A Platform for the World’s Leading Restoration Thinkers
What if the most effective ways to cool the planet are already in motion — and you could learn directly from the people leading them how you can make an impact?
Biodiversity for a Livable Climate (Bio4Climate) is launching a new mini-conference series on ecological protection and restoration — a set of focused Saturday-morning virtual events featuring some of the world’s most compelling scientists, practitioners, and restoration leaders.
Each session gives Bio4Climate’s Advisors and allied experts a platform to share their latest observations, research, and thinking on the ecological and biophysical processes that regulate Earth’s climate — and to speak directly to you about how their work is creating pathways for action.
About This Series
Humanity is living through an accelerating ecological and climatic crisis. Forest loss, land degradation, desertification, and water-cycle disruption are reshaping hydrology, intensifying floods, droughts, and wildfires, and increasing the frequency of extreme weather, including extreme heat. Regions such as the Amazon basin, the Congo, Mediterranean, and Arctic have already crossed or are approaching tipping points.
Traditional emissions-focused mitigation — while important — cannot slow global heating quickly enough on its own. Nor can it regenerate the hydrological functions, soil fertility, or biodiversity that underpin Earth’s climate-stabilizing systems.
Across the scientific literature and in the lived experience of frontline communities, a common insight is emerging:
Healthy ecosystems — forests, wetlands, grasslands, mangroves, and coastal systems — are indispensable climate solutions. They cool the Earth through evapotranspiration, cloud formation, and complex energy dynamics. They regulate water cycles, rebuild soils, buffer extreme weather, and restore the conditions for life.
This series brings together the scientists, ecologists, restoration practitioners, and advocates who are working at the frontier of nature-based climate solutions. Each brings deep field experience, cutting-edge research, and a clear-eyed view of both the urgency and the extraordinary potential of ecological restoration.
The sessions in this series are not lectures. They are conversations with people doing the most important work in the world — and an invitation to join them.
Why Attend
This goes further than most climate conversations. Throughout this series, you will:
- Hear directly from leading experts implementing powerful research initiatives and on-the-ground solutions
- Identify critical climate tipping points and which regions are a priority
- Understand how nature cools the temperatures — through water, energy, and living systems
- Discover high-impact initiatives already working to restore and rehydrate the land and cool the temperatures
- Ask questions and engage live with the speakers and a community of like-minded changemakers
- Leave with clear next steps on how you can support, collaborate with, or apply these solutions
What Each Session Offers
Each two-hour session hosted on Saturdays from 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET features:
- Context-setting from Bio4Climate’s senior leadership on why this topic matters now
- Presentations by 2–3 featured experts
- A moderated conversation among presenters, exploring connections and implications
- Open dialogue and Q&A with the participants
- A direct call to action
Mini-Conference Series Convenors
This series is hosted by members of Bio4Climate’s Leadership Team, including Board President Philip Bogdonoff, Ecological Economist Fred Jennings, and Architect Christopher Haines, author of Greenhouse Gases: True, but Not the Whole Truth.
Opening Session
The Power of Forests & Water:
Creating Rain and the Global Circulation of Moisture
Saturday, April 18
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET
Forests are not simply collections of trees. They are living hydrological engines — actively generating clouds, recycling rainfall, stabilizing regional climates, and cooling the Earth through the movement of water.
When forests are intact, they regulate atmospheric moisture, sustain river systems, and buffer both droughts and floods. When they are degraded, rainfall patterns shift, drying intensifies, and regions can tip toward desertification. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the Amazon basin and other large forest systems that influence continental-scale water cycles.
In this opening session, two leading experts will present their current thinking on forests as climate regulators, and tell you what you can do to support this critical work:
Bio4Climate Advisor Anastassia Makarieva, atmospheric physicist, co-developer of the Biotic Pump theory, and co-founder of the Biotic Pump Greening Group, will present on how intact forests actively generate and sustain rainfall — and why large-scale forest loss threatens the water security of hundreds of millions of people across entire continents.
Bio4Climate Advisor Rob de Laet, creator of Arara.Earth and Cooling the Climate , and co-author of Cooling the Climate: How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years, will present on the Amazon’s role as a planetary thermostat, the accelerating risk of Amazon dieback, and the strategic forest restoration efforts his team is advancing in northeastern Brazil to avert hydrological collapse.
Effective, powerful solutions exist, and the stakes could not be higher. Reserve your spot and be part of the solution today.
More sessions to be announced soon
To receive announcements of upcoming sessions, sign up for our newsletter.