Water Restoration Service
Create a thriving landscape that retains water naturally, enhancing fire, flood and drought resilience while elevating its productivity and beauty.
Let's go!Why Water?
Since colonisation, Australia’s landscape has been transformed by extensive land clearing, soil compaction, draining of water systems, and biodiversity loss. These changes severely limit the land's ability to retain water, disrupting small water cycles essential for healthy ecosystems. When vegetation thrives, it seeds rain, evapotranspires, and allows water to infiltrate deeper into the soil, fuelling a natural ‘biotic pump’ that sustains life. Without this, Australia’s ecosystems are increasingly degraded and dehydrated.
This issue is global. Wetlands, Earth’s most endangered ecosystems, are disappearing three times faster than forests (UN). Over one-third of Earth’s land has been desertified since the dawn of civilisation, with dry, compacted soil losing its ability to absorb rainfall. Instead of enriching the ground, rainwater runs off to the ocean, perpetuating a downward spiral of aridification.
Water plays a critical role in climate regulation; its breakdown signals a weakened capacity of ecosystems to moderate temperature, known as the ‘second leg’ of climate change.
Yet within this crisis lies an opportunity: by restoring water cycles and rehydrating the land, we can regenerate ecosystems and bring cooling, resilience, and vitality back to our local environments.
How the process works
- The first step is an on-site consultation. This generally involves walking the land, digging some slices and understanding your goals. The output of this is a concept plan. You may take this to use yourself or you may continue to work with me into the next stage of project implementation.
- Project implementation involves earthworks and revegetation. Contractors are used for completing these steps to ensure local supply of equipment and local knowledge.
- After implementation the land will begin retaining water after the next rainy season and you will see the ecosystems begin to regenerate. Some maintenance and additional ecosystem inputs will likely be required, depending on the nature of the interventions, the landscape and your goals.
About the approach
I have been learning this stuff from Water Stories, an international group teaching water cycle restoration. The great thing about this is that I have a community of experienced practitioners to learn from and grow with. While I am starting out, I will review all concept plans with my mentors so you have quality assurance!
The provision of these services is run as a social enterprise, with profits enabling me to work on the Water Alliance.
