If it is true that water vapor accounts for 60-70% of the greenhouse effect while CO2 accounts for 25%, why do we rarely discuss it?

Maybe we choose to ignore it because it means we literally need to revegetate the entire Earth.

Bring back the marches, the mangroves, the perennial pastures with trees and regrow real forests that can bring back rains in strategic places.

In short: bring life- lots of plants, trees, animals- back to many places on this Earth. Natural climate engineering: it is time we take our role as keystone species seriously.

In this special Water Cycles series we interview the dreamers and doers who are using the latest technology to figure out where to intervene first. They are making or trying to make the investment and return calculations. so what is missing, what is holding us back? Maybe we lack the imagination to back them and try regeneration at scale.

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. In our ongoing Water Cycle series we focus on how restoring small water cycles is unusually actionable when it comes to climate change.

This series is supported by The Nest, 1000 Steps, Sol Fund and The Mark Leonard Trust.

• Neal Spackman – Why it is so difficult to get truly regenerative water and ecosystem restoring projects funded
• Alpha Lo – What if water is more important than carbon
• Millán Millán – Farm water at its proper scale
• Marcel de Berg – Water is a more important cooling factor than the heat of carbon
• Ties van der Hoeven – The regreening project we can’t afford not to do, restoring the water and weather systems in the Med, starting with fish
• Zach Weiss – On a mission to train hundreds of thousands of people in key water restoration techniques
• Anastassia Makarieva – Healthy forests invest their capital to create their own rain
• Tim Coates – Sell flood mitigation to institutional players to finance water cycle restoration
• Ichsani Wheeler and Lenka Danilovic – How to make water our friend again thanks to hippies with satellites and indigenous water management
• Rodger Savory – Restore the water cycles and reverse desertification in California, regenerating 150.000 acres with 600.000 cows
• Jesús Areso Salinas – Building towers to trigger rain, to help nature sweat and cool
• Ali Bin Shahid, one of the few who can model and calculate water cycle restoration
• Antonio Nobre – If nature were a bank it would have been saved already
• Rob de Laet – Water is key to cool the planet within 20 years
• Douglas Sheil – Why fixing water fixes carbon
• Stef van Dongen – Trees don’t send invoices so a Catalan valley is rewiring water, forests and finance
• Laura Ortiz Montemayor – What if healthy economies meant drinkable rivers
• James Barrett – Europe Doesn’t Have a Water Problem, It Has a Retention Problem
• Marc Leiber – 200 euros, 160,000 trees, and how to build a syntropic paradise from scratch