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Drought resilience with flood protection

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How can we disrupt the drought, fire and flood cycle?

Last week we hosted a practical workshop here on Tenerife to teach the next generation of regeneration practitioners. My colleague Edu built a syntropic agroforestry system and I focused on water harvesting.

The conditions here on the site are really tough. Annual rainfall of roughly 150mm, a steep entry road on the site of a valley that occasionally gets massive water flows.

The focus of the workshop was on building safety features in water work. There are too many people out there just randomly building swales, ponds and dams without any consideration for safety features and overflows.

On this farm it only rains a couple of days a year and the quantity is minimal. That’s why we need to make sure that every trickle from the road gets captured.

However, the valley has a large catchment above and every 10-20 years there can be a big rain event with massive water flows. We need to keep those massive flows off the property.

With the students we designed it in a way that we have a sediment trap at the bottom of the row that has a small spillway towards the property. Only 5cm higher is the main spillway down the valley. With this design, small quantities enter the property but massive flows can continue down into the valley.

On the terrace we added another sediment trap and an infiltration basin with rock armoured spillway. In the future we will connect the little infiltration basin to an irrigation channel for the agroforestry system.

Through Zach Weiss and the Water Stories course I learned to love rocks for spillways.

After this week, I’m sure the students love rocks as well. It would have been so much easier to work in a gentle valley, but we don’t always get to choose our work sites and need to find creative solutions for tricky situations.

+#watercycle #drought #rainwaterharvesting

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