Award-winning director, Damon Gameau, leads this session featuring world-leading hydrologists, Michal Kravčík and Anastasia Makarieva, discuss the New Water Paradigm and its application to climate science.

The New Water Paradigm is an incredibly hopeful story that is only just beginning to break through into climate thinking, offering a pathway to climate mitigation, including breaking from the drought and extreme weather cycle we are currently witnessing. The Paradigm takes the science beyond just CO2 as the cause of our predicament and proposes levers we need to turn things around.

Michal Kravčík is the author and lead researcher of the paper, Water for the recovery of Climate. He is known for his work restoring watersheds across Slovakia following the devastating Central European floods of 2002. Michal is the founder of the People and Water NGO, a holder of the Goldman Environmental Prize and a member of ASHOKA: Innovators for the Public, an international network of innovators who work for public welfare. Michal is the most prominent representative of the People and Water NGO, which has been awarded the EU-USA Prize for Democracy and Civil Society Development.

Anastassia Makarieva is a professor in the Theoretical Physics Division of the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute the Lead author of Biotic pump of atmospheric moisture as driver of the hydrological cycle on land, which provides ground breaking research into how healthy forests can draw moisture from the ocean far inland.