Global Warming: Solutions to Droughts, Fires, and Floods
Regenerative agriculture, wetlands restoration, wildfire management, and forest restoration (Part 2)
Alpha Lo is a water physicist who works to restore the water cycle and rehydrate the landscape using natural processes. He co-founded the Regenerative Water Alliance and he publishes the newsletter, Climate Water Project, on Substack. (Read Part 1)
Regenerative Agriculture
A fourth way to retain more water in the landscape is to shift to regenerative agriculture.
Farms get water funneled to them, water which is taken from naturally flowing rivers that could be hydrating other parts of the landscape, and then funnels that water back to the ocean.
Modern farming with its tilling, monocultures, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers has decreased our soil’s ability to hold water. Because crops cannot have too much water, modern farming installs drainage systems under the soil that dump the extra water into rivers and then the ocean.
Modern tile drainage systems are causing our continents to lose a lot of water [14,15,16,17], and play a huge role in creating our drought- fire- flood cycle.
Switching to regenerative agriculture would increase the organic matter and microbial life in the soil, allowing the soil to absorb more water. Farms would have less need to tile drainage systems.
When our continents lose water, they is less water to hydrate the landscape, less water to fill the aquifers, and less water through evapotranspiration to help create rains.
As permaculturist Sepp Holzer says, "The soil is drying out, water is being lost, and the retention space, the natural water storage system of the earth, is becoming dry. Flora and fauna are disappearing. In the end, the earth will burn because it is so dry”.
Its important that we raise awareness about the role modern farming practices play in our “natural disasters.”
Here is a video I made to illustrate this issue (you will need to turn the volume up high):
Restore Wetlands
A fifth way of retaining more water in the landscape is to stop siphoning off the water through aqueducts to far away cities.
For instance Owens valley in California has become dry and desertified as most of its water is siphoned off to Los Angeles. Winds originating from or moving through Owen’s valley then become drier and hotter, helping to fan wildfires across California.
The solution is for cities like Los Angeles to provide their own water. The rains in LA can provide for half the drinking water of its inhabitants. LA is currently de-paving land and creating nine multi-million dollar wetland projects, so that it can funnel its rainwater into the aquifers below.
The wetlands will have woodchips, microbes, biochar to cleanse the water as it moves downward. LA will then use wells to bring up the water when needed. The aquifers below are a much larger facility to store water than dams. As cities provide their own water, it saves enormous amounts of electricity, as they no longer need to pump water long distances.
Our urban areas would also siphon off a lot less water from the wilderness if they separated our sewage system from the water system. There is no need to use a lot of our freshwater to wash away our waste, and thus help propagate the drought, and the possible subsequent fires. As Brock Dolman says, we should shit in the carbon cycle, not in the water cycle. This would take a deeper cultural shift, so is more of a longer term solution, but its an important shift to start beginning to make. We can start by seeding these ideas and creating smaller demonstration projects.
Reducing Wildfire Risk
The issue of how we can have grow more vegetation and trees while also reducing wildfire risk is a nuanced question. We need more vegetation to create a conveyor belt of water moving inland. We need more vegetation to slow down the water and limit soil erosion during floods. And we need vegetation to help slow rainfall and guide it into the soil to hydrate our landscapes.
However one could also argue that we need less vegetation in order to limit wildfires.
The issue of fire management is a complex and multidimensional. Nature, if left alone, creates wildfires. In pre 20th Century USA forests resemble a patchwork quilt of burnt and non-burnt areas that limited large wildfires.[19]
Smaller fires help prevent bigger ones. Smaller (cooler) fires also can help the carbon cycle by turning dead biomass into a burnt carbon form that enriches the soil. Indigenous tribes in the US used to do controlled burns to prevent larger wildfires.
Wildfires have been getting bigger and hotter over the years, giving the soil a waxy coat that prevents water infiltration. Hotter wildfires can also kill all the bacteria and fungi that help decompose bio-matter. And they also burn a lot of toxic material when they enter urban areas.
It used to be the policy in the US to put out all wildfires. And forested areas that were clear-cut have been replanted too densely, creating wildfire powder kegs that endanger the very existence of the forests.
But the policy is shifting toward controlled burns to clear out some of the dried underbrush and to recreate the patchwork that prevented larger and hotter wildfires, kept forests healthy, and protected urban areas.
On the other hand there is also evidence that naturally grown forests in the Western U.S. that have been thinned are more at risk of wildfire. [20]
Curtis Bradley, Chad Hanson, and Dominick DelaSalla studied 1500 wildfires between 1984 and 2014 in pine and mixed conifer forests and found that thinned forests had more wildfire. [21]
The theory is that intact forests can create humid microclimates that fend off wildfires. Dead logs in those areas, hold 24 times the amount of moisture of soil, help create this humidity, and so do not need to be cleared. Old growth forests in particular are good at holding moisture, so those need to be protected from forestry management.
The balance of growing more vegetation and fire prevention will be different in different climates and bioregions. Different techniques will be applicable in each area.
Forest Restoration
In restoring our forests, its best to let nature do as much of the work as possible. Our human role is to remove some of the impediments. Restoring means rewilding.
Vegetation disperses its seeds with help from the wind and animals, thus avoiding excessive density growth—ecosystems can dance the many rhythms of nature, including wind, rain, and fire.
Alan Watson Featherstone, forest restoration expert from Scotland, has put together a set of eco-restoration principles
Work from areas of strength - the areas where the ecosystem is closest to its initial condition.
Pay particular attention to ‘keystone species’
Re-establish ecological processes such as the use of pioneer species, natural succession etc., to facilitate the rewilding process.
Mimic nature wherever possible.
Recreate ecological niches where they have been lost.
Re-establish ecological linkages- reconnect the threads in the web of life.
Control and/or remove introduced non-native species.
Remove or mitigate the limiting factors which prevent rewilding from taking place naturally.
Pay special attention to species with limited ability to disperse - eg aspen, woods ants, twinflower.
Reintroduce species that are unlikely or impossible to return by themselves.
Re-establish essential ecological processes, such as predator-prey dynamics and natural disturbance, which are absent. [22,23]
These eco-restoration principles combined with methods to rehydrate the landscape can help our continents deal with drought, fire and floods. As we shift from the grey infrastructure of our manmade water structures to the green infrastructure and back to the original nature based solutions, we will find ourselves saving billions of dollars in drought, fire, and flood costs [9].
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References:
[1] Makarieva, A. M.and Gorshkov, V. G.: Biotic pump of atmospheric moisture as driver of the hydrological cycle on land, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 11, 1013–1033, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-11-1013-2007, 2007
[2] Dominguez, F., Villegas, J. C., and Breshears, D. D. (2009), Spatial extent of the North American Monsoon: Increased cross-regional linkages via atmospheric pathways, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L07401, doi:10.1029/2008GL037012
[3] Sampaio, G., Nobre, C., Costa, M. H., Satyamurty, P., Soares-Filho, B. S., and Cardoso, M. (2007), Regional climate change over eastern Amazonia caused by pasture and soybean cropland expansion, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L17709, doi:10.1029/2007GL030612. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007GL030612
[4] Millán, M. M. et al (2005). Climatic Feedbacks and Desertification: The Mediterranean Model, Journal of Climate, 18(5), 684-701. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/18/5/jcli-3283.1.xml
[5] Millán,Millán. (2014). Extreme hydrometeorological events and climate change predictions in Europe. Journal of Hydrology 518 (2014) 206-224. Journal of Hydrology. 518. 206-224.
[6] "Water for the recovery of the climate: A new water paradigm" M. Kravčík, J. Pokorný, J. Kohutiar, M. Kováč, E. Tóth http://www.waterparadigm.org/download/Water_for_the_Recovery_of_the_Climate_A_New_Water_Paradigm.pdf
[7 ] “Turning Soil into Sponges” Union of Concerned Scientists https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/turning-soils-sponges
[8] There is a picture of a water piano in thumbnail of this blog post https://peopleandwater.international/project/wildfires-in-greece/
[9] “How nature can help reduce flood risks” The Nature Conservancy 1/28/20 https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/tackle-climate-change/climate-change-stories/natures-potential-reduce-flood-risks/
[10] Acreman, M., Holden, J. How Wetlands Affect Floods. Wetlands 33, 773–786 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-013-0473-2
[11] Bullock, Andy, and Mike Acreman. "The role of wetlands in the hydrological cycle." Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 7, no. 3 (2003): 358-389.
[12] Liu, Y., Sheng, L. & Liu, J. Impact of wetland change on local climate in semi-arid zone of Northeast China. Chin. Geogr. Sci. 25, 309–320 (2015). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11769-015-0735-4
[13] Sudd wetland in upper Nile which is approx. 150x150mile in size, if drained would lower humidity by 30-40% during dry season and temperature would rise 4-6 celsius. During wet season impact is small <10%. This is in area of Sudd and downwind. Their conclusion is that impact on rainfall is small because of amount of water , but if its a catalyst for rainfall is something paper does not take into account
Mohamed, Yasir A., B. J. J. M. Van den Hurk, H. H. G. Savenije, and W. G. M. Bastiaanssen. "Impact of the Sudd wetland on the Nile hydroclimatology." Water Resources Research 41, no. 8 (2005). https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004WR003792
[14] Golmohammadi, Golmar, Ramesh Rudra, Shiv Prasher, Ali Madani, Mohamed Youssef, Pradeep Goel, and Kourosh Mohammadi. "Impact of tile drainage on water budget and spatial distribution of sediment generating areas in an agricultural watershed." Agricultural Water Management 184 (2017): 124-134.
[15] Abtew, W. and Khanal, N. (1994), Water budget analysis for the Everglades Agricultural Area Drainage Basin. JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 30: 429-439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-1688.1994.tb03302.x
[16] Skaggs, R.W., Breve, M.A., & Gilliam, J.W. (1994). Hydrologic and water quality impacts of agricultural drainage. Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 24(1), 1-32
[17] Dinar, Ariel, and David Zilberman, eds. The economics and management of water and drainage in agriculture. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
[18] TED talk David Sedlak
[20] “Smokescreen” book by Chad Hanson. NCCCA video about Chad Hanson on youtube.
[21] Bradley, Curtis M., Chad T. Hanson, and Dominick A. DellaSala. "Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent‐fire forests of the western United States?." Ecosphere 7, no. 10 (2016): e01492.
[22] TED talk Alan Watson Featherspoon