Alpha Lo’s Post

What would happen to the rain if we reforested Europe by turning modern farms into agroforestry farms https://lnkd.in/gRzf4E4Z

An article about our project to restore the rain to Spain and Portugal, and a explanation of meteorologist Millan Millan's research on how coastal marshes, shrubs and forest affect the rain, wind patterns, evapotranspiration rates, and local temperatures.

What are your ideas of the sequence by which to do ecorestoration? Do we focus on restoring wildfire, water, soil, plants, or trees first? Where in the landscape should we restore first? Additional question: Lets say we want to do large scale tree plantings. Should we focus first on getting enough water in system with swales and ponds, or can we jump right into tree planting? Should we focus on soil regeneration? Should we focus on getting wildlife like birds and squirrels to seed the trees rather than have humans plant them? If we plant, should we plant first near coast, or maybe we should first plant near older forests?

As we work on our Restore Iberian Rain project, its useful and inspirational to look at examples of where rain has been restored through ecorestoration and regenerative water projects. In Maharastra, India, some villages kept track of the impact on rain that regenerative projects had. Here's my interview with Andrew Millison who went to India to document the large scale water restoration project that involved 8000 villages.

The hypothesis that bacteria play an important role in creating rain was first postulated in the 1970s. Since then a lot more evidence has been found that shows how bacteria seed ice crystals in clouds, that then turn into rain, snow, and hail Part I https://lnkd.in/gJH9DKpx and Part II https://lnkd.in/gtkeVWz7 Edit: And here is part III https://lnkd.in/gWcdfEwT

The quest by scientists to figure out if forests and the ecosystem can increase the rain has been a long one. Check out my essays (in two parts ) I wrote awhile back on this very interesting quest that has many twists and turns

I was interviewed recently on Ecojustice Radio episode 231 https://lnkd.in/gjEDG4F7 Or look on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

After posting about the vision of restoring the rain in Spain and Portugal on Linkedin 2 weeks ago, a hotel in Marbella, Spain reached out to me. I suggested including Nick Steiner, from Water Stories in the project, and Nick and I headed out there. Nick and Michal Kravčík were all coincidentally posting about restoring rain to Spain at the same time on LinkedIn. Restoring rain in Iberia is crucial. Spain and Ukraine supply a lot of food for Europe. Spain's rain has been steadily declining over the last few decades. If it keeps declining Spain's agricultural output will dip precipitously affecting all Europe. Towns Southern Iberia have at times been turning off all water, which affects many sectors, like hotels, local industries, and resident life. Together, with Nick and the hotel folk, we brainstormed. What emerged was intriguing ideas of using a network of eco-tourism and hotels as a way of activating the restoration of the water cycles and the rain in Iberia. I've also been talking to numerous groups in Iberia in the last two weeks. What I see is a network of bioregional self-organizing groups that bring multistakeholders together to restore their watershed at the landscape scale i.e. 100,000 hectares of more. Alvelal ( Silvia Quarta ) and Commonland are involved in such a process in the Southeast region of Spain. I think such processes could be replicated throughout Iberia. We can bring hotels, regenerative farms, local government, environmentalists, financiers together in a region into the facilitated discussions like the ones Commonland uses. There are many sorts of helpful relations that can emerge. Then we can weave these local regional groups into an Iberian network, that helps us understand how they work together to restore rain. We can see how the eco-restoration in the Alentego region will affect the rain in Castille-Leon region which is downwind of it. I asked Muhammad Ali Bin Shahid to do some calculation of how much eco-restoraton will restore rains in the Valencia and Andulucia regions of Spain. His article on this https://lnkd.in/gZnbB3J9 . Colleagues of Millan Millan, the meteorologist who discovered deforestation was lessening Spain's rain, are gathering next month, to look at how to restore the rain. My podcast with Nick Steiner https://lnkd.in/g5323NyJ

I am here in Iberia - the peninsula that contains Portugal and Spain. This is the area where Millan Millan, the meteorologist, was famously asked by the European Union, to figure out why Spain was losing its rain. On investigation he found it was the loss of forests and the paving over of the land that was causing the loss of rain. These caused the rain to not be able to infiltrate as well into the land, so that there was then less water to be transpired into the air by the forests. That transpired water would have been able to add to the moisture coming in from the ocean to push the moisture over the humidity point, and create more rain. Millan Millan's investigations helped pioneer our understanding of the small water cyclae. Here I've been getting a feel for the land, observing the winds, clouds, and biomes. I've been talking to locals who speak of watching the loss of rain over the years. In one town they have to turn off the water to the whole town at times, because the rain has lessened so much. There have been devastasting fires in part because of the droughts. Millan Millan recently passed away this year. I wrote an obituary about him here https://lnkd.in/giQbkPvf . Sadly he did not get to see his dream of rain coming back to the Iberian peninsula. However his dream does not have to die. I believe we can restore the rain, and I think it would be a great flagship project for the regenerative water movement. I've started looking into developing a plan to restore the water cycles in Iberian peninsula, and also to begin weaving together various organizations into activating this project. You can see my podcast interview with Millan Millan on the Climate Water Project channel. And you can read about Millan Millan and the loss of rain, in Rob Lewis's three part essay, which has generated a lot of widespread interest, here https://lnkd.in/gYTS3kr7 .