Hello and welcome to this symposium during the Global Earth Repair Summit with the title Repairing the Earth in Times of Water, SCAR-STEEK. Welcome on YouTube, welcome on YouTube where if you wish you could participate in the chat and share us any questions you may have for the August group of panelists that we've gathered for this symposium and and we will make sure the panelists receive those questions so feel free to start sharing questions in the YouTube chat. We're honored to be part of the Global Earth Repair Summit which is initiated by one of our key advisory council members Michael Polarski and it's great that so many practitioners on earth repair, ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture are convened in this Global Summit. My name is Pieter van der Gaag and I'm a director of the Ecosystem Restoration Foundation. This foundation is set up to facilitate the Global Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement and I would like to introduce that movement to you through a short video which I hope is not going to be choppy. Gathering an ecosystem restoration camps to restore degraded ecosystems and introduce new ways to produce our food and materials. These camps are initiated by the people who are losing their livelihoods due to degradation or by the people that are inspired by new and promising regenerative agricultural techniques. The fast growing Global Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement works together to equip anyone who wants to start with understandable expert knowledge and accessible advice to restore degraded ecosystems and start new regenerative livelihoods. And to realize our vision with the lowest costs possible we invite ordinary people from around the world to physically join in and support at the camps. We can change the future of humanity to one of abundance and well-being by reconnecting to our planet's great natural systems. So join us and help us create the world you want to live in. That movement is growing very fast and consists of people like you and me who are, as the video says, who have made a decision to change the way humanity is progressing on this planet to what in the end will be degraded ecosystems, climate change and biodiversity loss. My name, I've already said, it's about the Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement which we will soon rename to Ecosystem Restoration Community, communities as that name more accurately reflects the actual people that are part of the movement. People living in degraded or degraded lands and who have taken on the decision to restore and introduce regenerative practices on those lands. The foundation provides an ecosystem of services to this mighty movement of earth restorers. Primarily we offer a home where local people, often lone pioneers in their environment, can find a community that understands them with whom they can exchange. The foundation also brings the story of the incredible work of these local communities to a global audience providing glimmers of hope to all of humanity. Crucial to the success of the work is that we try to help the projects find funding and one of those funding routes is to individual donors. If you're in this event or we are seeing this on YouTube, the number of individual donors really needs to increase to make this work possible and less reliable on institutional grants. Please consider becoming a regular donor. The proverbial cup of coffee per month is all it costs and if you donate that one cup you will help ensure that there will be a coffee to be grown in the future for a sustainable humanity to enjoy. Finally we provide a platform of learning and exchange of practices and knowledge. This symposium is part of that platform where we dig into a question we see appearing in the camp discussion groups more and more and not only from the usual desertified places. How do I deal with water scarcity? We're going to discuss in this symposium drought and desertification and how to restore ecosystems and introduce regenerative agriculture practices in those circumstances. Water scarcity is one of the biggest environmental challenges of our time but the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Drought in this symposium is a natural phenomenon where one area receives no water and becomes barren with no vegetation. The certification for us is a process of turning productive fertile land to non-productive land and around the world that desertification is increasing as a result of land mismanagement such as deforestation, the exploitation of natural resources, poor agricultural practices such that lead to soil compaction which leads to a lack of water holding capacity in those soils and at the same time warmer temperatures attributed to climate change are increasing the frequency duration and severity of drought across the planet. According to the UN by 2050 there's a lot happening in 2050 drought could affect more than 75% of the world's population so it will affect us all. Our survival on this planet depends on repairing the soil to reduce soil compaction and increase water holding capacity. Restoring ecosystems will change hydrological cycles. The process to get there needs us to understand how to start that restoration in dry circumstances but vitally for the people living there also how to produce food with drought resistant crops in those water scarce areas. So in this symposium we've been able to collect some of the world's leading experts on drought-stricken areas and share inspiring on-the-ground examples from some of the camps where the use of drought-resistant plants is helping to restore the natural water function to restore the water cycle and increase soil fertility. It's our hope that this symposium can support all that are aiming to restore the earth and the symposium will henceforth be available on YouTube for a long time for people to go and look at. I'd like to go straight into our program and introduce our first speaker, Rami Schett. Rami is a consultant with formal training in mechanical engineering and permaculture-based regenerative whole systems design. He serves as a registered certified permaculture design instructor. He's a former co-director of the Permaculture Research Institute. He's a member of the United Designers International and he's on the supervisory board of that wonderful non-profit ecosystem restoration foundation. Rami's experience ranges from being a trustee for the Plants for Peace Foundation and a key contributor to the India-based Shivansh Farming Initiative but also consulted on permaculture and told permaculture design in Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Ethiopia, Yemen, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia, Italy, Spain, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Australia, and the United States. And if that's all, Rami, there's lots of the planet for you to discover still. I would be very happy to give you the floor. Thank you, Peter. That's very kind and generous of you. First of all, greetings everybody. Greetings to my fellow panelists. A couple of you are friends I've known for quite some time and folks I haven't had the pleasure of being in the company for quite some time and for far too long. So hopefully this will be the beginning of our being able to reconnect. But I think a lot of what you had stated, Peter, is I mean you've covered a lot of the material thematically that I think is of real importance here and being able to describe the challenge at hand and what it is that what it is that we need to be busying ourselves with. I think ultimately the problem of land degradation, desertification, ecosystem dysfunction is largely a product of the disruption of the hydrological cycle, of the water cycle. I think if we sort of zoom out into a kind of a bit of a macro view of the problem and we look at this as a historical phenomenon, the way I often like to discuss this as I like to frame it in those terms. So if you look at many of the historical surveys that you'll see covered by people like Dr. Jared Diamond even in his books like Collapse and Guns, Derms and Steel, which I know for some people some of the things that are contained in his writings to be controversial. If you go to another one of his colleagues, James Scott in some of his writings in particular, his book Against the Brain, the Deep History of the Early Estates, I think what's really interesting about those texts and others of their type is that they look at history through the lens of land use and that basically a lot of what we see of human history is driven by a progressively worsening management of the land that forms the basis of our communities, of our societies, of our civilizations. And as you said it typically starts with the deforestation and the de-vegetation, the removal of vegetation from the landscapes that we have settled. And then along with that there's a whole set of ecological elements, all of the different fauna in addition to the floor, all the different life forms that are attached to that habitat are effectively removed and displaced and undermined. And all of these things are necessary in order to maintain all of the various systems, the biogeochemical cycles, all the systems that make life possible for us. The provisioning services, the regulating services, the supporting services, and even the cultural services. If we talk about this in terms of the ecosystem services if we use that language. So one of the analogies I like to use is that it's sort of like removing organs from the body progressively over time. And the more organs that are removed from your body, the less healthy the body is going to be, the less able the body is going to be in its functioning. So there's this progressive removal of the vital organs that provide the basis of the body's functioning again over time. And I think the unfortunate kind of reality is that this deconstruction of the body is often incentivized through the advent of not very well thought out policy through some very problematic ways of thinking about economy and how we make a living and how we support ourselves. And as a consequence, we have this situation that we now call land degradation, desertification, ecosystem dysfunction. And then that of course has a whole set of effects that range from internally displaced peoples, refugee populations to battles over fighting over resources, etc. etc. So the more I've been able to travel and see a number of different places in various climates, various cultures, you see this same theme play out. So this is very much a human problem. And I think the part of what we need to do in effectively addressing this problem is I think again on a much more grand scale, we have to be able to rethink the way that we see ourselves in the world and the way that we function in it and where it is that we see like how we are positioned relative to other living things. And again, the systems that make our lives possible. And I don't think this is a very difficult problem to solve in terms of the technicalities. I think it's the technicalities at this point are pretty clear. If again, we can understand this problem as being primarily driven by a disruption of the water cycle, which then in turn becomes a major driver of what happens again on land and in the climate because there is this conversation that takes place between the ground and the atmosphere. You sort of have to work in reverse to what created the problem in the first place. So if I go back to Jared Diamond's account, he sort of has this logical progression of degradation. So you start with deforestation and habitat destruction and then that in turn creates problems with soil. So most notably fertility loss, erosion, and then salinization or the salting of soils. And then this in turn sets off problems with water because the ground becomes too hard. It's no longer in a condition to be able to support vegetative life and then all of the, again, the biota and the different fauna that make up the habitat that actually maintains it. You are going to have water problems. You're going to have problems with drought, you're going to have problems with flood, and that's inevitable. So the solution is basically attempting to put in a regime to where you are working backwards in order to reverse the order. So you are focused on addressing the water management problem by actually creating a condition to where you're able to put more water in the ground than is able to, again, to get away either in the course of evaporating, running off. Typically those are the two main means of actually losing water is that you have a lot of it that evaporates them in dry climates, in narrow climates, in semi-arid climates. That's what makes them what they are, that you have far more water leaving in evaporation than you do in precipitation. So increasingly more and more places are falling into that condition. That is sort of the underlying or major primary descriptive characteristic of those landscapes is that you have a condition to where you no longer have places for that water to be sunk in. And again, this is largely a product of the types of economic systems that we put in the place, where they are largely industrial, and even the types of agriculture that we've encouraged, which again are largely industrial, they don't model the way that ecologies or ecosystems actually function. So again, just being able to understand this from a strategic standpoint, that if we can't frame the solution in the right way, then everything that we do is going to be wrong. And I think this is again largely part of the problem is that the thinking behind the solution making or the identifying solutions, the thinking has been mistaken. And so we find ourselves investing and spending a lot of energy doing a lot of the wrong thing. And I think what's encouraging is that we're seeing more and more of the types of things that we've been discussing and the kind of work that many of us have been engaged in, that we're seeing more and more of that make its way into the mainstream discussion of what's happening with again, quote unquote, climate change or climate weirding or climate warming or whatever language folks want to use. I think a lot of this language and a lot of what we've been discussing and engaged in is beginning to make its way into sort of the mainstream discussion as it concerns this particular problem. I think there's more that I could say, but I think allowing for the others to offer their contribution. And then I think if we get into a conversation, I think more will come out. And I always find it at least more beneficial for me to engage in a conversation into me offering a monologue. So I'd like to hand it over to back to the floor, back to you, Peter, and hopefully we'll be able to hear more from the other panelists and then we can get into a conversation. It's a rare moment where a panelist allows you to go ahead of schedule. I'd love for you to expand a bit more about because in your presentation you said the traditional way of looking at restoration is you you trace back where it came from and then you take those steps back to full ecosystems. And then you talked about climate weirding and the fact that the ecosystem has changed and the climate conditions have changed after degradation. How do you trace back? I mean, you can't plant the same plants that were there in the beginning? No, actually I'm glad you mentioned that. That's actually a good point. So I mean the fact of the matter is, well, I think for one there's an understanding that ecologies are dynamic. I mean, and effectively ecologies are sort of a reflection of energy really. And I don't mean energy in sort of the esoteric sense. I mean, quite literally climate is just an expression of again, the atmospheric energies and again, these biogeochemical cycles that are affected by a number of different factors. So climate is largely a product of what's happening on the ground. And I think one of the things that I know I think this has been attributed to Alan Sabry, but I don't mess with who can talk about this. And I think it was in his book, I remember correctly, So Exceeds in the Desert. And he talked about how when he came to the American West and he's looking out at the landscapes, that he had this realization that it wasn't the drought that produced the desert. It was actually the desertification, the removal of vegetation that actually caused the drought. Because basically the driver of what moves water has been taken away. Professor Milan Milan talks about this as well. When he says that vegetation is the midwife of water. And again, this makes sense given what we know has been related to us. And again, many of these historical accounts of the process of degradation. And again, in the sort of more comprehensive understanding, this has also spelled the degradation or the destruction or the collapse of civilization is because the things that made civilization possible are no longer able to exist. This is in James Scott's book, Against the Grain, where he said that what made state making possible were what he called the four domestications, which were plants, animals, fire, and people. And I would actually include a fifth, which he doesn't include in his list, I would include the domestication of water. But in the course of that domestication, it's also involved, again, the destruction or the undermining of sort of wild, unaffected ecosystems. Because ecosystems are simply, ecosystems are just reflecting, again, the energies of the atmosphere, or it's in an active conversation. So when you look at factors like temperature, how it's affected by albedo, how it's affected by evapotranspiration, you have the thermal capacitance or the heat capacitance of all the different forms of thermal mass when you're talking about water, or you're talking about stones, or you're talking about, again, vegetation. Like you're constantly having this exchange between the ground and the atmosphere, but the major driver, the really big one, is going to be water. And you need vegetation to manage that water in a judicious way. That the plant understands, sort of intuitively, how it needs to be dealt with. And it's actually mediating or translating the conversation in the form of water, like water being the language between the ground and the atmosphere. And so climate change or climate rearing is largely an expression of the inability for the conversation that is to happen between the ground and the atmosphere to be mediated by the translate. So the translate has been taken away, and instead of having a conversation, the ground and the atmosphere is basically screaming at one another. And then that's where you have the extremes. So not only do you have places that have problems of drought, you don't have a place that has a problem of drought that doesn't also have a problem of flood. And also it's going to have a problem of fire. So I'm in the Pacific Northwest. I've been in Seattle for the past. I'm not in San Francisco right now, but I'm a couple hours north by plane as the crow flies, as the metal crow flies. And we just had fires here. I mean, in fact, up to about three days ago, if you look in the papers of what was happening in Seattle, Seattle had the worst air quality in the world, which I thought was stunning, had the worst air quality in the world because we had fires. And so the Pacific Northwest is not a place that you often associate with having a serious problem with fire. I mean, there's some, but it's not really, it's not the kind of place that you would associate with that condition like you would in California. It's in fall. Yeah, not in the fall. We're not in October. And so it's just been pretty late in the season we've been seeing this. And we also happen to have the hottest summer on record in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle. We have the highest temperatures, I think for both July and August, average temperatures recorded. So, you know, and again, part of this is a product, and this is precisely a product of everything I've been talking about, that there's a way that many of the landscapes up here have been managed that is really problematic. And especially with what you're mentioning with the species, right? So, the species are not going to be the same as they were in the past, because the conditions are different. So I did an consultancy for the Saudis, for the Saudi ministry of the environment, the Saudi wildlife authority, where they have a problem with invasive species. They have certain species that have kind of taken over certain portions of the kingdom that are actually different than the natives. So they've been spending, you know, a lot of money and doing a lot of things that would be better if they didn't do in trying to remove them. And the question I put forward to them was, well, instead of spending all of this money in an effort to manage a problem that ultimately you're not actually getting down to the causes of what is creating the problem, you have to ask yourself, well, what are the conditions that have advantaged the invasive species and that have disadvantaged what have been historically understood to be the natives. And in you're seeing the same problem all over the world, right? You're seeing the same issue that the sort of the composition of the types of species that you're seeing in many places and most places, they're not the same as they were in the past. Why is that? Well, the conditions are different. So the ecology is going to express differently because it's just following what energetically is possible in order for whatever species emerge to exist. So it's just an expression of the times and of the sort of the again, the energetic condition in terms of temperature, in terms of emissions, etc. There are a few questions from the chat, but I think we can maybe take those for the later discussion about water harvesting and carbon sequestration. I really like the image of the earth and the atmosphere screaming at each other, but the microphone is muted because the plant's not there. And if you're currently talking to your YouTube screen, we can't hear it, so use the chat and ask the questions there. But for me, that's a new one, Ramesh, climate weirding. I'm going to remember that because I think it's a very powerful image. I'd like to go to our next speaker though. And then the questions in the chat that I've already seen, we will make sure that they are not forgotten and they will be used in the remainder of this symposium. But our next speaker, let me get my cheat sheet so that I know what I'm saying that I'm saying the proper thing about Patrick Worms. Patrick is a senior science policy advisor for the Nairobi based World Agroforestry Center, where he handles all policy and donor outreach in Europe. The World Agroforestry Center, one of the world's 15, I think World Bank Financed Agro Research Centers, has developed tree based technologies that are cheap in cash and labor and yet allow poor small holders to multiply the yield of their field by several multiples, thus enhancing food security. Patrick also holds honorary positions as president of the European Agroforestry Federation, treasurer of the International Union for Agroforestry. He's a senior fellow of the Global Evergreen Alliance and a member of a number of advisory boards, which includes that of the ecosystem restoration camps movement. He brings to this symposium an enormous amount of experience and Patrick, please share that with the audience. Peter, thank you very much. I realize I should have sent you an updated CV because we're not funded by the World Bank anymore, we wish. I'm no longer president of the European Agroforestry Federation, but merely vice president. However, I am president of the International Union of Agroforestry. Now, for the sake of the symposium, we'll keep up appearances. You're still a great person. Thank you. I absolutely loved your intervention. I am a fan of James Scott and of Guns, Germs and Steel, and I recommend another one, plows, plagues and petroleum, which you will love. What I would do, the other speakers will be speaking and or have spoken about the technicalities and the making it happen of ecosystem restoration at a time of water scarcity. What I'd like to do is to take it back and to actually look at the planet as a whole and understand how these earth systems are impacted by our activities and how we can impact them in turn. First, just as a reminder, I know you don't need it, but even though we decided over 30 years ago that we wanted to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a reasonable level, I'll share the slides later, we have not succeeded in doing so. We have, however, succeeded in having many, many, many talking shops, and the graph that you see there overlies a line that shows you the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere with these talking shops. Another thing to know about climate change is it's nothing new. We humans have been changing the climate of this planet for several thousand years, and we have been doing that by introducing wet rice cultivation in Southeast Asia, which increases methane levels, and by chopping down forests for farmland in the Middle East and Europe, which puts CO2 in the atmosphere. The increases in both of these greenhouse gases have been measured, those are the two graphs at the top right, and what they do is they counteract the natural cooling that the planet should have undergone as a result of astronomical factors, because normally we should slowly be moving our way back to another ice age. And that is what gave us this extraordinarily stable period, we call the Holocene, the last 10,000 years when the temperature was more stable and less variable than it had been for millions of years before. Of course, that started changing when in the 1750s we discovered the wonders of coal and started burning our way through the Earth's fossil fuels in order to finance a very comfortable lifestyle. And it's a lifestyle that everybody wants. This is probably the scariest chart I've ever seen in a business publication. It's three years old, it's in the financial time. It's a logarithmic scale, and it shows how everybody is getting onto the carbon bandwagon. You've got the usual suspects on the left, the US and the UK and France and Germany, the countries that industrialized early. But in the middle you have the rising countries from around the world, and they too are increasing their carbon concentration, their carbon intensity. The countries on the right are mostly countries in Africa and Asia that we normally call underdeveloped or in development, and they too are going into carbon. Why? Because carbon is fantastic, it gives us absolutely everything we have. It makes sure that I was in Accra for my meeting today, that I'm going to be home with my family tomorrow, that I can speak to you through this computer, that there's electric lights that allows me and air conditioning that allows me to operate in this very humid climate. We use that. And yes, we're moving away from it, but right now we're still putting an enormous amount of pollution in the atmosphere, which is why a lot of people are beginning to panic. And that's where we, the ecosystem restoration theoreticians and practitioners come in, because what we know is that we are as gods. And because we are as gods, we might as well get good at the job. We also know, especially in this community, that the earth, the earth may be alive, a life like a tree in the words of James Lovelock. One thing we need to remember, however, is that this wonderful planet of ours is not a planet of land and farmland and forests and deserts, but it's a planet of oceans, a planet of water. 30% of the planet is land, but 70% of the planet is oceans. And I'll come back to that in a minute. Right now, let's focus on the land part. The land part has a direct measurable impact on the atmosphere every single year. What you see on this chart is a change in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over the seasons and by latitude. And what you notice is that the biggest changes happen in the northern latitudes. Why? Because the northern latitudes have most of the continents.  But in the spring, as the leaves come back into budding and absorb that carbon again, you have a massive, a fairly rapid drop in carbon going on. So the tantalizing signal this gives us is that if we simply manage to increase the productivity of the land, we may be able to get to the stage where the annual carbon drawdown will compensate and maybe even negate the additional carbon we put in the atmosphere as a result of our carbon greed. And that means we need to work with agriculture. And agriculture, bit of a flawed giant really. Yes, it's huge. A third of global greenhouse gas emissions, half of global employment, two thirds of global land use, and three quarters of global freshwater use. But that massive use of resource and this huge amount of pollution generates less than 5% of global GDP. Yes, it's the 5% that goes into our bellies. So it's a particularly important 5%. But nevertheless, that shows us that we have a problem. We do not pay our farmers enough. We do not pay enough for food. And we do not pay for the negative externalities that producing food requires. And that's why regenerative agriculture is an ace up our sleeve. But what does that mean regenerative agriculture? It means in an agriculture that instead of putting carbon in the atmosphere and here you have the figures going from anywhere between 20% and 40% is pulling the carbon back into the ground through clever management. And we know that there's many, many, many different ways of doing this. Many, many different brands, many, many different names, biointensive agriculture, sustainable intensification, ecological agriculture, conservation agriculture, organic, agroforestry, climate smart agriculture, 3D farming, IPM push pull, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what all of these things mean foundationally is two things. Mix things up and think before you spray. And even more foundationally, it really means the management of two sets of tools. These are the tools you need to manage to get water function back into the landscape, to increase biomass productivity, to increase food productivity, and to protect biodiversity. It's the management of livestock and the management of trees and sometimes the management of livestock in trees. There are really four different classes of interventions you can take once you understand that to generate the food we need, the fiber we need, the timber we need without damaging the environment. And the first are the silver pastoral system. Clop wise from top left, you have Poland, Finland, Burkina Faso and Portugal. And in every case what you have is livestock that is grazing, living matter under the trees, lichens in the case of the reindeer, grasses in the case of the three other pictures, and fertilizing those trees through their manure. You also have the silver arable systems, the kind of modern agroforestry systems where you have long alleys of trees in between arable crop lands, which is a great way of producing food while still using the tools of modern agriculture. And as you see here from the top left, clockwise, it's Zambia, the UK, Sri Lanka and France. You then have the most productive systems and the systems that I'm sure Ramis you love the most, the polycultures, the system that are really really complex, that makes dozens of different plants, animals and livestock species. They are by far the most productive systems you can have in terms of biomass productivity and in terms of ecosystem function, but they are of course impossible to mechanize. And for that reason they tend to disappear because they're also impossible to make decent money from because if you have two hectares and you produce wonderful things from 18 different products, it's really really difficult to find a buyer, right? Buyers are interested in one product at a given quantity and a given quality over years. They're not interested in dealing with individual farmers to buy you know two kilograms of this and three kilograms of that. So it's difficult to integrate these kinds of systems into the modern market economy. And the final systems are the grassland systems. I'm not going to talk much about that, but I'd just like you to focus on the picture at the top left, which is from South Africa. As you can see there's a fence and as you can see on the one side of the fence, it's desert on the other side of the fence, it's lush grassland. The only difference between the two, literally the only difference is the management of the cattle. There is more cattle in the lush grasslands than on the desert land, but in the lush grasslands the cattle are used to restore the ecosystem function through their management in a process that was first explained at scale to the world by island savory. On the right the cattle are just allowed to eat whatever they like so they kill the plants that they find the most palatable and leaving this bare land in between. So these four things, silver arable, silver pastoral, polycultures and grasslands. But now getting to the water cycle, what does that mean? How do trees impact the water cycle? First it's a local story, it's a very local story. Trees are giant rain catching devices and so when it rains, the rain goes down the branches and the trunk of those trees and into the soil along the roots and that water is, some of it will go into aquifers, but some of it will be stored closer to the surface and will become available to your crops. So it's a fantastic buffering system for short droughts and it's a great way of ensuring the water doesn't run off the land when it falls but goes into the ground. Second it's a system that helps protect trees because in a forestry system as you see on the left most of the rootlets are close to the surface. In an agroforestry system as you see on the right most of the trees rootlets are much further down because the area close to the surface is occupied by the roots of the crop. So when the drought comes in the forestry system the tree is going to stop growing, it's going to try to husband its resources and wait for the drought to stop because most of its rootlets are affected by the drought. In the agroforestry system that simply doesn't happen. Most of the rootlets are not affected by the drought, the trees keep on growing. You also have the impact on woody biomass. The reason the interaction between the crops and the tree roots explain why you actually have more woody biomass in the tree roots and in the trees in an agroforestry system than in a forestry system. You simply have a way of ensuring that the trees get nutrition from deeper soil horizons where they're not in competition with crops and where there's more nutrients available and because they are protected by the crops and by the agroforestry system from the worst impact of droughts they can grow more quickly. So even though they are squatter trees they're not these nice long straight poles that industry loves they are things that function remarkably well for growing a lot of woody biomass quickly. They also help water recharge, this is some work that colleagues of mine did in the Sahel that was published six years ago and it's still extraordinarily relevant and this core graphic explaining what's going on is what I'd like you to focus on. The red arrow is going up is the evapotranspiration or the evaporation from the soil surface, sorry the evapotranspiration from the plants. The yellow arrow going up is the evaporation from the soil surface. The green arrow going down is the infiltration of water into the soil and the blue arrow going down is what's left once you add and remove the groundwater that goes into the water that goes into groundwater, the water that evaporates and evapotranspirates. And what you notice is that in the bare hand on the left most of the water runs off the orange arrows a lot of the water evaporates and very very little water actually gets into the ground. In the thick forest the example at the top right, yes you have a lot of water that goes into the ground but you also have a huge amount of evapotranspiration so groundwater recharge is not that great either. In these agroforestry like systems in the middle these savanna systems if you prefer these intermediate tree cover systems you have significant infiltration. You have lower soil evaporation than in bare land but obviously higher than in forest but you have much much less evapotranspiration than you have in a forest. So in the aggregate the total amount of water that recharges the agroforest is highest in these systems and there are places in Mali and in Niger where the water table that were restored with large scale tree cover 10-15 years ago where the data table has been measured rising by several meters in one case up to 15 meters so it's extremely extremely encouraging but trees and water are not just a local story they're also a global story. First I want you to focus on this chart and what this chart shows is where the main wind direction is anywhere on the planet. I live in northwest Europe normally and most of our winds come from the ocean so when rain falls it comes from the ocean but look at the Sahel where I'm now the south well I'm not I'm south of the Sahel but look at West Africa there the rains come from the east so they've crossed the African continent. Bear in mind briefly that in the mid latitudes the winds go from west to east and in the tropical latitudes the winds go from east to west. What does that mean and why is that important? That means that is important because it dictates water cycles around the world. The second map you need to understand that is this one that shows you the proportion of the total rainfall in a given area that evaporates again and as you can see in eastern Africa across Arabia the Middle East and in large parts of southern Russia most of the water that falls onto the ground ends up evaporating again so it does in the Amazon of course it's a rainforest. You combine that with the winds and what you can do then is begin to understand where rainwater is coming from. You can measure where rainwater is coming from and you can do that because there is a different isotopic signature in the oxygen of the H2O molecule that constitutes water depending on whether it evaporated from trees or evaporated from the oceans that's because trees preferentially take up one isotope of oxygen rather than another. So you can make a map like this one that shows you which proportion of the rainfall somewhere originally evaporated from other plants rather than from the oceans and as you can see across west Africa and across the middle belt of Latin America and in large part of northeastern Asia most of the rainfall evaporated from plants which means mostly trees somewhere else rather than directly from oceans. So for example the rains in the Sahel come from east Africa if we're cutting down trees in east Africa as east Africa desertifies there will be less evapotranspiration in east Africa and there will be less rainfall in the Sahel and you can do that and you can start measuring that around the world and that goes back to something that you were saying Ramis most rainfall in many places comes from plants and these are the percentages in various parts where it was measured and as you can see in some parts like the northern Russia 68 percent of the rainfall originally evaporated from plants so it's yes it all originally came from the ocean but it falls down it evaporates it falls down it evaporates it falls down it evaporates again and as you can see it's a huge factor around the world and it's a fact that policymakers don't quite understand and here's an example Chinese companies are now busy destroying the rainforests of southeast Asia as quickly as they can because timber makes money and it's wonderful to have lots of it but that means that the evapotranspiration that the Chinese grain belt depends on which comes from southeast Asia is going to reduce and these massive massive droughts that we're beginning to see in China and this year many of you may know that we had the worst drought ever measured anywhere on the planet and it was in China is not just a consequence of climate change and of the general drying of the continents that climate change brings but also a consequence of misguided policy decisions in this case the bloody engineers who are running China who do not have a degree in ecology between them fail to understand how the mismanagement by their companies in other parts of the world would affect them directly now I started this presentation with a little thing about climate change one of the things we really like about trees is that they draw down carbon but it's sometimes difficult to understand just the sheer scale of the carbon drawdown potential of trees and food systems generally and if you look at this list prepared by the drawdown group in the US you will notice that the you know the things we always talk about in the climate context the solar farms and the nuclear power and the wind turbines and all that yes they play a road they play a role they're one of the biggest ways of getting carbon out of the atmosphere again but nowhere near as much as the role played by biological solutions whether it's forest or agroforest or better farming techniques or better grazing techniques or what have you if you don't believe the private sector drawdown group perhaps you believe the IPCC and their special report on climate and land and what did they look at where a whole bunch of options that you could engage in in order to manage land and if you measure and analyze these interventions across six criteria you come to this table and these criteria are mitigations so less carbon in the atmosphere adaptations or more resilience their desertification so better for land land degradation similar to that food security and cost and the very first line is increased food productivity yes well we all want that it's a father christmas thing right i mean dear father christmas please give me increased food productivity amen it's great but it's not an intervention it's just the general progress of agricultural productivity the second list item on their list is agroforestry it's exactly as good as increased food productivity on most items it just costs a little bit more money and then you have improved grazing land management which is particularly important i want to stress because the standard answer in climate circles is oh my god the cows are bad let's get rid of them so we have less methane that is completely wrong in the grasslands of the world in the semi-arid areas of the world livestock management is a precious ally on climate change finally the climate change 2022 adaptation report um was as clear as can be there was just no better way of putting it than they've put it which is why i simply copied their text here the agro-ecological practices that are being pioneered by the ecosystem restoration community are approaches that with natural processes they support food security nutrition health and well-being livelihoods and biodiversity sustainability and ecosystem services and then for a scientist the most beautiful words you can ever read high confidence that means that the hundreds of scientists who analyze the thousands of papers to decide whether this agro-ecological stuff was just some hippie bullshit or worked came to the conclusion with high confidence that it was delivering all of the things that we need better than almost anything else that we have now peter i haven't watched time i assume i'm at the end of my 15 minutes very much at the end of your 15 minutes in that case i will leave you with a tantalizing thought that the other 70 percent of the planet can also be fixed and in a way that is much much easier than we think next time thank you okay thanks i'm i'm noticing i'm sitting in the dark i'll turn on my light after this intervention thank you patrick for a tantalizing presentation and apparently quite clear because there were very there were no questions in the slack of in the youtube channel there is a john welcome youtube promoting a webinar on the cyanide coming soon we have magic here from the cyanide so we can you can stay here and learn a bit more about what's going on in signing i have one question patrick before we go to the other speakers you spoke about how humanity has always affected the climate which is why we are living in the holocene well we no longer living in the holocene probably also because of our greed of carbon emitting technologies and our inability to let go of those before anyone gets confused would it be a combination of carbon reducing efforts globally and restoring the greater ecosystems introducing vegetation and and animals to keep that vegetation alive it has to be a combination right we can't save ourselves by merely thank you for me thank you for asking that question it's it's absolutely clear there are no silver bullets in this game um re-greening is great and getting rid of carbon uh fire power stations is great as well and having more solar panels is great and fixing the oceans is great and having more nuclear power stations is great all of these tools are useful to reduce the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere and together if we deploy all of them we may be able to stabilize the climate as something which is more or less bearable for civilization but unless we fail to expand our energies across all these domains we're probably going to miss that opportunity so you are absolutely right to remind that we need to regreen i'm a regaining specialist not a nuclear physicist that's what i do but i'm very happy that other people are nuclear physicists and they're looking at that i'm very happy that other people are battery engineers and they're looking at that i'm very happy that some people are figuring out how to make solar panels ever cheaper i'm happy that they're bankers that are trying to figure out how to finance all these things all together we need to work all together from our own specialisms and our own priorities in order to contribute a little brick to this building of solutions that we're going to need yes that's that's that's a correct point there is one question from chris keen could we graze horses instead of cows no methane question mark no methane you know if you eat grasses you got to digest them and to digest them you need battery of bacteria sorry and these bacteria will emit methane again it's not it's it's a question that comes from the silver bullet thing right i mean we plant moringa and everything's going to be fine or we graze these animals instead of those animals and everything's going to be no all animals play a role and which animals are used in which particular farming system depends on where you are depends on the local market on the local soils on the local climate on your own preferences all of these things will help because ultimately in functional ecological terms if you have trees and grasses and animals or trees and crops and animals and you manage them well where there these are temperate trees and temperate crops and temperate livestock over there tropical trees and topical crops and tropical livestock is actually much less relevant it will make a difference in the numbers but from the perspective of the principles it does not make a difference you need to manage for biomass and for soil carbon for soil health you need to manage for soil health and for biomass no matter where you are and what you do great thanks thanks for this wonderful presentation and introduction i'm going to move on on our program there's a question from finn simmonds what are the strategies and tactics to get ideas to implementation let's go there with our next two speakers i'll introduce amy first because we're going to end with one of my heroes majette amy amy is let me get it right again amy amy skeinswulf is director of research and community outreach at drylands agro ecology research amy is also the lead facilitator and teacher for bolder permaculture and manages that one and a half acre subsistence homestead we know amy because she's involved with ecosystem restoration camp elk run which is actually a long existing incredible initiative that we're very proud has joined the movement recently her initial interest in agriculture came out of a degree in cultural anthropology uh which ignited the fascination with the human trajectory and how connected it has always been to our means of subsistence amy spent the next five years learning on and then helping manage two organic farms in massachusetts and although she loved being on a farm she questioned some of the practices even with organic agriculture then she stumbled across permaculture i hope maybe you read me i don't know it felt like the beginning of an answer since then amy joined the board of a former urban urban eco village spent three years working at a sustainable plant nursery and ran her own permaculture based landscape design install business for about for a few years and she has a permaculture teaching certification amy that's an incredible path uh please help us understand how to bring all this all these ideas to practice oh and unmute yourself great thank you for the support and unmuting myself and thank you for having me here today really excited to actually go right after patrick because um so much of what you discussed patrick really frames everything that we're doing really well and um you are not the first person peter to stumble over the name of our non-profit drylands agroecology research it's a bit of a mouthful and i'll get into that in a little bit here um but just delighted to be part of this organization that i joined last year but have been kind of in the loop with and familiar with for a while now um so just excited to share a little bit of that story and a case study of what we've just discussed with you all so just to share a bit of the back story of this project um i'm based out in colorado which for those who don't know this region of colorado long watt sits right at the edge of the great plains and the rocky mountains so a really cool place to be also right in the rain shadow of the mountains where we get usually about 16 inches of rain kind of short grass prairie ecosystem and this whole project started seven years ago when nick d domenico pictured in the bottom set out to start a farm he never intended to start a non-profit or anything else he just wanted to farm and because land is really expensive in this area the only piece of land his family could get a hold of was this 14 acre piece of land and today everybody is deeply regretting that nobody took any before pictures of this project nobody thought of it so the picture you're seeing here is down the road a little bit but when nick got what became elk run farm it was completely degraded there was no vegetation on this hillside that you're seeing here it had been overgrazed for years um there was only enough water on site in a temperamental seasonal well to irrigate about one acre of the 14 acres so he reached out to various people for advice on how to restore the land reached out to the government nrcs service all the advice he got was find a different piece of land there's no way you can restore this land to a farmable state without water and really inspired by a background in permaculture and indigenous land management that he learned in south america he decided to try and everything that's grown in the last seven years on this farm has expanded into this framework we're using now for our non-profit in partnership with many other people so just to share a little bit of what that looks like and what's worked we've talked about this a lot in this symposium so not going to hit it too hard but just really realizing that in these dry arid semi-arid climates water is truly the limiting factor for how productive our landscapes can be in carbon sequestration biodiversity food production and also acknowledging this is one of our partner properties this is what a lot of land in boulder county where we live looks like right now and this is not how it looked historically years of mismanagement have broken that water cycle and set in motion a very rapid process of changing our lands into desert that we're asking ourselves when there isn't irrigation water available which is most of the time now how can we actually reverse that process and what we settled on as a technique that's very common in the permaculture world but how can you actually use earthworks to first plant water in the landscape so most of our systems are designed with this idea of contour soils so just as a brief kind of rundown of what that is for those who don't know if you have even a mildly sloped landscape gently sloped you find the level line on that landscape and you dig basically a depression right there so you have a basin and you have a berm and that runs along the contour line of the landscape and so water instead of just running off that landscape which happens on a lot of our bare soils hits that basin and deeply infiltrates before proceeding down the landscape what's kind of cool about this system is if we did nothing else this is almost the first step to catalyzing landscape rehydration and we actually had a soil scientist come out a few years into the project and take a core sampler and drive it down into the basin of the soil and a year of deep drought and it was drying it was drying it was drying suddenly it was wet because it has caused this recharge and he was blown away because he works on so many agricultural lands here and has never seen anything like that but what and just as a kind of example of what that looks like on a broader scale this is one of our partner properties with those swales cutting through the landscape but what we realize is in that moist microclimate of the swale basin with compost and with mulch we can plant trees without any irrigation and for those who live in this area people think that's the craziest thing to do and when Nick and Marissa first set out to plant about a thousand trees on their pilot farm with no irrigation people told them they were out of their mind and they also wondered is anything going to actually survive here so they planted the trees a foot and a half apart assuming most of them would die three to four years later 85 survival rate having never once been irrigated after the day they were planted in our arid climate and so at this point we planted about 5000 trees and systems like that but what's really exciting to us is the way we're designing this just to give you an idea of what's in these systems is an alternation of nitrogen fixing nurse plants um and fruit trees and ultimately what's exciting is as these trees mature yes they're going to produce a fruit yield we actually got our first fruit this year at the elk run farm system which was tremendously exciting for us very little fruit but a little bit of plums um but as these trees grow they're creating this cool moist microclimate that's going to further rehydrate the landscape and kind of like we were talking about before we really feel that the most productive type of landscape and resilient especially in this climate is one that's an integrated agroforestry grazing system because so much of this landscape is historically grassland dominated we could go a lot into allen savories model of holistic grazing but in a nutshell basically asking ourselves how can you actually look at the movements of wild ruminants the improved landscapes and how can you copy that in domestic settings and a lot of that actually has to do with the predator pressures that keep animals bunched together and moving across the landscape quickly so using that technique we managed to actually revegetate a lot of these landscapes with bale grazing and a number of other techniques over the years and are noticing increasing soil organic matter percentages in the alleyways between the swales systems using sheep on the pilot farm and are just starting to get into much larger acreages and cattle this year and excited to see how that develops but the other piece that right now is happening on a very small scale at the pilot farm but we're beginning to scale as well is when nick arrived at that farm there was this area that was a kind of compact gravel parking lot that's what it had been used as for years and he was pretty new to farming at that point and he got some pigs and he heard you know pigs really degrade landscapes so i'm going to put them in that parking lot because there's nothing they can do to make it worse than it already is but he noticed as he was throwing in wood chips and other things and manure and they're eating the grubs out of it that they were starting to turn all that material into the soil as they dug and after a couple of years of having them there with wood chips and mulch topsoil started to grow and so he thought we're going to try cropping this and he went to the local bioregional seed distributor that had and said what is your most drought resilient seed because we can't water this space after spring our well runs out of water and so they gave him some seed and he planted it and that first year there was an absolutely terrible yield but they saved the seed from what came up and the next year the yield was much better and now there's a system in place of integrating pigs excuse me crops first and then pigs and then chickens and that is building so topsoil to where we now have eight inches of this rich black topsoil that you see on the right as compared to the parking lot it started with having never brought in finished compost just using this natural cycling of animals and crop residues in some initial organic matter and this is what the crops are looking like in that area now which does not get watered at all after about early June so really exciting to us and something that we're also starting to grow and expand as a technique with our partner farms really just understanding too that the soil can act as a living sponge for water when we improve it enough that's kind of the two pieces we see of this development of water retentive systems is one planting the water which I guess is kind of our summary here is first how do you start this whole process how do you catalyze a landscape to rehydrate when there's no vegetation there and set things in motion to be able to establish vegetation to begin with in our case that allows us to practice dryland agroforestry and then we use these holistic livestock management techniques to further enhance the soil's ability to store water like a sponge as animals are building the soil and then really this focus too on just developing crops that are appropriate for this bioregion and adapted to this bioregion as time goes on and that's kind of the framework that we're working within but what it all comes down to for us and this is kind of an interesting question I get a lot is how do you actually define regenerative agriculture and for us I think that definition comes down to we see regenerative agriculture as designing agricultural systems that function like ecosystems with a tremendous amount of upfront infrastructure because this is a lot of work to dig these soil systems to fund the trees to get it all going it's a lot but once you set that system in motion if we stepped back and did absolutely nothing it would continue to regenerate and catalyze and humans in a way get to be once again a keystone species in this ecosystem we're creating but it's a whole new type of ecosystem with the mind of its own that continues to regenerate and follow nature's patterns that humans now get to be a participant in so that's kind of where we're coming from as we design these systems and just to touch lightly on kind of what else is going on with this we really in order to evaluate how our landscapes are actually functioning we're looking at how well do they perform the functions of a healthy ecosystem and the three biggest things that comes down to for us is how well do they retain moisture sequester carbon and support biodiversity and I know we don't have an abundance of time here so I won't get into too much of this but we have a number of different metrics we're looking at to understand this holistic picture of how our management is affecting the landscape's ability to function as an ecosystem um and some of the things that we've been excited to see is just compared to the adjacent open space properties that we're using as kind of our control we're seeing our grassland management increase soil organic matter percentages by over 200 percent in the grain fields it's kind of outrageous we're sitting at about a 25 percent organic matter um percentage in some of those more intensely managed systems and we're just seeing a huge increase in fertility and of course the tree survival rates that we mentioned before so all things that are encouraging to us and our research program still growing but gives us a really nice framework to analyze these systems a little bit of our vision and I wanted to share this too because I think one of the biggest curiosities to us is how does this kind of work scale because it needs to happen fast and it needs to happen everywhere but I think what we realize is for us we want to manage a thousand acres in our county but more exciting to us than trying to manage acres farther and farther out as empowering other people too in a kind of nodal network because this isn't something you can hand somebody an instruction manual and say hey this is how you dig a soil system in fact it involves kind of this deep holistic understanding of how you read and engage with the landscape to create something like Patrick was saying that is unique to that place and that ecology with the the livestock that suits that area's needs so this really comes down to the essence of our organization which is realizing that we're really excited about land regeneration but as holistic designers we realize that's tied into human systems entirely so what we're really trying to create is a new way of relating to the world culturally and economically and socially and that's a much more complicated issue to approach and to scale but just also noticing that we have over 2,000 people in our community come out to help plant trees and support our farms and come to events and workshops and how much momentum is catalyzing around this work is really inspiring and the whole model of growth for us is to build these partnerships with landowners in our region who are excited to do similar things and we now have seven of them who are expanding these systems with them and then just the final piece I want to touch on too just to speak to the full picture of this work is we have these four branches we really work within and land regeneration and research are two of them but we also acknowledge that every the way that we're relating to the land is completely grounded in the indigenous way of seeing the land that humans have held for most of time so in a way what we're trying to do is create tool sets for people who have forgotten that to come back to it but that also involves an acknowledgement of the deep damage that is in our land and our history with the indigenous peoples who lived here so trying to repair that is really central to us and we think we can't heal without doing that and also just realizing culture starts with the youth so we have a really strong childhood education program that's outdoor and nature based as well so just kind of an overview of the case study of what we're doing and really excited to connect with everybody more during the panel here as well Amy what a truly inspiring story and what an incredible amount of knowledge is being developed I'll take off my glasses I can't see you anymore but I'm reflecting what an incredible story and what an amazing inspiration someone the youtube handle is called Katz Biggio ask what kind of seeds did you use because we are trying to figure out how to start in dry dry systems what kind of seeds did you use yeah that's a great question and I didn't touch on that so for the grain crops which I assume is the question we have this organization called Masa Seed Foundation near us that has been trying to cultivate by a regional seed so we started with Chihuahua blue seed corn we started with I'm telling you the ones we settled on in the end but scarlet amaranth hopi black beans and then just I don't think there's a lot of variety in the grain sorghum but those are the four things that we started with and at this point we almost call it our own seed variety because it's so hyper adapted to elk run farm but that's seven six years ago as the beginning seed if you could put those in our zoom chat melissa yes then put them in the youtube chat and people can I will do that right now what seeds you used thank you so much I think you said 16 inches of rain per year yeah okay I don't know what that is a millimeter yeah I was thinking probably most people listening are in the metric system here should I google it's it's a lot of millimeters we're going from 16 inches which is way over the amount maggot gets per annum which I believe maggot is 30 millimeters which is about an inch a little over an inch per annum maggot from all the way from the Sinai desert Habiba community it's a great honor that you've joined us I think what you're doing is incredible also for you we have a bio that I will read but we have met and maybe I could do it by heart but um maggot you started your career in the travel industry in Cairo tourism in the 80s and in 94 you relocated with your family to a small family run enterprise by the sea called the Habiba beach lodge still tourism eventually uh maggot adapted the vision of the business of having the greater goal of food security and a responsible approach to the environment and tourism maggot and his family through the Habiba community have been committed for the past 28 years to guaranteeing food security enhancing the and enhancing the resilience of the indigenous Bedouin communities communities of the Sinai to better face the impacts of climate change today much of maggot's work focuses on knowledge exchange with experts in the field researchers and global communities to develop better techniques for restoring natural water cycles while continuing to experiment with new crops regenerative farming techniques and improve economic sustainability in the desert climate climate with 30 millimeters of rain a little over an inch uh of the Sinai in Egypt maggot I give you the unmuted microphone good evening and thank you Peter and thank you all the team of ecosystem restoration that will be ecosystem camps soon inshallah thank you very much for this uh possibility and occasion to show our journey of 28 years living here on this wonderful spot on the on earth which uh Moeba this is our location we are a place to be the Gulf of Aqaba and behind us the mountains of the holy Sinai it is very important location and this city was always for tourism but the position make it very difficult to continue that's why we went for the food security and from there started our journey since we are in a sport politically and economically has always suffering and now integration between the tourism and the uh the agriculture this is what make uh Habiba community what it is now so uh weather condition uh we are on the middle of the desert Sinai falls on the iron and semi-iron region which is characterized by unpredictable rainfall patterns as you mentioned Peter like three millimeters per year sometimes of high intensity short duration and uneven distribution the Sinai peninsula is especially affected by desertification and drought phenomena like many other places in the world as the evaporation of water on the ground exceed yearly precipitation unfortunately with the with this absence of enough fresh water salinization is increasingly present on the soil and the ground water and I'm really and uh I'm witness and testimony of that because I started with uh certain salinity and now with the years and with the drought we are facing more so I I saw it with my eyes and we with the living this oh what is our mission synergizing differences dreaming our desert providing food security and education this is the pillars of Habiba and the core of of Habiba community in if the timeline as you mentioned we started 1994 this is the Habiba beach lot and then due to what I explained about the political economical so I found the solution in 2007 started the organic farm in that time I thought that organic farming is one of the best practices but I'll come to you later to explain why it's not the completely right solution in 2009 we got the wolf and the wolf it's worldwide opportunity organic farming and through wonderful people traveling around the world sharing their experience and knowledge and good well so we started to receive a lot of volunteers in 2011 we start our uh having our organic certificate uh from uh volunteerism and the agriturism activities to be combined then 2003 2013 we had the golden chance partnering with the desert research center of Egypt and this is another milestone and the real change on the on the on the community and how the scientists and researchers help us because as you mentioned my background is not farming I work always uh in trees but uh with the desert research center start of the learning center and the Sinai Palmedit Foundation which is planting a lot of trees of the palm of the Mejul to support the uh community after school learning center and 2015 we started to include the woman through a project which means woman and these thanks to my partner and my wife Lorena in 2019 this is a very important milestone for us is shifting to regenerative farm and regenerative agriculture and to be among the wonderful uh communities and the camps of the ecosystem restoration and then 2020 2020 we have been organized as a global ecovillage and as an eco restoration camp we've organic farm in brief 2000 and 3000 we have found the farm act as a community based farm that benefits the people of the south Sinai the farm serves as a beacon of what can be accomplished through sound organic farming practices on the desert it was like learning how to prototype a model to show the people that it is possible to transform and to start with our food city although that desert like nature of the location there is so much to plant harvest learn and space for growth and this is really what happened local people that I owe them a lot our community the Bedouin I've seen the reserve and today agriculture is beginning to flourish across the region regenerative farm and this is really very very important because it's found in 2019 it became like the hub connected people that are facing agricultural challenges like us such as the water and food insecurity by using knowledge transfer to create sustainable solution through local natural resources the operation of the research institutes and regenerative farm aims to becoming an open ear lab for trial experiment and the pioneer projects it has now become benchmark of the Bedouin everyone asking what is the difference between the organic and the regenerative then the people see how the soil itself the regenerative is completely different than the soil of the organic farm and how it is very strong and the plants and the endemic endemic plants and the crops are completely more healthier than the organic farm in terms of Habiba use this space also to conduct cases on water and soil samples from different farms to find solutions to the local challenges around so the ecosystem in our area is as we mentioned we are between the sea and the desert and the Sinai mountains desert we pass from coral reefs to seagrass which is very important element of the seagrass in carbon sequestration and seaweeds to mangrove swamps to sand the dune valleys until we reach that giant mountain base our goal is to try to make all of them co-existent together how the solution will be holistic so from the sea we take the seagrass that are collected on the shore by the waves and we add them to our compost from the desert we take the sand for our crops this sand helps reduce the level of salt in the soil and at the same time gives different nutrient to the plants we plant a type of plants like arctic lakes which can help also in taking the soil the salt from the soil the mountains also affects our crops through atmospheric events such as sand and dream stores for soil preparation nutrition and the solution traditional compost kitchen waste garden waste mud compost tea for nutrient phosphores and potassium molasses for microorganisms manganese and eggshells and vinegar for calcium so it's all about integrating management of resources and how we can mimic the nature and how we can extract what the plants and the soil need from what we have organic mix to keep invasive insects away infusion of chili garlic onion and lemon to keep the natural humidity on the soil we are mixing together sand and compost this is what we have covering the field with the straw it helps to protect the soil from the sun the most important mulching mulching mulching on the algae area then now we have the water treatment systems Habiba and the other farms of the community are now cultivating drought resistant land that adapted to the Sinai weather conditions as the emissions of water and soil is now the main challenge and that's why I'm trying to integrate with the more scientist researchers from different parts of the world to come out with the best solution and to learn from similar places so our farms are facing caused by years of over pumping and seawater intrusion along the coast and there's something also that the desalination in plants is also increasing the salinity and they're making the plant more yeah with this absence of enough fresh water salinization is increasingly present on the soil and ground water some farmers in the area use the traditional techniques to catch real water and let it infiltrate into the ground water and hopefully the government started now in what you are here to make different dams and catching a water catchment to refill again the underground water we have the nubian aquifer and we need to recharge inshallah practices so our objective the long term the holistic approach that Habiba is following is focused on sustainability and the long term by ensuring quality education education is very important for us and that's why we have also the afterschool learning center for the children from starting from five years old living and then all the other members of the community everyone has the proper education that is suitable for them and the ecosystem reservation food security and the well-being of the of the community education it's ambitious also to have a accredited master's degree in Habiba so more students can come and more researchers can come to accelerate in helping us to find the achievable applicable solution the industry innovation and the infrastructure having more laboratory equipment that this will serve us and the whole community and many of the other farmers we need to have in spot water analysis soil restorations and crop loss management for example now we are having like the broccoli leaves we dried them instead of throwing them and then you can use for smoothies and nutrition and so on a lot of discovery more researchers that help us in implement our activities so the becoming Habiba becoming a sustainable city and the community becoming an even more integrated community so the conclusion with the system food local economic growth education the availability of good quality water in the area which it is possible might change absolutely everything allowing the farmers the community to survive thank you very much Margaret thank you so very much for that presentation at this late hour from Egypt thank you so much for doing so oh glasses I keep getting a hint the the aspect you brought in because you know in this posion we're looking for these technical solutions you're dealing with almost no rainwater and all and when it does come it comes at the exact same it all comes at once in a very short period and and then leave straight to the sea you're dealing with Salination but we've been to your land I've been to your lands some of the team have been to your land and we've seen that you've already been able to create dark soils where the rest is very yellow desert type soil I think you a few people can already attest to how quick regreening or regenerative practices leads to holding the water in the soil and how quickly that leads to your ability to vegetate the could you share a bit about your experience there yeah this is what I'm trying to so when I started with the organic farming so I use a lot of water and all the materials but thanks to many people that became and taught us like ramskin to give us a permaculture course and many other people so I'm the regenerative it's building the soil and when you build your soil with as I said with that with the seaweed this is a huge impact and then with the with the lift over so we start to make layer and layer and layer this is not productive for one year and a half just building our soil and with the rain that it came so as we know that soil is the biggest seed bank on earth so we started to see that endemic plants that started that cover when in the organic farm any plants that's not necessary you that is not productive for us it's not useful for us you take it away and you this is for planting crops on the regenerative farm no we leave it as as it is and then it may cover and then changing the soil and for example now we have the seeds we leave it and then it makes its own cycle and then it grow and dry and then you leave it there so layer after layer this is how you build your soil and once you build your soil you save water and we already make a test that was in the greenhouse we give 10 minutes of water in a week every week in the in the organic farm we have water almost every day okay thanks hey Christina from Jordan asks in the chat in youtube is the regenerative farm also efficient in reducing soil salination have you been able to observe an improvement in the regenerative farm while you just discussed that that there is an improvement compared to the organic but you also see that regenerative farm helps reduce soil salination yes and we we we did right now we have different experiments so for example we plant cotton in different spots because in it is as we mentioned this regenerative farm it is educational farm and different people come and everyone make his own accident so in in one in one lean we have different typology of soil and then we plant cotton and we give the same water same same everything what is the difference that you can see in in the in the plant where the soil is rich the plant is very happy and then you go less happy and then unhappy so this is soil building a lot of of nutrients that goes there okay so and is there less salt in that soil is there less salt in that soil much much less okay salt that's also because you use plants that desalinate right you use plants that eat the salt salt this is yes like atriplex but it's not in everywhere yeah there's another question and maybe Rami's and Patrick and Amy can come into this there's another question but that's to you also it seems to be a bit of a someone notices in the chat in youtube there's a bit of a counterintuitive feel to bringing cb to the lands to regenerate soil and trying to get rid of the salt could you could you maybe Rami's because I know you've studied this respond to that well I mean this the the thing about the seaweed and really this is anything that comes from water from the sea the reason why you would bring it on is because it contains the micronutrients that are often missing from from soils so the the salts could you know I mean the salts could be taken care of and depending on how you know you're you're doing the preparation for the for the the applying of the of the seaweed I mean the seaweed could be you know it could be composted but the point is you're trying to get access to the nutrients that are missing in in those soils but but really the salt the salt is is a product of of excessive evaporation so that's why I get to met to what magic was saying before and this is something like when I was you know when I came when I was in the Sinai the first in 19 and then I had a chance to go to to Imagine's project in a couple of years later the we were like constantly banging on him about a couple of things the first one was of course the discussion about compost and he would remember me mentioning this ad infinitum the second one is the is the the the mulching and the shade because if you if you can't reduce the the evaporation then you're simply not going to have enough moisture to to do anything and the and the number one mode of water loss in an arid and semi-arid climate is the evaporation so the you know being able to get enough cover to to reduce the water loss but also in reducing the water loss you're reducing the the the amount of minerals that are deposited near the surface as a result of the water loss and so what you'll find is and actually Jeff talks about this and Jeff Martin talks about this with what happened in his project in the Dead Sea Valley was that he would use a lot of mulch on the mounds with the swales that he had created in in his you know in his project and what he found was the salt was was actually rendered inert so it's not that is that it was rendered inert so it's so in so it was sort of taken out of the equation because you no longer had the excessive evaporation he was able to hang on to more water and he says that you know he started to see things like you know more life in the soil more um you know uh in order for activity but he also began to see mushrooms emerge because he had enough moisture for them to actually begin to fruit you know the mycelium to begin to fruit so you know all all of these things you know would um you know this is all part of the you know all part of the setup but i mean but but magic is it really makes me happy to hear you know all that all of these things are coming together because i mean we we talked about this we talked about all of this but i i want to say we use very little quantity of water so the evaporation and the salinity is completely different this is what i've wanted to underline that generative farm is completely different and then the seaweed wash it first before and i don't put it directly to that to the soil there is processing that we we do of course and then we but the most important is the nutrition that there and then also i were using diatoms now uh uh yeah yeah and there is difference it's in the sand itself uh you know that there's a sign i was covered by the sea so there is diatoms also sorry yeah so to that point before we go on on this and i have uh john you coming in wow um well before we continue this discussion uh which i think is great but i'm also cognizant of the time and the organizers want us to end by uh in four minutes which we won't but we will go close to those four minutes patrick i would like to pull you in because you said something uh that triggered me a bit about uh the great polyculture examples and the tree uh rose of trees and i think what i saw in the pictures mostly was uh annual crops like grains and um you actually said rambies may not agree with this so i thought this is great for the final discussion uh because here are three people i know and i'm sorry imagine if you want to drink something go ahead uh because you have a cough uh we have three people here on the ground working very hard and i know you have that experience too patrick i'm not saying that but they're working with us more polycultural systems perhaps um rambies does um is patrick right that the because i i sense there's some correctness in this the initial projects were quite small scale with small agroforestry projects to feed the world they need to go to that larger scale maybe is he right or is he horribly wrong rambies no well i mean i think he's he's right in the sense that when he said that the market prefers to have sort of the current um you know kind of single product focus type of production so in that sense he's correct it but in terms of looking for systems that actually are the best at provisioning actually providing us with the production that would allow for us to be able to be sustained you know in in the uh either food stuffs or other materials the polycultural systems in relation to what is invested in terms of energy and time um in the aggregate is is is better than the conventional system but in terms of what the market is looking for no he is correct that because the mark because the whole point is that the patrick uses your music patrick yeah the current the current the current um commercial systems in terms of you know the you know commodities and such they want the industrially set up they want the industrially set up um uh land uh land management systems because it's a it accommodates the needs of the market right it's dumb it's dumbed down the market is not like complexity go ahead let me really come back here and and repeat what i said and then expand on it yes the polycultural systems are better and i said that the polycultural systems deliver more of everything that we want on a smaller area of land with less negative externalities and more positive externalities than anything else but two things about that first agroforestry in the silver arable systems there's rows of poplars in your wheat field they act i've seen this again and again and again they act as a gateway drug they act as agroecology farmers who start doing this then become interested in complexifying their systems they start becoming interested in tinkering and every single time what they tell you is this is great because i need to spend less money on inputs and that is what's getting them to move in that direction at the same time we cannot avoid the modern world over half of the people live in cities they cannot be fed by local production that's a pipe dream they need to be fed by large areas of land and that food needs to be carried by hundreds and thousands of kilometers away whether we like it or not the most efficient way of doing that is through supermarkets it's the way that gets the highest quality food in the highest quantities at the lowest price into the hands of most consumers so that will not change the trick therefore is to figure out how to use the tools of agroecology including agroforestry to start restoring the agricultural landscapes onto which cities depend while still being able to deal with the market system that demands the homogeneity and the quantities that ultimately simply mean that we have millions of stomachs to feed in cities so that's why we should not put these things into conflict with one another there are things that actually work well together right the best farmers i know whether they're small scale or large scale always work with systems that are tending towards poly cultures towards permaculture and but they do that in ways that still allow them to sell stuff to the buyers and that is crucial we cannot ignore that factor great way to come to consensus is to pose a possible conflict that obviously doesn't exist thanks patrick for that response i live in amsterdam i think i understand what gateway drugs are amsterdam but i also i purchased my food at the supermarket and i've i've been dealing with this question a lot that there are going to be probably 10 to 11 billion people on the planet most of those will not be producing their own food so i see the point and i see ramy shaking shaking his head no no and again at that i mean it's that was that was my point and i'm glad patrick clarified that because i don't think i know i mean i've known patrick for you know more than a decade i mean we're on the same page about pretty much 95 percent no no and you're all part of the same community amy your view your thoughts i was also thinking about that when patrick brought it up originally and it's kind of interesting just looking at some of the models that have worked in these systems for us and near us and in other farming communities i've been a part of that this idea of the whole diet csa where people are coming to a farm that is somehow producing a whole diet and getting everything from that works amazingly well when you're close enough to an urban center to do it and that's kind of what's an interesting bridge for us is like that's an untapped market that's not yet saturated in our region there's people still out there to come and buy that kind of thing and be happy about it but that market is still very small relative to the whole population of people who are living in cities and so that is a question we also have a lot of curiosity around but just haven't also figured out the way to take this to the broad huge monoculture acreages that are in the american prairie right now and then transport that so interesting question diversification uh john you the founder of this incredible ecosystem restoration camps movement has joined us john um in patrick's presentation there was this uh element of rain producing areas that are and the rain is carried across uh oceans and large tracts of land to be deposited somewhere else i know you're very much interested in what you call a global acupuncture points this is very much resonated with your thinking right now right where we need to prioritize restoration efforts to get rain to come everywhere again yes yes i i think that uh what we're seeing is that people who are working locally are doing exactly the right thing but we have to link up all these local things local projects on a planetary scale and and that restoration of earth systems has to be the central intention of human civilization so if humans decide that that restoration of the ecosystems is our priority since we're depending on that for our lives and we could go extinct if we if we don't have these functional ecological systems and so it's this changes everything this changes the the governance systems the economies it it changes the relationships of people to one another and to the earth so we have lots of people who've been lost their human rights and they need to have their human rights back and they need to have land and and the ability to live and so we we we really need to put this into both the physical biological ecological perspective and in this social perspective and in the historical perspective and in the justice thing so i i don't know how long how long did you say we're going to go on minus four minutes so we should we should be done already we're supposed to end at nine nineteen forty five months please anybody who wants to go the Sinai peninsula is going to be discussed and it's a very deep dive with T. Svanderhofen coming up on zoom and you'll have to go to the organizers because i cannot put oh maybe i can do it now it's too difficult and they say kath is kath is already trying to manage that john so don't worry about it uh well she had that link somehow uh because it is important and majat are you involved in that webinar maggot veteese uh yeah i i send it to you i send it directly to you now okay but before we end in in in uh merging into a different webinar without properly concluding this one uh i'd like to thank patrick for an amazing presentation rameez for uh introducing climate weirding to me and another amazing presentation amy with showing how you're involving two thousand people in understanding the relationship with earth and changing that that colorado farm into a regenerative one and maggot struggling against the worst possible conditions politics um you switch from tourism because of terrorism uh the uh the circumstances in the Sinai and finding a pathway out i i thank you for sharing those stories and and thank share you for thank you for sharing your insights i thank the global earth repair summit for existing i hope people following this online found this very very valuable we didn't get to all the questions in the chat there was a big one if we restore the entire planet how much carbon could be sequestered i don't think anyone knows there's guesses exactly patrick i don't think anyone knows there are very few more i hope those questions were answered with these wonderful presentations uh before uh well rameez i'm sorry uh i'd like to state that uh ecosystem restoration cam soon ecosystem restoration communities has a website we are about to launch what we call the restoration project finder it allows you to find out what these projects are doing visit with them participate with them i know from the first to the 15th of december maggot is organizing the habiba community winter school if you want to learn what they're doing if you want to experience it personally sign up and you can go to our website and do so the restoration project finder will allow you to find these projects near you by the time when you're available etc it will also also allow you to select the camp that you would like to donate directly to that's currently not yet possible but you can donate to the general foundation will make sure it gets to them somehow if you earmark it if you don't earmark it will make sure it gets to good put the good use through this exchange of knowledge these types of symposia and getting all these systems up and running so that these these incredible projects can go to the global scale john is has been arguing for for the past 20 25 years so uh thank you for joining i'm going to sign off now because the next event and i don't know what it is but there is a next event you can go to the global earth repair summit find out what that next event is is following us soon and we don't want to keep you from it thank you for participating thank you for joining and hoping to see you again soon thank you bye bye thanks patrick thank you good seeing you all


Nathan here back with another Nathan and nature segment Larry here got stuck on a roach trap So we're gonna release Larry back into the wild so he could be with his family and be free so I'm gonna be here as We gently get him without breaking any of his legs Come on buddy. You're almost there Notice I have gloves on I would not be doing this bare-handed And I'm actually freaked out right now. So I don't want to kill him. All right. It's pointless