By Femke van Woesik & Frank van Steenbergen
When we talk about climate change, most attention goes to reducing emissions (mitigation) or adjusting to impacts (adaptation). But there’s a third, often overlooked, pathway: managing local climates.
Landscapes don’t just react to climate change, they actively shape temperature, rainfall, and overall resilience. The key driver in this process is the small water cycle.
You have probably heard of the water cycle during geography class in high school: a droplet evaporates from the ocean, travels through the air, condenses into clouds, and eventually falls back to Earth as rain. This is the large water cycle, which moves moisture from oceans across continents.
The small water cycle, by contrast, happens over land and is the engine behind local water recycling. Soil absorbs water, vegetation releases it back into the air through transpiration, clouds form, and rain falls again on land.
When soils are degraded and vegetation disappears, this cycle breaks. Instead of infiltrating, water runs off. Instead of cooling the air through evapotranspiration, the sun’s energy just heats the ground. The result: hotter landscapes, erratic rainfall, and more droughts and floods.
Landscapes as climate buffers
The contrast is striking. A degraded landscape acts like a boiling plate: soils are compacted, dry, and lifeless. Heat rises, condensation is inhibited, and rain either drifts away or falls in destructive bursts.
A healthy buffered landscape, by contrast, holds water in soils, recycles it through vegetation, and stabilizes local humidity. Solar energy is used for evapotranspiration (latent heat) rather than heating, buffering temperatures by several degrees and sustaining reliable rainfall.
The science is clear: the mean global rainfall over land is about 720 mm per year, of which only 310 mm comes from the large water cycle while around 410 mm comes from the small water cycle (Kravčík, 2007) which is rainfall recycled locally through soils and vegetation. This means land management decisions directly affect whether it rains tomorrow.
At the same time, recent research (Staal et al., 2024) reminds us that the rainfall effects of restoration depend on where and how it is done. Forests recycle water through evapotranspiration, which can increase rainfall locally and downwind. But location matters: in wet regions forests buffer droughts and stabilize rainfall, while in drier zones poorly planned tree planting may reduce local water availability. This shows why restoring the small water cycle is not just about more trees everywhere, but about carefully designed landscapes: forests, wetlands, grasslands, and farms, that keep water in the land and atmosphere where it is most needed.
Cooling power made visible
The book Water for the Recovery of the Climate – A New Water Paradigm (Kravčík et al., 2009) illustrates the cooling power of water and vegetation with striking examples. A drop of just 1 mm/day in evaporation over Slovakia’s land area releases as much sensible heat as the entire annual output of all Slovak power plants. This shows how degraded soils that no longer evaporate water can unleash immense heat into the atmosphere. Moreover, a single healthy tree with a crown about ten meters wide can transpire around 400 liters of water each day, using the sun’s energy to transform that water into vapor. In doing so, it cools with a power of 20–30 kilowatts: the equivalent of running more than ten air-conditioning units at once. Together, these examples make tangible what the small water cycle really means: landscapes rich in water and vegetation act as vast natural cooling systems, while degraded land turns into a giant boiling plate.
The Third Way Forward
The good news is that degradation is not permanent. We can reverse it, and we can do so locally. Restoring the small water cycle is not a zero-sum game: it creates abundance, not scarcity. The benefits are real and measurable: local temperatures drop, agriculture becomes more stable and productive, rainfall and microclimates improve, groundwater and soil moisture are restored, erosion and nutrient loss decline, and biodiversity thrives.
We need mitigation. We need adaptation. But we also need to actively restore local water cycles. By doing so, we cool overheated landscapes, stabilize rainfall, and build resilience where it matters most: locally.
Read more:
Bunyard, P. P., Collin, E., de Laet, R., Hodnett, M., & Fourman, M. (2024). Restoring the earth’s damaged temperature regulation is the fastest way out of the climate crisis. Cooling the planet with plants. International Journal of Biosensors & Bioelectronics, 9(1), 7-15. https://doi.org/10.15406/ijbsbe.2024.09.00237
Staal, A., Theeuwen, J. J. E., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Wunderling, N., & Dekker, S. C. (2024). Targeted rainfall enhancement as an objective of forestation. Global Change Biology, 30(1), e17096. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17096
Kravčík, M., Pokorný, J., Kohutiar, J., Ková, M., & Tóth, E. (2007). Water for the Recovery of the Climate – A New Water Paradigm. Krupa Print, Žilina. From: http://www.waterparadigm.org/indexen.php?web=./home/homeen.htm
Widows, R. (2016, May 8). Rehydrating the Earth: A New Paradigm For Water Management. Medium. https://medium.com/@rwidows/rehydrating-the-earth-a-new-paradigm-for-water-management-3567866671a2
