In these days of incredible loss in California, I want to remind ourselves, that not everything we see is “climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions”. But that the way we treat our land, nature and water directly influences our landscapes. Heating up the surfaces through loss of vegetation and build-up of infrastructure, reducing natural evapotranspiration, thus cooling, reducing humidity which would otherwise serve as rain, reducing the soils capability of storing water, feeding natural vegetation, assuring that rainfalls end up very fast in rivers and seas instead of vegetation, soils and ground water, etc.
Zach Weiss calls it “The Watershed Death Spiral”. Here is a very good animation of all of these interrelationships.
And see more in my UNEP paper “Working with plants, soils and water to cool the climate and rehydrate Earth’s landscapes“.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvHco_GL4Mo
https://bit.ly/3zeukPb
