After lecturing and researching landscape management at Reading University, Tony Kendle became one of the founding team of the Eden Project in Cornwall. He now works with Sensory Trust on making natural climate solutions (including ‘slow water’) more accessible.
Below, he reflects on the synergy that nature-based solutions to water management provide between such work as The Sensory Trust’s climate repair agenda, and Slow The Flow’s advocacy of Natural Flood Management (NFM) and Sustainable Drainage Solutions (SuDS).
It first became clear to me in a summer of simultaneous droughts and floods that something was amiss with water.
It soon emerged that amongst the first impacts of climate change is a major disruption to the water cycle.
The Stockholm International Water Institute have said
“climate change is water change, climate chaos is water chaos”
In light of this growing understanding in COP 26 a call was made to policymakers to make water central to climate action.
This call stated
“Climate change is primarily a water crisis. We feel its impacts through worsening floods, rising sea levels, shrinking ice fields, wildfires and droughts.”
Furthermore, the UN World Water development Report 2020, emphasises that water is the “climate connector” that allows for greater collaboration and coordination across the majority of targets for climate change “Accelerated action is urgently needed to address the water-related consequences of climate change that impact people and the planet”
Researchers have begun to talk of carbon tunnel vision – a failure to look beyond carbon dioxide as a cause of the climate problem and therefore a failure to look beyond cutting CO2 emissions for solutions.
Water is so closely tied to our climate systems it has been termed the global thermostat.
Amongst other reasons this is because water vapour is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This does not change our responsibility just as human activity has disrupted the natural carbon cycle, through deforestation, agriculture, wetland loss and urbanisation we have disrupted the natural water cycle too. It has been calculated that over the past 50 years more than 1000 billion m3 of rainwater has been lost from the ground stores of Europe thanks to urban drainage.
We live with a soil water deficit, a hidden underground desertification that contributes to our altered climate, limits plant growth, aggravates the heat island effect and creates risks to human health.
Water is not a factor in the climate problem, it offers new solutions too.
An awareness of the importance of water adds to the list of options we have for addressing the climate crisis. Focusing on water and carbon together gives us more options to address the crisis.
To confirm this an informal network of researchers have collaborated on a blueprint for solutions called The New Water Paradigm for Healing the Climate
Central to this new paradigm is the principle that, like carbon, water is safest and most useful underground rather than in the atmosphere.
Rather than treating precious rain like a waste product to be rushed to drains and out to sea, the new paradigm calls for restoring water cycles by enhancing water infiltration and rehydrating the landscape – hence the links to the slow water movement.
For many of us, net zero is a disempowering ambition – reliant on expensive technologies and action by governments and corporations
The authors of the new paradigm, endorsed by the UN, argue that a grassroots movement of many small water targeted actions will be more likely to succeed than high cost centralised government programmes – they state that every square metre, every micro-catchment counts.
In Cornwall, thanks to funding from the National Lottery climate action fund, the Sensory Trust and partners are testing whether water focused climate action is more inclusive and easier to implement than decarbonising our lives.
Sensory Trust climate repair project focusing on water and inclusion
To date we have developed demonstrations of the cooling and water-slowing effects of plant cover, compared to bare ground and hard surfaces. These have been trialled in schools, and with community groups in our Climate Repair Café events.
