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Comment by worldsayshi | Hacker News Reader

My favourite solution to water scarcity is water traps. It seems like such an amazingly simple concept with underrated potential:

Make sure that whatever water rains down in a place stays long enough to nudge the micro-climate in the right direction - by digging some water barriers in the right places.

While it cannot possibly(?) solve water shortages everywhere it can turn some deserts green:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8

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Beaver dams are a good example of this too. Beavers were building bioswales everywhere in North America for free and we killed almost all of them and wore them for hats.

https://www.ewu.edu/cstem/stories/the-ecological-benefits-of...

Which makes me wonder how much carbon we can sequester per reintroduced beaver. Wetlands are apparently very good carbon sinks.

Also known as swales. There’s a lot of woo and ‘influencer’ stuff in the permaculture world but some real good concepts too.

I've only recently been learning a little bit about permaculture. In essence it seems like agro hacking in a way? A big variety of tricks that you can implement on a plot of land to increase biological values or yield.

It sounds a bit like medicine before medical science. A bit of woo is then to be expected?

This is an amazing video.

The eco-system seems fragile - easily destroyed by over grazing, or even simply from tourists or visitors

Also labour intensive - he mentions 100 labourers x multiple years.

So these projects would need government regulation and protection.

Sure it's labour intensive to adjust the topography but once it is done it shouldn't need continuous maintenance, as shown in the end of the clip. I also suspect that the fragility is due to it being so newly established. If the foliage is allowed to become dense and put down proper roots over time it should become more robust.

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