Erica Gies – The water, land and climate nexus: why restoring water cycles is the missing piece in climate action

11th August 2026 antonellatotaro Landscape Design 2.0, Regenerative Agriculture, Water Cycles 0 Comments

Erica Gies is a California-born environmental journalist who has spent more than a decade reporting on water from every angle — drought, flood, irrigation, hydropower, urban infrastructure, indigenous stewardship — and whose first book, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (University of Chicago Press, 2022), brought together stories of communities on every continent rebuilding their relationship with water rather than fighting it. She is now writing her second book, Roots to Sky: How Life and Water Can Help Cool Earth’s Climate, which goes further into the atmosphere to explore how the water–land–climate nexus connects land restoration, water vapour, and the cooling of a heating planet. It is due in 2028.

The common climate narrative — decarbonise, bring fossil fuel emissions to zero, problem solved — is no longer sufficient on its own. Water vapour accounts for roughly half of the greenhouse effect, and 75% of the land on earth has already been degraded, much of it by draining it. Record-breaking summer heat across the northern hemisphere in 2026 cannot be explained by CO2 alone; land use change is a major driver. The good news, which Erica explores in both her TEDx Boston talk and her forthcoming book, is that this is something we can change relatively quickly through land restoration — and that water is absolutely the key lever.

In this conversation — recorded in July 2026, part of the podcast’s ongoing Water Cycle series — we get into why Erica shifted from below-ground water management to the atmosphere, why a 1970 MIT Press report already knew that pumping groundwater raises sea levels and we have only accelerated since, what beavers in California are teaching conservative farmers who spent eighty years shooting them, why investors who optimise single variables are going to run out of natural buffers faster than they think, why land back for indigenous peoples is one of the highest-return interventions available, and why Erica’s magic wand answer — caring for non-humans — is less idealistic than it sounds.

Climate action’s singular focus on CO2 and CO2 equivalent misses the bigger picture, intact water cycles cool the land, recycle, rainfall, and stabilise local temperatures. This episode is part of our ongoing Water Cycle series where we focus on how restoring small water cycles is unusually actionable when it comes to climate change.

WHY WATER ALWAYS WINS

The title of Erica’s first book is not a consolation prize or a call to surrender. It is a design principle. Every large-scale engineering project built to control water — dams, concrete channels, drainage systems, levees — has created new water problems faster than it solved old ones, because it was designed around what humans wanted water to do rather than around what water naturally does. The book’s central question — what does water want? — is not poetic; it is practical. Understanding water’s natural tendencies and working with them, rather than fighting them, is the engineering insight that communities in the book have discovered independently, from the Netherlands to Peru to California to Kenya. The title is also a warning: the people who thought they could control water permanently were wrong, and continuing to act as though they were right is making the problem worse.

“The point I really wanted to make with ‘Water always wins’ was actually a lot of it has to do with how we’ve subverted water’s natural tendencies. And that’s why the people in my book are asking: what does water want?” — Erica Gies

WHY ERICA FOCUSED ON WATER

Erica grew up in California, where the relationship with water is, she says, a form of low-key collective anxiety. The state’s agricultural history depends on extreme engineering — water imported from hundreds of miles away, river systems reversed, groundwater pumped at rates that have caused the San Joaquin Valley to sink by more than thirty feet in places. That structural instability made water a constant background noise. When she became a journalist, she was pushed by an editor toward energy rather than conservation; writing about the water–energy nexus was the door that opened everything else. The more she learned, the more there was to learn. Water Always Wins was the result of a decade of that accumulation — and finishing it only clarified how much remained.

“I grew up in California, born and raised, and I think everyone in California is kind of low-key obsessed with water, because agriculture has been a big part of the state’s history, and one of the reasons there is so much water is because there has been really extreme engineering to bring in a lot of water from elsewhere. And so that makes it an inherently unstable system.” — Erica Gies

SHE IS NOW FOCUSING ON THE WATER–LAND–CLIMATE NEXUS FOR HER NEW BOOK

The shift from Water Always Wins to Roots to Sky is a shift upward: from groundwater and surface water to the atmosphere. Water vapour is responsible for roughly half of the greenhouse effect — not as a pollutant but as a natural amplifier — and the degradation of 75% of the earth’s land surface has dramatically reduced the amount of water vapour that living landscapes return to the sky. Scientists working across disciplines — climate science, atmospheric science, ecology, biology — are beginning to connect these dots in ways that general climate journalism has been slow to follow. Erica names Abigail Swann at the University of Washington and Aila Fisher at NCAR in Colorado as researchers working carefully at this intersection: how forests change water vapour, how water vapour moves into jet streams, and how continent-scale land use changes alter rainfall patterns. Roots to Sky will be structured as a three-part journey: underground, at the surface, and in the sky.

“The working title is Roots to Sky: How Life and Water Can Help Cool Earth’s Climate. It’s really about the Water–Life–Climate Nexus. And there are large groups of scientists around the world who are encouraging people to solve these things together because the heart of it is land restoration. That is the solution.” — Erica Gies

WHAT SHE FOUND MOST SURPRISING WHILE RESEARCHING HER NEW BOOK

Reading a 1970 MIT Press report called Man’s Inadvertent Modification of Climate — written for educated laypeople about what scientists then understood about human impacts on the climate — Erica encountered a detail that stopped her. Recent research has shown that more sea level rise is caused by pumping groundwater out of the earth and rushing water off land surfaces into the sea than by melting glaciers. We tend to think of sea level rise as an ice problem. It is also a land management problem. What surprised her was finding the connection already noted in 1970: the MIT report speculated that pumping out groundwater might be increasing sea level rise. Fifty-five years later, we have not slowed the pumping. We have accelerated it.

“In fact, more sea level rise is caused by pumping out groundwater and rushing water off of our surfaces and into the sea. And it’s kind of amazing — the way that we are manipulating water on land is a significant contributor to sea level rise. In this book written in 1970, in this big report, they were like: we think pumping out groundwater might be increasing sea level rise.” — Erica Gies

WELL-DESIGNED WATER SYSTEMS ARE MODULAR AND DECENTRALISED

One of the structurally important arguments in Water Always Wins is that the best water interventions are not mega-projects requiring billions in centralised funding and decades of political consensus. They are distributed and modular: a beaver dam restored here, a floodplain reconnected there, a sponge meadow built into an urban park, a farmer in California’s Central Valley who stops pulling out the beavers’ dam and instead lets the water table rise until they no longer need to irrigate. Each intervention is something a community, a landowner, a local government can do in their own place, with their own resources. The aggregate of millions of small decisions — made because people around them are doing the same thing and it is working — is the mechanism of change. This is the opposite of waiting for a top-down solution.

“It is distributed and modular, so every little bit helps, and it’s something that people can do in their own places. So there’s an empowering nature to that message.” — Erica Gies

THE CONNECTION WITH REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

Erica comes to the regenerative agriculture movement as an interested outsider rather than as an embedded practitioner — her water journalism has brought her closest to smallholder farmers in Kenya and Peru, and to groundwater-dependent growers in California. What she has observed is a contagious culture of change: when a farmer sees a neighbour doing something that works, they do it too. The beaver story is her most vivid example. For eighty years, California farmers shot beavers and pulled apart their dams, seeing them as obstacles. Now, as the water table implications of beaver activity have become visible and word has spread, more and more farmers are actively wanting beavers on their land. The regenerative agriculture community — she notes — is a space of passionate, well-educated, mutually educating people. Her concern is whether it can outrun the consolidation of big agribusiness.

“There’s a contagious culture when one farmer or landowner sees their neighbour doing something that works — like not killing beavers but allowing the beavers to have their dam, and that’s raising the water table, and then they don’t need to irrigate. And so more and more farmers across California are getting excited about having beavers on their land, whereas they’ve spent 80 years shooting them or pulling their dams apart.” — Erica Gies

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Erica also talked about:

  • Land back for indigenous peoples — her billion-dollar answer: buy land in California and return it to indigenous communities, building on the evidence from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest that traditional land stewardship maintains biodiversity and water cycle health across millennia; indigenous languages carry embedded ecological knowledge accumulated over thousands of years of non-globalised resource management
  • Systems over optimisation — her message to investors: natural systems are not efficient, they have buffers and redundancies, and that is why they are resilient; optimising a single variable in a complex system breaks the system; seven of the nine planetary boundaries have already been exceeded, and the natural buffers that absorbed our excesses in the 20th century are almost gone
  • Caring for non-humans — her magic wand answer: human supremacy — the idea that human needs always take precedence — is not working, and is the underlying assumption that drives most of the decisions that have led to the planetary boundary exceedances; she is hopeful that care for nature is not as distant as it seems, citing polls showing that even politically divided Americans don’t want public lands opened to mining

LINKS AND MORE MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION:

MORE INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES:

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

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