Water, Soil, Heat and Carbon — the shift hits the fan
The interplay between these four elements is often lost. They are interrelated in many ways, though this Case Study will focus on water and a livable climate.
Picture a desert. Not that kind. Imagine instead one that used to have healthy grasses growing on it, or was perhaps once a body of water. Unfortunately, it is easy to find examples of this almost everywhere these days.
Desertification, as you probably know, is on the rise. With unprecedented water shortages in some areas, and periods of drought, the question becomes What on earth can we do about it?
Enter a pioneering Slovakian Hydrologist
We greatly enjoyed meeting Slovakian hydrologist Michal Kravčík as part of his US West Coast Tour a few years ago, with the model at Voices of Water for Climate, and the original website waterparadigm.org (various articles describe his work including Michal Kravcik Reflects on California’s Water Crisis, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, or know more about the Goldman Prize).
Michal has implemented hundreds of restoration projects in Slovakia, a region plagued by drought for decades. The next desert may be coming to your own region soon. Why? Climate change wreaks havoc on water cycles in ways that seemingly amplify the instability already witnessed in extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods, plus biomass growth in a wet year followed by fires in subsequent dry periods.
Most of Michal’s published work is quite detailed and academic, but his 20+ years experience in Slovakia and elsewhere boasts many successful projects that prove his hypothesis: it is more about heat than water per se, and how heat moves determines how water is distributed, not the other way around.
His science goes a bit off the deep end (kersplash!), but once it is properly evaporated, distilled and condensed … you will see the waters clear and then part (where’s Moses when you need him?) and what’s left in its wake is a subtle but important shift in paradigms that applies to regenerative design as well as climate change mitigation, with projects globally that prove he was right from the start: treat rainfall as something to channel, absorb, harvest, store, keep for a non-rainy day, … not to get rid of it for fear of flooding or just out of habit.
This ties into how we treat land (hint: absorbing water in pockets vs. sending it out to sea via the nearest river or aqueduct), but also how we design and build neighborhoods (hint: regenerative design environmental best practices along with social inclusion), manage stormwater, and so on.
“Local” strategies for this include permeable pavers (vs. concrete), rainfall catchment, and permaculture’s swales (more on swales).
Too simplistic? Probably. Leaving out 99% of the science, some of it controversial and worthy of debate, because it is a piece of the overall climate change mitigation jigsaw puzzle — one solution among many that have their place in the lexicon of strategies that deserve rapid scale-up in order to reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For example, in addition to manageable designs and thorough understanding of what makes heat and water cycles sustainable, we must also leave room for the “dirt,” soil carbon, soil micro-biome, and water management in sustainable food systems, no till or low tillage, carbon farming, carbon credits, managed grazing of sheep, cows, and somehow beavers. Just add water. See Food and Soil Carbon case studies.