use. That is where I got into all kinds of aspects of plants, of trees, of the biotic pump concept. It's all these things that just made me realize it's such a complex ecosystem altogether. It's really trying to get a much better rational picture—be able to tell the story much better. That's why I dived into it.” On how plant leaves can drink in water vapor, in a process called foliar water uptake. Its a process that is for instance important in California, where redwoods get up to a third of their water from the fog which they ingest through foliar water uptake : “Fascinating enough, if the plant becomes very dry, it appears that there are plants that can absorb water from the sky. It’s mostly water drops that are falling on the leaf. So it can be dew, it can be fog, it can be rainfall after a very dry period. At that point, the water pressure just becomes zero because there’s water available. So then the water can be sucked into the plant and is just filling up this gap of water shortage in the plant. According to one paper, we know this already for quite a long time, for a few hundred years. Now that we face more and more droughts and water becomes more scarce, we start to think, how on earth do we keep our plants and vegetation alive? Are there alternative water sources? This foliar water uptake, as it’s called, is becoming an interesting alternative, especially if it’s then combined with hydrologic, hydraulic redistribution [plants bringing up groundwater] , as well as some plants can do. The drier it is, the more significant this will be. Foliar water uptake in certain redwood tree ecosystems has been measured as a third, and in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel, it was three quarters of their total water budget. In dry climates, this can be really significant. Orchids have a huge percentage because they have no roots, they are more or less largely depending on foliar water uptake. It has now been found in all climates—in tropics, in arids, in subtropics, Mediterranean—whatever climate there is, these plants have been identified to do foliar water uptake. From Sieger’s blog article on foliar water uptake “Because the process of water flow through the plant is driven by tension differences, water can also be absorbed in the leaves if the tension gradient is directed inwards. This can occur when it starts to rain after a very long dry period (see image below). The tension in the air becomes 0 MPa, while in the soil it is still around -1 MPa and in the plant around -2 MPa or higher values. When it starts to rain, the leaves are the first to get wet, while in the plant/tree and in the soil there is still a high suction tension. Water can be absorbed via the leaves and reduce the suction tension in the plant/tree. The longer it rains, the further downwards the water can be sucked (the flow direction then completely reverses). At such times, water can even go from the leaves to the roots and ultimately infiltrate into the soil. In the last 20 years has much more research been done into Foliar Water Uptake and more insight has been gained. The consequence of this, however, is that many processes have mainly been described as possibilities, but have not yet been sufficiently studied. The research into Foliar Water Uptake has therefore not yet provided any clarity on how e… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Jan 19, 2025 · 1 hr 34 min
Lessening LA wildfires : The water solution - A dialog with Didi Pershouse
The Los Angeles wildfires hit close to home for me. In the wake of the fires, I started working on an expansion of an article “Rehydrating California to lessen wildfires” I wrote a couple of years back. Then I remembered that Didi Pershouse and Walter Jehne had run a Rehydrate California project awhile back. So, instead, I thought to have a dialog with her, as a way to provide an overview of the subject. Didi has a wonderful, warm personality, and is a leader in spreading the word about regenerative water. She teaches workshops about soil and water, wrote the book The Ecology of Care, and founded the Land and Leadership Initiative. I had her on for a great previous podcast where we talked about metaphors for understanding water and soil - bread, museums, and wicks. Here is a portion of our dialog, edited for clarity and context. You can listen to the audio for the full dialog. (The title picture above is the Ballona lagoon in LA which spanned thousands of acres in 1900.) Alpha Lo: I was around in many of the California wildfires during the 2010s. At one point, I thought, "How come no one's looking at the restoration of the water cycle to deal with the wildfires?" The talk was all about fuel reduction, cutting down brush and trees to stop the wildfires, but very few people looking at how we can rehydrate the land to lessen wildfires. One of the few who was talking about it was Zach Weiss, who was talking about restoring land and the small water cycle. His mentor, Sepp Holz, was talking about how draining the water from the land leads to more wildfires. Another one of the few was Milan Milan who was studying how the degrading of the landscape led to the drying up of the landscape, which lead to the loss of rain and an increase in wildfires in Spain in the 1990s. When he came to California, a US forest service person said to him, "If your ideas are correct, California is going to have a lot of wildfires in the 2010s." And lo and behold, it did. At the start of this year, a number of us who had been promoting water cycle restoration noticed that wow, there's suddenly a lot more interest around this topic and its importance in relationship to climate change. The word was getting out. When the LA wildfires hit last week, it seemed like there was a lot more talk than in the past about how rehydrating the land could be a way to deal with wildfires. Didi Pershouse: One of the phrases that's been going around is that wet wood is a lot harder to burn. So there's the basic principle that when vegetation is hydrated, when the trees and grasses have enough water, it helps with fire prevention. Even just when a lawn has more water in it, it affects the soil sponge. Healthy soil has pore space or void space. The structural integrity holds that together so that water can soak in and stay in this underground reservoir. In places like California, where there's a rainy season if you're lucky, you can have a much longer green season when you have water at the root zone for plants. There's an issue of plant health, particularly tree health. Trees are so long-lived that a tree under drought stress is much more likely to be stressed by viruses, fungal diseases, and insects. So you're much more likely to have damaged trees that are dropping limbs, falling over, etc., in a landscape where there's not enough water being held in the land at the root zone for the trees. Not only is wet wood harder to burn, but fuel on the ground doesn't break down when its dry. Limbs, leaves, dry grasses that have been trampled to the ground by foot traffic in a dry landscape will just oxidize. They're going to slowly dry out, lose their biomass into the air, and become crispy, crumbly, and fire-prone. We see this in the Southwest, where fence posts put up a hundred years ago are still standing because they haven't rotted off. But in a wetter landscape, or in a more biologically active one where you have more fungal activity from saprophytic fungi that biodegrade wood, a fence post will rot off after 10 years. Here in Vermont, you can't leave a fence post forever, or a log on the ground will turn into beautiful soil in just a few years. I can't leave firewood on the ground here for my wood stove; it has to be up off the ground because the fungal hyphae and spores will go right into that and turn it into soil. So that's really different in places with seasonal rainfall that haven’t found ways to preserve the water that was once in the land. In a more Mediterranean climate, you need the beavers, you need the wetlands, you need the soil sponge. You need a way of being in the land that does not disturb its ability to hold water. Those are some of the foundational ideas. There are ideas of biotic pump, cloud formation, precipitation nuclei, and the issue of transpiration and latent heat flux. Alpha Lo: There's some interesting studies about soil moisture correlating with wildfire risk. For example, NASA and other researchers have looked at places with more soil moisture, and found they were a lot less vulnerable to wildfire risk. One paper showed that soil wetness lessens larger fires. Nick Steiner, who works with Zach Weiss in water stories and does a lot of water restoration work, recently did a video where he shows a plant that he watered a lot and another plant that dried out. He then took a small blowtorch to both, and the one that was dried out just burned, while the one with water didn’t burn at all. Didi Pershouse: Yep. Alpha Lo: So, it’s key how we hydrate. Another factor I’ve been trying to raise awareness of is groundwater levels. In California, we've drained a lot of the groundwater, so much so that in the Central Valley, the ground is actually sinking because of groundwater loss. In LA, there's a freeway going through there called the Artesia Freeway. An artesian well is where if you swing a pickaxe into the ground, the groundwater will spurt up like a spout. That’s how LA used to be, with groundwater all the way up to the surface. When the groundwater is that high, plants are a lot more hydrated. If the groundwater drops beneath the roots, you can't bring up that water. If groundwater levels are reachable, the trees can bring it up, pass it into the soil, and also transpire it, making the air more humid. The groundwater also helps increase the rain through precipitation recycling. If we increase groundwater levels we will decrease wildfire risk. People think that LA is a desert, but if you look at old photos from the 1800s, you’ll see it was actually wetlands in many places. Rodeo Drive was where the rivers met, with a significant chunk of Beverly Hills being wetlands. It's just that we've kind of forgotten because we paved over it. During the floods of the early 1900s, we channelized and concretized the LA River, which made it really ugly, and also funneled water out of the landscape without allowing it to infiltrate. Thankfully, we’re starting to restore some of it now. Central Valley use to have big lake, Tulare Lake. The area was one-third wetlands. Didi Pershouse: And now Tulare is basically gone. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of water that has been drained off of the land. I think of having groundwater as a result of the soil sponge. The soil sponge can replenish it. We've seen places where the groundwater levels come back up again when people start managing the surface better—allowing cover crops, diverse vegetation, less or no tillage, and not using nitrogen fertilizers, which break up soil aggregates and interfere with the microbial work that forms those aggregates. Without those aggregates, there’s no pore space between the mineral particles. When we interfere with soil sponge formation, groundwater levels decrease. Alpha Lo: Right. Several researchers, Lucas Zeppetello and Marysa Lague, have shown that soil moisture in the southwest United States, including California, correlates with moisture from previous seasons. Less moisture in the spring and winter leads to more… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 3, 2024 · 1 hr 27 min
Absorbing rains to bring landscapes back to life: Neal Spackman
Trees, stout and rugged, once dotted the valleys in the Makkah province in Saudia Arabia. An indigenous system of community land management called Hima allowed nature to flourish for thousands of years. But then in 1950s Hima was abolished, and desertification set in. People cut down trees, so they could have money to import food for their animals. The land became austere. The sun seared desolation into the hills and wabis (the valleys). The earth became dry as a parched throat. Xerophytic plants baked in temperatures that reached 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). Animals were rare, except for the resourceful camels that weave their way through the landscape. [Al Baydha, from the “The story of Al Baydha - A regenerative agriculture in the desert” video] This is the land Neal Spackman came to help restore. One of the keys to restoration was to capture the rare rains, the rains that came once a year, or sometimes even less. These rare rains would turn into angry floods that left deep scars in the landscape. The important step was to turn these watery forces of devastation into a force of regeneration. He worked with the community to pile rocks into gabions and check dams, to slow the flow of the waters, then created initial plant beds to absorb the rain. Over the course of many years the vegetation came back, with the growth of plants like zizyphus, acacia, and sesbania seban. Biodiversity returned. I had the honor of having a dialog with Neal Spackman in this podcast episode. He is coming with us as we return to Iberia, to look at how to restore the water cycles and the rain there. This is the fifth article/podcast in a series that has a connection to restoring the Iberian water cycle and rain : 1. “Restoring Iberian rain” 2. “What implementing agroforestry on farms would do to the rain : a European perspective” 3. “How eco-tourism can help the regenerative water movement : Anna Pollock interview” 4. Regenerating a farm and a semi-arid region: Silvia Quarta. Global warming causes the air to be able to hold more water like a sponge, which means droughts are longer. But then when the sponge wrings out, we are beset with bigger storms. This week the eastern and southern coasts of Spain were pounded by huge rains. In Valencia, which was hit the hardest, rivers of mud devastated the city. Unfortunately many died. A landscape of buildings were destroyed. The road to recovery will be a long one. Preparations can be made for future large rains. We can work to restore the land, so it can absorb more of the rain, so that it can lessen the amount of that water that reaches cities downslope of it. Floods will then be a lot smaller. Just like in Saudia Arabia, the power of devastation can be turned into the power of regeneration. If there is vegetation, soil, and earthworks to slow and spread the stormwaters upslope, then more of the water can then sink into the land to refill the aquifers. That groundwater can then be brought up by trees in the dry season to hydrate the environment, and to evapotranspire to increase the small water cycle, and bring back summer rains. Nature can dampen the wild variability of our climate - lessening the impact of the big rains in the wet season, and increasing the rains in the dry season. Spain’s future food systems are being threatened by the droughts in regions like Valencia and Andalusia. Nature can store and dampen the big wet season rains, to help create summer rains that aid agriculture. …….. Here is part of the podcast dialog between Neal and I, recorded before the floods hit. Neal talks about his ecorestoration work in Saudia Arabia, and proposes some ideas for water related eco-restoration in Andalusia, Spain. (Dialog edited for brevity, grammar and clarity). Alpha: Do you want to share a little bit about how you got into the whole regenerative sphere and your background? Neal: I spent two years in Guatemala in my early 20s, and while I was there, I became very interested in sustainability in food systems and in the built environment. I met a group of corn farmers whose farms had failed. They were forced to leave everything behind and move to the city, hoping to find a better life for their kids. That sparked a question for me: why does a corn farm fail in Central America? What’s really going on? I grew up thinking I'd be a doctor like my dad, who was a cardiac anesthesiologist. But I became deeply interested in sustainability—specifically in food systems, building materials, and all that. At that time, I didn’t think I could make a living out of it, so I majored in Middle East Studies, Arabic, and did some economics work in undergrad. Then, all those interests converged when I was offered a co-founding role at the Al Baydha Project in Saudi Arabia. Back then, we thought of it as building a “green village,” and it evolved in many directions. Al Baydha was funded by Her Royal Highness Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the youngest daughter of the late King Faisal, and for her, it was a humanitarian effort. We were working with settled nomadic tribes south of Mecca, and the project encompassed a wide range of community development—education, infrastructure, and more. My role was focused on the land, water, and economy side, working with people to bring life back to degraded landscapes in ways that could restore nature and allow people to make a living off their land again. Al Baydha is about a 45-minute drive south of Mecca, in the foothills of the mountains, where we averaged around 60 millimeters [2.3 inches] of rain a year. It’s minimal. And that's an average, but in deserts, averages don’t count for much. You might go two years with no rain, and then in the third year, get six inches over a couple of events. So you’d have 24 hours of rain spread across a thousand days. It’s an extremely austere landscape. And that’s part of what made it meaningful—we were working in conditions many thought impossible, yet proved restoration was achievable. What resonates with people about Al Baydha is the way we approached it—holistically, and under such harsh circumstances. Alpha: What kind of background did they hire you for? Neal: I already had experience living in the Middle East, knew the language, and understood the culture. I also had the theoretical knowledge about land restoration, but no hands-on practice. I think they wisely chose someone with social and cultural skills over technical land skills, because I believe the socio-political and economic aspects are actually more challenging than the land itself. Once you get that right, nature has a way of filling in the rest. The complexity is really in working with people, not with nature, which is fairly straightforward once you're moving in the right direction. Alpha: And where did you get your theoretical background from? Neal: I’d done some permaculture, including a Permaculture Design Certificate course, and read a lot about traditional systems—Nabataean water management, Incan water systems, agroforestry practices in the Negev Desert, and similar topics. I was passionate about polycultural, agroforestry, and agroecological systems, including silvopasture. In the project, we ran hundreds of small experiments to see what worked, building on tiny successes. Alpha: What were some of the main techniques you used to restore the land and water? Neal: We focused on what’s called “natural” or “green infrastructure.” We experimented with gabions, check dams, one-rock dams, zuni bowls, zai holes, fish scale berms, and basins. These small earthworks intercepted water flow in different parts of the landscape. We also constructed about four kilometers of swales, both on and off contour, some based on keyline design. These helped us manage water across the dry river valleys and floodplains. [check dams made of rock to slow the waters. From “The story of Al Baydha” video] Alpha: So you essentially slowed the water down and gathered it, right? Neal: Yes, exactly. In that environment, we didn’t have sticks to u… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Oct 21, 2024 · 54 min
Regenerating a farm and a semi-arid region: Silvia Quarta
In the windswept plateau of South Eastern Spain, where the soil had been eroding, where desertification had been threateninghad the area, and where the community had been struggling with the exodus of young people, La Junquera farm, has been pioneering regenerative methods, and spearheading the activation and restoration of the local watershed. Its been hosting educational workshops for neighboring farmers, and its ways have gradually osmosized into the surrounding area. I had the pleasure of interviewing Slyvia Quarta, an articulate and action-oriented academic-turned-farmer, who works at La Junquera farm, running a regenerative educational program there called Camp Altiplano. Her bio reads “I love having calluses on my hands, taking a hot bath, having a beer at the Topares bar, and being alone on the farm when everyone leaves.” La Junquera farm is part of a larger Alvelal multistakeholder network, that brings together hundreds of farmers, local businesses and scientists working together for the prosperity of the region. They came together in 2014, and created a 20 year strategic roadmap that works to build community and shift the extractive sector into the regenerative sector. It has regenerated much over the past decade, and in the future aims to restore an ambitious 100,000 hectares. Alvelal’s success provides a model which other large scale land restoration projects in Iberia (and there are number of these), as well as around the world, can follow. Alvelal writes on its website “We intend to mobilize local society to transmit the vision that a self-sufficient, dignified region, full of life and prosperity, is possible. A young and revitalized territory that knows and values its resources, with a professionalized ecological agricultural sector and with business opportunities and restorative initiatives for society, the economy and the territory. This is why we work on the restoration of agricultural properties with degraded or eroded soils, through regenerative soil and landscape agricultural techniques. We offer training workshops and technical advice, thus guaranteeing an open and supportive transmission of knowledge. We promote marketing plans for indigenous organic products with great quality differentiated by their productive management. Above all, we want to help all those initiatives that defend the recovery of the landscape, culture and economy of our territory. Likewise, we are committed to the restoration of biological corridors to promote the conservation of biodiversity; activating and energizing local networks around landscape restoration.” Here’s a segment of the interview with Sylvia Quarta, (edited for clarity and brevity): Silvia: I'm currently at La Junquera, a large regenerative farm in southern Spain. It's a 1,000-acre farm, and we’re part of a larger landscape restoration project through Alvelal, a regenerative agricultural association that connects a vast landscape of 100,000 acres here in southern Spain, spanning different provinces: Murcia, Almería, and Granada. It started around 10 years ago, and their goal is basically to restore the landscape—not just in terms of land and nature but also through social restoration, creating jobs, improving the economy, and developing a patchwork landscape with natural areas as well as great regenerative farms and inspiring places. We mainly follow the Four Returns framework, which is part of the Commonland work focused on returning natural capital, economic capital, inspiration, and social capital. [from La Junquera’s website] Alpha: Cool, I'm excited to dive in with you to explore more about your farm and the larger network it’s part of and how that all came together to restore 100,000 acres in southeastern Spain. But first, let’s talk about you. How did you get involved in the regenerative field? Silvia: I’m from northern Italy, from a fairly urban area. I grew up half an hour away from Milan, a big city. At some point, I decided to study environmental sciences and went to the Netherlands. That changed a lot for me because I did my internship and my thesis on farming-related issues. I worked with indigenous communities in the Andes, and I experienced the whole world of agroforestry, organic agriculture, and permaculture. It really opened up for me, and I realized I wanted to do much more than just research. I ended up in a project in southern Spain where I worked as a volunteer for over a year on dryland restoration—learning about and restoring native species, maintaining a nursery of native varieties, planting in the desert, and having a forest garden. After that, I worked a bit at Wageningen University and coordinated excursions for the land and water management program in Portugal. We traveled across the country looking at issues related to large irrigation schemes and syndromic systems, giving students and ourselves a feel for the contrasts in land and water management in the desert. Eventually, I ended up here at Campo Altiplano; it’s the first ecosystem restoration community created by John D. Liu, who is the founder of the whole movement. This camp started in 2017 at La Junquera, and I came a couple of years later. So for the past five years, I’ve been managing a five-acre plot that we’ve transformed from a cereal field into a mixed regenerative agroforestry permaculture system, working with volunteers and the community. Alpha: Can you tell us a little bit about the landscape there? Silvia: You can’t hear it, but it’s crazy windy outside today! It’s quite typical because we’re on a plateau at 1,100 meters elevation. It’s Mediterranean since we’re only an hour away from the coast in the Murcia region, but being high up means we have a vast landscape with broad horizons, which can be quite monotonous. We get an average of 350 millimeters (14 inches) of rainfall per year, but in the last 12 months, we’ve had less than 100. It rained 30 millimeters last Saturday, which was basically the first rainfall we’ve had in a year. It’s been horrible winters; usually, it rains from October to April, but that hasn’t been the case in recent years. Winter can get really cold, and it can even snow, but it also gets super hot in the summer, with temperatures reaching up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 F). So there are huge temperature fluctuations throughout the year and even throughout the day. Most of the land around here is farmland—cereal land, mostly—but there are also more almond trees now. Because of our climate, it’s not easy to grow a wide variety of crops. Traditionally, it was mainly cereals, but now there are more almond trees and pistachio trees being grown. There’s a part of the valley where we’re located that is irrigated and increasingly hosting intensive vegetable production systems. Companies from other places rent out the land at very high prices and manage to have three cycles of lettuce growing in one season, which they then export to Germany, for example. The aquifers are suffering quite a lot—our spring, which is our drinking water, has gone down from 20 liters per second, about 10 years ago, to just 4 liters per second now. Nitrates are contaminating the water. It’s a beautiful landscape, but it faces many challenges; it’s highly exploited and is also depopulating quite quickly. Alpha: A lot of the soil has been washed away, right? There’s not much soil left because of the winds and how it can’t hold onto it in the landscape. Silvia: Exactly. Because of conventional farming and plowing everywhere, the soil is bare. When it rains, like now after three years of basically nothing, just 30 millimeters, a lot of soil gets washed away. That really shouldn’t happen, but everything is so dry and destroyed that it does. Alpha: And the other part is that the aquifers are being drained because that’s what the farmers are using. But that means the trees can’t get as much water, right? Silvia: Yes. It’s a vicious cycle—the water levels are dropping, which means there’s less water available for e… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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Oct 13, 2024 · 1 hr 18 min
How eco-tourism can help the regenerative water movement : Anna Pollock interview
While in Spain, Nick Steiner, the water restorationist, and I were involved in discussions with folks from the Spanish hospitality sector about restoring the water cycles and bringing back the rains there. It began to dawn on us that eco-tourism could play a role in the regenerative water movement. Anna Pollock, who is from the UK, heard of our discussions, and contacted me. She has been a leader in the regenerative tourism movement and in conscious travel. The 2022 Journey Women award was given to her for her work in regenerative tourism. She has been guiding the hospitality sector to help the regenerative farming sector through their purchasing power of food, through their ability to educate guests about regeneration and organic products, and through helping farms develop home-stay programs. Here is an abridged version of my podcast interview with Anna Pollock [edited for clarity and brevity] Alpha : How did you get into the tourism industry? Anna : I've been at it a long time. I started in tourism 50 years ago. I had emigrated to Canada and I happened to arrive in British Columbia at the very moment that the government there was starting to think about whether they could do something with this thing called tourism. Their economy up until that point was entirely resource-based, and they had no chance of doing a lot in manufacturing because of their location at the time. I happened to arrive after having spent a temporary job in England with the research department of Visit England. I had tourism on my resume, and the rest is history. I essentially had an opportunity to start with a very young visitor economy, with very little government involvement at that point, and develop that over a period of about 25 years, before I left Canada to come back to the UK. I’ve been working as a strategist and as a consultant, a bit of a futurist, a bit of a thinker. I’ve always liked to be ahead of the curve, and I’ve been doing that in various places. I do a lot of international speaking, trying to encourage people to think differently, look forward to see what's happening, and adjust what they're doing accordingly. That has kept me busy for that amount of time. So that’s my background. Alpha: How did your interest in sustainability and regenerative ecology begin? Anna: The sustainability journey started probably in the late '80s because I was involved with a consulting firm that was looking at land use planning. It was the time when ecotourism was being considered. A river rafting company in British Columbia came to me and said they were fighting a major mining proposal on one of the most beautiful rivers in British Columbia. They wanted to put tourism on that river to generate jobs and livelihoods without damaging the environment or the river. They asked if I could help them make a case. That was my first foray into trying to construct an argument as to why tourism in the future might be another land use that would bring benefits without necessarily causing the damage that mining was causing. That was a long time ago now, and it did get protected. It got me really interested in ecotourism, and then we did some other sustainable planning-type projects. Like many people, I was really affected by An Inconvenient Truth. That really got me looking very seriously at what was happening in the environment. I started getting serious about it, around 2000. I did a sustainability strategy in 2008 for British Columbia. Alpha: Could you explain the difference between sustainable travel and regenerative tourism? Anna: That's a challenging one. It all depends on how these terms are understood or interpreted because to sustain simply means to carry on, endure, or maintain. If the intent is to sustain a healthy planet with healthy people and biodiversity, then there wouldn't really be any difference between that and the concept of regeneration. However, over the past 20, 30, or even 40 years, the meaning of sustainability has remained very vague. It's not necessarily defined what anyone is trying to sustain. Or what I see happening is that the underlying principle behind it is sustaining the status quo, sustaining the current economic model. It aims to minimize damage, of course, mitigate and reduce emissions, cut back on water use, waste, etc., all of these good things, but it doesn't really challenge the system itself. That’s where I believe regeneration is fundamentally different because it’s based on a completely different understanding of how the world works. The current economic model that we're all caught up in, call it what you want, is based on a set of assumptions about us living in a machine-like world that we can divide into pieces and understand by reducing it to components. The reality is not that case at all. As you would understand, being involved with rivers, we are living systems as human beings. We inhabit a living system, which is the planet. It is constantly adjusting to the forces around it and within it. When you see that and have that way of perceiving, it changes the way you act and the values you have. The fundamental difference between the two is that one is based on a particular way of looking at the world. They call it a paradigm that sees the world as a machine—objects to be identified, analyzed, defined, and then acted upon—versus seeing the world we live in as a living system, as we are a living system, and acting according to a different set of rules, as it were. That’s the real difference between regeneration and sustainability. So when I see many people tacking on the word regeneration and talking about community engagement or nature-based solutions while continuing the fundamental paradigm and the same business model, which is usually growth-oriented—more people, more travel, more destinations—I know it's not the real thing. I hope that kind of explains it. Alpha: Could you tell me a little bit about the evolution of regenerative tourism history and what paradigm shifts might have occurred in its evolution? Anna: The most important thing to realize is that the application of regenerative thinking, which has been present in the Western world, has been around since probably the last war, certainly the 50s and 60s. Regeneration in the Western world is still quite young, but it's not a new concept. If you look at a large population of the earth, indigenous peoples and people of different spiritual traditions understand regenerative thinking. They do it naturally; it’s in their DNA. It’s new in the Western world. When looking at the application of that thinking in the tourism domain, it's really very young, very new. I started studying it around 2010. Before that, I didn't feel confident enough to start writing about how that might have been applied to tourism for another nine years. I wrote a blog post titled Regeneration: The Maturation of Sustainability, suggesting it was a step forward. I'm not saying I created regenerative tourism; I simply applied the thinking or tried to apply the thinking to tourism. That was only six years ago. Regenerative thinking is now moving into many domains—obviously agriculture, regenerative economics—and tourism is responding to that. People in tourism are thinking, "We need to understand this, apply it, or use the term because it’s trendy." I wouldn't say it has evolved; I would say it has spread, and in that process, it has sometimes been misrepresented and sometimes even diluted. Alpha: I saw you had an article advocating the importance of soil to the tourism industry. Can you say a little bit about the article and the impact it may have had? Anna: My interest in soil comes from a, I am a gardener and b, the fact that food is a major part of hospitality. I'm focusing my work very much now on the hospitality component of tourism. There are several reasons for that. One is that hospitality providers are very much rooted in places, and we need to focus more and more on applications in specific places. There’s no generic rege… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe
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