[mountaintimefrm]

Alternative headline from a saner and more practical world: "Europe's drought might force acceptance of landscape-wide rainwater harvesting earthworks." The effectiveness of such earthworks is pretty shocking to witness: -- https://youtu.be/8QUSIJ80n50 "Lessons of the Loess Plateau"

The permaculture folks have been implementing functional solutions to drought for 3 or 4 decades now, repairing large-scale damaged ecosystems and halting desertification. The problem already has a simple effective remedy, and gene-edited crops are a band-aid non-solution that does nothing to change the underlying conditions by which drought is created and perpetuated.

It is widely understood that forests attract/create rainfall (https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941). Large scale water harvesting earthworks attract/create forests by creating the hydrological conditions amenable to increased vegetative cover. To put it simply, here is what is do be done: an army of people use whatever earth moving equipment they have available (from shovels to machinery) to dig a network of swales and catchments across the landscape, and then plant them with early successional "pioneer" species (sun/drought tolerant, often nitrogen fixing woody shrubs). In 5 to 10 years, the soil will be holding onto to the rain for much longer periods of time , creating the conditions such that longterm forest trees will begin to establish (attracting more rain), and staple crops can be reliably grown. This a proven method, it absolutely works, and it needs to be widely implemented across the globe.

Hopefully this comment get read by the heads of public works agencies of numerous governments in drought affected regions around the world.