Scientists have finally quantified the annual loss of freshwater

[Hart Hagan]

Scientists have (finally) quantified the amount of freshwater we are losing annually, as it runs off into the oceans and not being replaced by “effective rainfall,” which is where rainfall actually soaks into the ground.

This coming Wednesday, we will be talking about the Worldwide Loss of Soil Moisture. You can register here: The Worldwide Loss of Soil Moisture — Wednesday, June 10 — 12:00–1:30 PM (ET) 

The great thing about this topic is that we can do something about it, right where we are. If we manage for soil health, we will be doing our part to capture the rainfall. 

That’s the whole problem: People who manage farms, forests, home landscapes are not managing for soil health or the capture of rainfall. If they were, we would have a lot more water in our soils and in our streams and rivers.

Healthy soil can hold over 100,000 gallons of water per acre. Poor soil can hardly hold any water. This assumes, as per the US Department of Agriculture, that every additional 1% of soil organic matter in the top six inches holds an additional 27,000 gallons of water per acre, according to this publication: Soil Health Key Points.

Because of poor soil management and poor water management, we have been losing soil moisture worldwide at a rate of 150 billion tons per year, according to this study. 

I am grateful to the authors of the study for quantifying the annual loss of freshwater. However, I am disappointed that they don’t seem to understand how soil holds water, and therefore don’t understand the problem or the solution.

Instead of pointing to how we treat the soil, they talk only about climatic conditions, such as drought. 

“Generally, droughts commence with precipitation deficits, leading to the depletion of terrestrial water storage (TWS), including soil moisture (SM), groundwater, and water in streams and lakes (10).”

In other words, it is not raining enough. That’s the entire problem (almost).

But it’s not the rain you get, it’s the rain you keep, that really matters. Let’s say it rains 4 inches. 2 inches soaks in while the other 2 inches runs off. How much rain did you get? You only got two inches, because that’s all you kept.

Now, let’s say it rains 4 inches and all 4 inches soaks in. How much rain did you get? You got 4 inches. 

This is something you can control locally, because it depends on your soil, not your rainfall.

And when your soil soaks in all 4 inches of a 4 inch rain, then you are preventing both flooding and drought. You are preventing flooding because you don’t have any runoff. 

You are preventing drought, because your soil is soaking in that rainfall. The more rainfall your soil can hold, the less it depends on the increasingly fickle nature of rainfall patterns as the climate changes.

This is why I say that the mainstream climate narrative is increasingly irrelevant. There is such an extreme dedication to a certain narrative, a certain understanding of climate change, that people, including scientists and expert reporters, are blind to common sense realities and the facts on the ground.

If you would like to join us to discuss these issues, I invite you to this free webinar, coming up Wednesday: The Worldwide Loss of Soil Moisture — Wednesday, June 10 — 12:00–1:30 PM (ET) 

[Sheil, Douglas]

Hi

FYI … If you click through on the Seo et al. article you refer to (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq6529) and scroll down to the 5+1 E-letters attached below it you can also find some criticisms and doubts about that study. It includes Pierre Ibisch and my own short note on the role of vegetation.

 

Douglas

 

Here is our text:

Reversing desiccation: cooler, moister, greener

 

The Earth is drying. Seo et al. (1) highlight an alarming shift: while for most of the planet’s history, a warming climate brought a wetter, greener world (2), it now brings desiccation (1, 3). Our biosphere’s water-regulating functions are broken.

 

While climate science and policy focus on greenhouse gases, they often neglect vegetation’s role in keeping the planet cool and hydrated. Forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems regulate temperatures and drive the water cycle (4) — but degradation has impaired these services. Feedbacks from droughts, heatwaves, and declining vegetation now amplify local and regional warming (5, 6). Nonlinear responses risk abrupt shifts and catastrophic tipping points (7, 8).

 

Solutions become clear when we recognise water and vegetation as partners in climate regulation. Protecting and restoring forests and wetlands does more than sequester carbon — it rebuilds the processes that keep landscapes cool, moist, and productive. Managing land to increase infiltration, reduce runoff, and restore soil water storage helps sustain transpiration and cool the land (4, 8-10). We need to revive a “sponge planet” (11) and support place-based innovations like “sponge cities” that enhance water retention where it's most needed (12).

 

Policymakers must act boldly to safeguard “green water” (4, 13). Land-use decisions must prioritise ecosystems that regulate moisture and climate. Strong incentives are essential: those who degrade should pay; those who protect and restore must be rewarded. The message is simple and urgent: a cool, moist, green planet is our best defence against a drier, warmer world. It remains possible. The time to act is now.

 

1.          K.-W. Seo et al., Science 387, 1408-1413 (2025).

2.          U. Salzmann et al., Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 309, 1-8 (2011).

3.          P. De Luca, M. G. Donat, Geophysical Research Letters 50, e2022GL102493 (2023).

4.          D. Ellison et al., Global Environmental Change 43, 51-61 (2017).

5.          C. Smith, J. C. A. Baker, D. V. Spracklen, Nature,  (2023).

6.          D. L. Schumacher, J. Keune, P. Dirmeyer, D. G. Miralles, Nature Geoscience 15, 262-268 (2022).

7.          T. M. Lenton et al., Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences 105, 1786-1793 (2008).

8.          A. M. Makarieva et al., Global Change Biology 29, 2536–2556 (2023).

9.          D. Ellison, J. Pokorný, M. Wild, Global change biology 30, e17195 (2024).

10.        D. Sheil, Forest Ecosystems 5, 1-22 (2018).

11.        K. Yu, E. Gies, W. W. Wood, Nature Water, 1-3 (2025).

12.        Z. Zheng, X. Zhang, W. Qiao, R. Zhao, Water Resources Management, 1-15 (2025).

13.        L. Wang-Erlandsson et al., Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 3, 380-392 (2022).

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[Hart Hagan]

Douglas,

Thanks very much. I’ll check it out. 

Hart 

[Jon Schull]

Coherent and compelling!  Thanks Douglas!

CCQ and I will make sure the the relevant articles you cite are cited in Cooling Climate Quickly as well!

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[rob de laet]

Hello everybody, 

I just came across a UK government document that deserves far more attention than it has received. In January 2026, the UK government quietly published a national security assessment titled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, in large parts written by MI5 and MI6. The publication was initially halted by Downing Street, reportedly because officials felt it was "too negative." It was only quietly released after a repeated Freedom of Information request. 

The report's conclusions will be familiar to anyone who has read Cooling the Climate or the CCQ whitepaper. With high confidence, it states that every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse, and identifies the Amazon rainforest, the Congo basin, boreal forests, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia's coral reefs and mangroves as sources of cascading risk: to food security, water availability, weather patterns, geopolitical stability and thus a first-order national security threat. On all of this, the intelligence community has caught up with what the science has been saying for years. The report falls short as its framing is entirely one-directional: forests are valuable because losing them releases carbon and disrupts rainfall. The water cycle appears only as a victim of collapse, never as an active system that, when intact or regenerated, mitigates the above mentioned risks...

I propose we add a single sentence at the end of §1, after the paragraph that closes with "...incomplete measurement can be fatal." This is the point where the paper makes the case that carbon tunnel vision is a systemic institutional failure, and the following sentence provides what I think is the most powerful real-world illustration of that argument we could cite:

"In January 2026, the UK government's Joint Intelligence Committee, forced to publish only after repeated Freedom of Information requests that Downing Street had initially blocked, confirmed that every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse and that severe degradation would alter global weather patterns, drive geopolitical instability, conflict, and food insecurity at a scale that directly threatens national security.''

The report is in PDF in annex and the URL is:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/696e0eae719d837d69afc7de/National_security_assessment_-_global_biodiversity_loss__ecosystem_collapse_and_national_security.pdf

Best,

Rob de Laet 

Project Lead Cooling the Climate

Member of the EcoRestoration Alliance

Fellow fo the Schumacher Institute

Planetary Solvency Taskforce

Co-founder of Senang Eco Services

WhatsApp: +55 71 992617846

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[Michael Hands]

Thank you, Rob.

This is very important.  

What constantly troubles me is the vast gap between our getting the ideology right, complete and convincing and the next step in securing the massive institutional re-think and, above all, funding required to act upon it.

A handful of NGOs, of which Inga Foundation is one, have been beavering away for years to bring about these changes.  In IF's case, an end to the consumptive destruction of tropical rain forest and the beginnings of re-vegetating and rehydrating desiccated former rain forest landscapes.  The model is working, but is tiny in comparison with the scale of the problem.

all the best

Mike Hands

Inga Foundation

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ecorestoration-alliance/1777475678.212537.1781855814035%40mail.yahoo.com.
<National_security_assessment_-_global_biodiversity_loss__ecosystem_collapse_and_national_security (1).pdf>

Mike Hands
Director:  Land for Life Program.  Central America

mhan...@btinternet.com
mi...@ingafoundation.org

UK Registered Charity:  1124688    

[Phoebe Barnard]

Thank you dear Rob and all,

I am coordinating a team within the Stockholm Environment Institute at Oxford and the civil society organisation “SAFER” (part of the Climate Majority Project) to bid for a grant from DEFRA, the UK’s environment, food and rural affairs, on Nature Security Research which appears focused on responding proactively to this suppressed report.  I’ll make sure we take up your well articulated points with which you know I agree as a biodiversity scientist.

Warmest - Phoebe

-copying academic address here so please switch to that

https://hihello.com/p/8be19904-5fb6-4350-b4d0-12cacea71351

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ecorestoration-alliance/A3748B29-567F-451D-B176-5E7F62E96896%40btinternet.com.

[rob de laet]

Dear Phoebe, 

great to hear from you. Good luck with the grant request! Happy to  help with the monetary calculations in economic output reduction in specific cases, 

Warm regards, 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ecorestoration-alliance/CAG%2BUD1Q6H6tMR3NBTjbstr92SXOPQ%2BqDFKBoQDC_q0qWTzG43w%40mail.gmail.com.

[rob de laet]

Dear Mike, 

Indeed, it is crazy. Your image of the handful of dedicated NGOs beavering away while the institutional machinery grinds on in the opposite direction is painfully apt. What comes to mind is a snake devouring its own tail, gleefully consuming as it goes, unaware that the feast ends with its own head. The system is, in a very literal sense, eating its future.

The gap you describe is not just frustrating, it is structurally engineered. The funding flows where the ideology already is. Changing the ideology requires demonstrating scale. Demonstrating scale requires funding. We are being worne out by a vicious circle. 

The Inga Foundation model is working, and an amazing, well documented example and proof of concept. I think we need to focus more on the calculation of the damage if it is not done, compared to the investment and ROI when done. You probably have done that already. Were any institutions with substantial funds willing to listen to that calculus? I think we should stop to beg for hunders of thousands, and demand billions, frankly!

That may be where the real work lies now: you have proven the case. We need to drive the message home in the language of risk, liability, irreversible loss (including in the clear cut case of Middle America migration and all the tensions that that has brought) versus the investment in a sustainable future for those lands and communities, and indeed at scale. 

We are way beyond piloting: this has to be done at scale if we can have any meaningful effect. In fact, to stop global collapse caused by climate change, we have to restore a billion hectares or more in strategic areas with the knowledge people like you and many others within the ERA have built up over decades.

With warm regards,