Climate Water Project

Zach Weiss launched an education and community platform Water Stories which trains people to restore water cycles via earthworks, soil restoration, and ecosystem restoration. Central is the idea of retention ponds and terraces which help slow water and help it seep into the aqufers below so the ecosystem has year round access to water. The education trains students to learn the art, find and take on clients. It also trains people to advocate for water cycle restoration. For more see https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/activating-a-global-network-of-water

https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/rewilding-beavers-and-water-restoration

To restore water, shift to regenerative ag: to shift the world to regenerative ag, redo global supply chains https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/supply-chains-and-insurance-the-secret

Patrick Keys, a professor at Boston University, studies the sources and sinks of rain in the moisture recycling process (aka small water cycle). He looks at how they are embedded in socio-economic systems.

John Cherry 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 pioneered the field of groundwater contamination.

Lan Wang-Erlandsson is a researcher studying moisture recycling aka small water cycle. 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, 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.For more info https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/planetary-tipping-points-of-green

Douglas Sheil is an ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He has worked on questions of how forests affect watersheds, how to restore and conserve forests, and also helped clarify explanations of the Biotic Pump. For more info https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/the-forest-water-connection-ecologist. You can help support this podcast by becoming a subscriber of the Climate Water Project newsletter.

Dr. van der Ent is a hydrologist who made a global map of the small water cycle, showing what percentage of the evapotranspiration turns back into rainfall on the same continent. For written article https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/making-the-map-of-the-small-water

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. For more see https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/our-blue-world-documentary-paul-ocallaghan

Laura Norman is a physical scientist with the USGS. Doing hydrological modelling of slow water. https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/putting-rocks-in-rivers-to-lessen

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.For more info https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/natural-sequence-farming-stuart-andrewsYou can support this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber of Climate Water Project newsletter.

Charlotte Qin in an artist of water. She paints the fluid flow of water in its different forms, and she does reciprocal performances about water, where she interacts with the audience, as they connect with the water. For more info https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/the-art-of-water-charlotte-qin . You can support this work by becoming a paid subscriber of the Climate Water Project newsletter.

In this interview, we talk about a wide range of topics in hydrology, including how plants drink water from the air in a process called foliar water uptake. Article is at https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/plants-drink-water-from-the-air-hydrologist

Rehydrating Los Angeles and its surrounding areas can help lessen fires. For more see climatewaterproject.substack.com

A participatory approach to restore bioregions. Commonland is an organization that helps facilitate multistakeholders to come together to look at how to restore the land, ecosystem, and water. It works to bring farmers, businesses, NGOs, local government, and academics together in a collaborative approach. They work to restore 100000 +hectares in a bioregion. An interview of the Climate Water ProjectCommonland (2024) The 4 Returns Framework in Practice: A guidebook for holistic landscape restoration https://4returns.commonland.com/lesson/introduction/ El marco de los 4 retornos en la práctica: Guía para la restauración holística del paisaje" https://4returns.commonland.com/es/lesson/about-the-4-returns-guidebook/ The 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration. UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration Report published by Commonland, Wetlands International Landscape Finance Lab and IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. https://www.commonland.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/4-Returns-for-Landscape-Restoration-June-2021-UN-Decade-on-Ecosystem-Restoration.pdf Using regenerative agriculture to restore the Spanish Altiplano landscape (2022) ETH Zurich https://crowtherlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Restor_Case_Study_Case-18_Spain_Hi-Rez.pdf The Spanish Altiplano Landscape Restoration (visual) https://local-heroes-alvelal.webflow.io/

Neal Spackman discusses his project that restored desert lands in Saudi Arabia, his work with the Great Green Wall of Africa, and eco and water restoration ideas for Spain. https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/absorbing-rains-to-bring-landscapes

La Junquera is a farm on a windswept plateau in southeastern Spain. www.lajunquera.com/ . Its part of a collective of farms and businesses called Alvelal that is working to regenerate the region. https://alvelal.es/. For more info and transcript https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/regenerating-a-farm-and-a-semi-arid

Anna Pollock has played a significant role in launching the regenerative tourism movement. For more info see https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/how-eco-tourism-can-help-the-regenerative and http://www.conscious.travel/

Nick Steiner is a water management consultant at PermaNick , and works at Water Stories, which trains people in the ways of water management. For the essay on this podcast see Climate Water Project

Koen van Seijen is the host of the "Investing in regenerative agriculture and food" podcast, and also manager at Toniic, an impact investment organization. We discuss various ways of funding the regenerative agriculture as well as the regenerative water movement. for interview also see the Climate Water Project Newsletter . The "Investing in regenerative agriculture and food" podcast page is here . You can support this podcast by subscribing to the Climate Water Project newsletter, or on Patreon

Beavers a keystone species. Bringing them back can help us restore wetlands, rivers, biodiversity, and climate. For article https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/beaverland-interview-with-author . Leila Philip's website https://www.leilaphilip.com/

Stephen Robert Miller is the author of "Over the Seawall", where he looks at the unintended consequences of our water infrastructures, and when they backfire. His book describes humans attempts to control water scarcity, droughts, floods, and tsunamis, and how these attempts can worsen the situation. His website is stephenrobertmiller.com . You can read the article on this work at the Climate Water Project at https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/maladaptations-in-the-time-of-water

An interview with Erica Gies, author of "Water Always Wins" and writer for New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American and Nature. She discusses how our current 'grey infrastructure' solutions to floods and droughts, may cause more problems than they solve. Instead she proposes 'green infrastructure', nature-based solutions. She discusses the importance of not destroying the natural ability of the landscape to hold moisture, in order not to increase possibility of wildfires.For more info and newsletter climatewaterproject.substack.com

From restoring peoples health to restoring the earth health, Didi Pershouse, brings her sweetness and wisdom to help heal humans and Gaia. She is the author of “Understanding soil health and watershed function”, and teaches ecological knowledge through her Land and Leadership Initiative. In conjunction with Walter Jehne, she has facilitated numerous water projects around the world.Didi Pershouse is landandleadership.orgThe Climate Water Project is at climatewaterproject.substack.com This is a newsletter you can subscribe to.Instagram.com/climatewaterproject

Zach Weiss is a land and water manager that helps restore the water cycle on our land. He also teaches a course to train people in water restoration. For the essay interview see here. For a link to his water course see hereNewsletter: climatewaterproject.substack.com

Andrew Millison is one of the world's most known permaculture teachers. He travelled to India to document what he calls the worlds largest permaculture project, where 8000 villagers participated to build earthworks and reforest the land, which restored the water cycle to help the crops grow, and also brought back the rain. For accompanying article to this podcast https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/indias-regenerative-water-movementTime stamps for podcast:1:10 Learning about water Arizona. Curb cut idea of Brad Lancaster6:15 Teaching permaculture and water at Oregon State University. The launch of his videos.16:50 India and water30:25 How revegetation and restoring watersheds has increased the rain in those watersheds in India47:00 water situation in Africa49:20 water situation in USA53:57 dampening extreme weather through restoration of the land. Shock absorbers do lessen extreme flooding and drought.56:10 On integrating climate movement and permaculturehttps://www.youtube.com/@amillisonTo support this podcast patreon.com/watercology

Rodger Savory is an ecologist, land manager, and ranch owner who worked in his Holistic Management, the ecorestoration movement his dad Alan Savory started.He set himself the goal of figuring out how to turn deserts into grasslands.His website is www.fixdeserts.comThe article that goes with this podcast is at https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/cows-chickens-microbes-and-fungi

Judith Schwartz, author of "Water in Plain Sight" joins us to discuss how animals affect the water cycle.Her website is judithschwartz.comOur website is climatewaterproject.substack.comand instagram.com/climatewaterproject

Brock Dolman is a conservation biologist and permaculture teacher who coined the phrase "Slow it, sink it, spread it" and helped co-found the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and the Water Institute https://oaec.org/our-work/projects-and-partnerships/water-institute/His organizations work helped bring back the beaver in California, and has helped communties restore the water cycle in their neighborhoods. The template for neighborhood watershed restoration is here https://oaec.org/publications/basins-relations-citizens-guide-2018/You can read his interview here https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/beavers-biology-and-slow-water-brock#detailsYou can subscribe to the Climate Water Project https://climatewaterproject.substack.comYou can support me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/watercology

Teisho and Alpha rap about the water cycle.For more info : https:climatewaterproject.substack.comwww.instagram.com/climatewaterprojectIf you would like to support this project https://www.patreon.com/watercology

Charles Eisenstein is the author of "Climate", "Ascent of humanity", "The more beautiful world that we know". He discusses the importance of water to our ecosystems and the climate, and how we can heal our relationship to the environment.You can see the article at the Climate Water Project newsletter https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/charles-eisenstein-water-and-the#detailsYou can support this work at www.patreon.com/watercologyInstagram: www.instagram.com/climatewaterproject

Forests evapotranspire water vapor. When that vapor condenses to form clouds it creates a lessening of pressure which can then attract more moisture from the ocean. Anastasia Makarieva and Victor Gorshov discovered this effect called the Biotic Pump

An ambitious project to regreen the Sinai desert in Egypt is underway. It involves 1) restoring Lake Bardawil at the northern tip of the Sinai 2) turning the sediment from the lake into soil which is then used to jump start the regreening process in the desert. Creating temporary ecosystems in geodesic domes that catalyse the ecosuccession process 3) a shift in the rain and wind patterns that result from the regreening

Minni Jain is the founder of the Flow Partnership, an organization that has helped thousands of communities in India and Britain protect themselves against floods and droughts, by the use of simple watercatchment structures that can slow, sink, and spread the rainfall as it comes down.

Professor Helen Dahlke, of the University of California of Davis, has been leading the (re)charge to replenish California’s groundwaters. She has teamed up with farmers, to guide the excess water from the winter rains to flood farms, thus creating temporary wetlands. Over days and weeks, that water then sinks down to replenish the aquifers.In this podcast Helen Dahlke shares about her research, the groundwater situation in California, the quest to replenish its aquifers, the droughts and intermittent large rains, the wetlands and floods, and the interdiscplinary efforts to bring back nature-based solutions to our water needs all over the world.

Francina Dominguez, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Illinois has been figuring out where our rain comes from. She has been tracking water as it moves across our continents. The process of moisture hopping, or moisture recycling (also known as the small water cycle in other circles), is the movement of water from air to land to air to land and so on - rain falls to the land, and then evapotranspires back up to form rain again.She studied the droughts in the US Midwest in 2012, and found that the droughts there were related to the drought in California. Rains hop inland from California to the Midwest. When there is less water vapor in California, there will be a less moisture hopping inland. [1]Francina Dominguez has also been researching the behavior of rain in South America. Having grown up in Colombia, which is home to part of the Amazon rainforest, she was motivated to stop it from being chopped down. When she became a hydroclimatologist, she used climate models to study the effect Amazonian deforestation would have on the water cycle.Her simulations found something quite surprising.Climate modelers do not always know what effects will emerge out of their models. They put in various equations and various parameters into their models, and then they wait for it to emerge a result. When Francina Dominguez modeled deforestration in the Amazon she was expecting to find that moisture recycling (aka the small water cycle) would decrease as forests were chopped down. What she instead found, to her surprise, was that the moisture recycling stayed the same, and it was the wind that increased. When the trees were cut down, the wind blew in faster which made it harder for the water vapor molecules to coalesce to form rain. Deforestation led to wind increase, and the wind increase led to rain reduction. Or to state it another way as a maxim - forests makes less wind, less wind makes more rain. [2,3,4,5,6]Francina Dominguez has also studied the interaction of groundwater and climate. At first glance it might seem that groundwater would not affect drought and rainfall patterns. After all groundwater is underground and not touching the air. But water is a complex systems phenomena, understanding one part often requires understanding how all the parts fit together. What Francina found in her models was that groundwater would have a significant effect on rain, because it was being brought up by the root systems of the vegetation, and then would evapotranspire into the air to increase the moisture content in the air. Groundwater levels thus affect drought and rainfall patterns. [7,8]References[1] Herrera‐Estrada, Julio E., J. Alejandro Martinez, Francina Dominguez, Kirsten L. Findell, Eric F. Wood, and Justin Sheffield. "Reduced moisture transport linked to drought propagation across North America." Geophysical Research Letters 46, no. 10 (2019): 5243-5253.[2] Eiras-Barca, J., Dominguez, F., Yang, Z., Chug, D., Nieto, R., Gimeno, L. and Miguez-Macho, G. (2020), Changes in South American hydroclimate under projected Amazonian deforestation. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., 1472: 104-122. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14364[3] Sud, Y. C., Shukla, J., & Mintz, Y. (1988). Influence of Land Surface Roughness on Atmospheric Circulation and Precipitation: A Sensitivity Study with a General Circulation Model, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 27(9), 1036-1054. Retrieved Oct 6, 2022, from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/27/9/1520-0450_1988_027_1036_iolsro_2_0_co_2.xml[4] Yang, Zhao, and Francina Dominguez. "Investigating land surface effects on the moisture transport over South America with a moisture tagging model." Journal of Climate 32, no. 19 (2019): 6627-6644.[5] Chug, Divyansh, Francina Dominguez, and Zhao Yang. "The Amazon and La Plata River Basins as Moisture Sources of South America: Climatology and Intraseasonal Variability." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 127, no. 12 (2022): e2021JD035455[6] Martinez, J. Alejandro, and Francina Dominguez. "Sources of atmospheric moisture for the La Plata River basin." Journal of Climate 27, no. 17 (2014): 6737-6753[7] Martinez, J. Alejandro, Francina Dominguez, and Gonzalo Miguez-Macho. "Effects of a groundwater scheme on the simulation of soil moisture and evapotranspiration over southern South America." Journal of Hydrometeorology 17, no. 11 (2016): 2941-2957.[8] Martinez, J. Alejandro, Francina Dominguez, and Gonzalo Miguez-Macho. "Impacts of a groundwater scheme on hydroclimatological conditions over southern South America." Journal of Hydrometeorology 17, no. 11 (2016): 2959-2978

In this podcast I interview Dr. Elizabeth Dougherty, executive director of WhollyH20. She was instrumental in helping get California to pass its greywater laws. She did this by bring different demographics together - the hippies who knew about what to do with water, with the Stanford engineers who were happy to learn about these methods, and the government officials who could implement the new water laws that allowed these new ways of working with water. She talks about getting Brock Dolman, now a water legend who runs the Water Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, who back then was a long haired bare-foot hippie, to put on suits in order to be heard properly by formal administrators and public utilities workers. Elizabeth got her PhD in anthropology, and is interested in peoples relationship with the water cycles. Her organization has more recently worked with getting communities to connect with their watersheds, and talk about the stories of water in their neighborhoods, with one common, usually largely unknown, story being that neighborhoods have paved over their creeks. Telling these stories can help get a process called “daylighting” to bring these creeks back to the surface. In getting communities interested about their watershed, they learn about the various aspects of the water cycle, and are more willing to get water projects activated.

Nik Bertulis is a permaculture water educator, a designer of integrated water systems, implementing greywater, rainwater, stormwater and wetland systems. He cofounded Dig.coop a water conservation systems cooperative. He has designed many innovative water solutions for our environment.We talk about the importance of closing the nutrient cycles in our environment. What our society considers waste, our pee, our poo, our sewage, can be useful nutrients for the vegetation and soil. The distribution of pee and poo of animals moving around support the functioning of our ecosystems. Nik discusses how we can clean our sewage with nature’s natural biology and wetlands rather than with synthetic chemicals.

David Maher is an experienced land management practitioner who has helped restore natural water processes on many lands. He worked with Peter Andrews who founded the Natural Sequence Farming modality. He expounds here on how our land and water management affects the climate.

How we can used nature based solutions, rather than man made infrastructures for our water.