Community-led water systems for the Alentejo Drylands

PROJECT STORY: PurposeFlow Living Water and Life Infrastructure for Dryland Regeneration · Pavia, Alentejo, Portugal

Our Mission

PurposeFlow Living believes that regeneration is not a technique. It is a practice, one that has to be learned on the ground, adapted to specific conditions, carried by communities and honest about what does and does not work. We are a registered non-profit operating a community-led ecological restoration project in Pavia, Alentejo, Portugal, one of the driest municipalities in Europe and one of the most ecologically pressured landscapes on the continent. Our work integrates land restoration, community living, and education into a single living system. We restore land alongside the people learning to steward it. And we try, as honestly as we can, to show what regeneration can look like when it is not performed for an audience.

Background and Problem Statement

The Alentejo is classified as having high vulnerability to climate change, with a projected temperature increase of 4.3°C by 2100, accelerating desertification processes already well underway. This is not a future scenario. It is happening here, now, in the cracked soil and absent shade and reduced rainfall of the landscape we live in every day. Our 6-hectare site at Guarda da Freira tells the story of this region in miniature. Intensive wheat production until the 1980s, followed by decades of rotational sheep, cow and horse grazing, left the land severely compacted, near-zero in water infiltration, and almost entirely stripped of native multi-generational and diverse woody vegetation. By 2021, when we began restoration work in earnest, the soil was in no condition to support establishment of new tree life including natural reforestation.

We learned this the hard way. In the first years, 6,000 native planted tree/shrub seedlings of around 20 species failed almost entirely. Not due to lack of effort as we prepped each hole individually, added additional soil/compost where applicable , individual water retention sites , broadforked around them as well as watered . The vision was not wrong, but the failure happened because the land conditions were not yet ready to receive it. The soil bare of a myceliun network, could not hold water, and without water and facing heat wave of 42. Celsius in the first day of spring, the nursery seedlings had no chance to survive.

That failure and thus lesson was one of the most important things that has happened to this project.

Our Approach

The 6,000 seedlings taught us the foundational principle we now operate on entirely: restore water and soil function first, then revegetate and then reforest. We had to rebuild the conditions that make life possible before asking more established life to take hold. Since 2021, PurposeFlow has worked on exactly this. Over 300 hand-built water retention features, half-moon bunds, rainwater basins, hugelkulturs, brush berms, swales, check dams, infiltration ponds, and diversion drains, have been placed across the site along topographic contours and natural flow lines.

Their shared purpose: to slow, spread, sink, store and share stormwater that would otherwise run off degraded, compacted ground before it can do any good. This work has been guided by a team lead by Justin Robirg Söndergaard the ecological specialists from Terra Hábil, and informed by continuous real-time observation during rainfall events, watching where water goes, adjusting, learning, adjusting again. Alongside the earthworks, we have built a native seed program rooted in the only source that reliably produces plants adapted to this site's extremes: the bioregion itself. We harvest seed systematically from priority native species, including leguminous herbs and grasses such as Trifolium angustifolium, Lupinus spp. and Ornithopus spp., and native shrubs including Pistacia lentiscus, developing species-specific propagation protocols, sowing onto prepared ground within and around earthworks, and installing bird perches within them to encourage natural dispersal between active planting zones. Harvesting calendars are aligned with species phenology and adapted to our specific microclimate. Commercial nursery stock has failed us repeatedly, not entirely but strongly. Locally adapted seed has proved to be much more successful!

What We Have Built and Who Has Built It

Between 2021 and 2025, over 600 participants from more than 110 countries contributed to this work, not as passive visitors, but as active contributors to practical restoration and as an essential part of our rotational community. They have dug earthworks in winter, harvested seeds, propagated native seedlings. They have attended workshops on water-retention structure construction, seed identification, and native plant propagation, gaining transferable skills alongside meaningful contribution. Many have returned. More have carried what they learned to create other land projects in other countries. This is not incidental to the ecological work. It is inseparable from it. We cannot separate the restoration of land from the development of the people caring for it. Stewardship of self, community, and land are the three pillars our project rests on, and each one strengthens the others.

Alongside the restoration work, gradually improving systematic ecological documentation has been underway since winter 2023–2024. Approximately 100 native herbaceous plant species have been documented across the site, with dozens of animal species recorded across invertebrates, reptiles, birds and small mammals. A photographic species database is being been established, initial fungal and lichen documentation is underway, and pressed plant specimens are being collected to build a permanent herbarium reference collection, supporting long-term identification consistency and informing future planting decisions based on the ecological roles of each species. In 2023, we commissioned an independent NDVI satellite vegetation analysis establishing a formal baseline for long-term monitoring. This analysis, using Sentinel-2 imagery at 10-metre resolution and a 20-year Landsat time series from 2000 to 2024, confirmed what field observations were suggesting: a gradual upward trend in vegetation productivity, improvement in zones surrounding earthworks, and clear spatial differentiation between managed and unmanaged areas. A 2023-versus-2019 difference map identified specific zones of measurable improvement. Two extreme drought years visible in the Landsat record contextualise the climate variability the site operates within. Self-seeded native trees are now surviving summers where planted seedlings previously failed. Thistle density has sharply decreased where healthier grassland communities are establishing. The conditions are changing.

The Infrastructure Bottleneck We Now Face

Four years of ecological work have created conditions the site was not capable of supporting in 2021. The land is beginning to respond. Native species are establishing. The community learning and volunteer model is mature and functioning. But there is a critical bottleneck now constraining everything the ecological work has built. Water. Our current water system pumps directly from a borehole into a 200-litre pressure tank. This is insufficient to supply a nursery, support summer irrigation for establishing plantings, or serve a community of volunteers during peak usage periods. Without a reliable, resilient water supply, we cannot propagate the native seedlings the land now needs. We cannot support the expanded planting program the earthworks have made possible. We cannot function consistently as a learning community during the dry season, precisely the period when the land work is most vulnerable. This is the constraint this project addresses.

The Next Phase — Water and Life Infrastructure

With Ma Earth funding, supplemented by approximately €2,000–3,000 from our own resources, PurposeFlow will build three interconnected systems over a 12–17 month period from August 2026 to December 2027. - A water storage and distribution system connecting the borehole to multiple site use points, capturing water during aquifer recharge and distributing it flexibly across dry months. This single intervention unlocks everything downstream. - A climate-adapted greenhouse and native nursery, designed to operate in temperature extremes from -5°C to +47°C, built to propagate food crops and native trees and shrubs from locally collected, site-adapted seed. This nursery is the direct ecological output of four years of seed harvesting, propagation trials, and species documentation. The seeds are ready. The greenhouse is what is missing. - A greywater treatment and infiltration system, routing household wastewater through planted infiltration beds, converting waste water into a resource for food production, shade planting, and pollinator habitat. This closes the water loop from a sustainable to more regenerative loop on site and makes the principle of circular systems visible and legible to every volunteer and learner who passes through.

Alongside this infrastructure, we will run 2–3 practical workshops open not only to our community but to local residents, neighboring land projects, schools, and institutional partners, including the University of Nova and Évora, with whom we are developing longer-term research collaboration. Designs will be documented in Portuguese and English, freely available for other projects and communities in the bioregion to adapt and build on. Pavia and the surrounding municipality are home to many small landholders and rural families facing the same dryland challenges we work with daily. Sharing these systems locally is as important to us as documenting them internationally.

Opportunity

Mora is one of the driest municipalities in Europe. PurposeFlow sits in it intentionally, not despite the difficulty but because of it. A successful European dryland regeneration demonstration site in this landscape proves something important: that ecological recovery is possible here, in these conditions, at this scale, without industrial resources or external expertise unavailable to ordinary communities. Every system we build and document becomes a replicable model. Every workshop we run sends skills even beyond the bioregion. Every volunteer who works here for a month and then returns to their own project or community carries something of what has been learned. The infrastructure this funding supports is not just infrastructure for PurposeFlow. It is infrastructure for a model that other degraded dryland projects, in the Alentejo and beyond, can learn from and adapt.

Tracking Impact

We are committed to honest monitoring, not fabricated metrics. The indicators we will track are things we can genuinely observe with the capacity we have: - Water system: borehole pump run-time before and after tank installation; estimated volume stored; number of site use points supplied. - Greenhouse and nursery: species propagated; seedling survival rates through first summer; volume of locally adapted seed stock established. - Greywater system: volume of household wastewater treated; plant species established in infiltration beds; observed soil moisture improvement. - Ecological: visual coverage assessments around earthworks; qualitative field observations of species presence and change; rainfall event logs tracking infiltration and retention behaviour; seasonal flora and fauna field surveys building on the established baseline; NDVI follow-up analysis planned for 2024–2026 imagery, enabling quantitative before-and-after comparison aligned with UN Convention to Combat Desertification land degradation monitoring guidance. - Community and learning: number of participants in workshops; number of local residents and institutions engaged; number of documented guides produced and distributed.

Reports to Ma Earth will reflect honest observations, including what has not worked and what we have changed as a result. Our process will grow through observation, feedback and iteration.

Our Experience

PurposeFlow Living has been operating since 2021, led by its two co-founders. Anthony Ryan leads overall coordination, community management, and hands-on restoration work, bringing together the ecological strategy, the volunteer program, and the practical infrastructure of the project. Ana Carrero leads community facilitation, learning program design, , volunteer integration as well as the digital, house and animal care teams, holding the relational and educational dimensions of a project that is as much about people as it is about land. Together they have maintained continuity through five and a half years of iterative, resource-constrained, genuinely difficult work.

Through sustained community participation and honest engagement with failure as well as progress, we have built one of the most substantive grassroots dryland restoration projects in the Alentejo, run by a small core team supported by a rotating, internationally diverse community of volunteers and learners. We are not a large organisation. We do not have institutional backing or a research budget. Some , but definitely not limited to what we have is five years of genuine practical experience, a documented methodology, a functioning community model, a satellite monitoring baseline, an ecological species database, and a deep understanding of this specific land. We have ecological guidance from Terra Hábil and growing research relationships with more entities. We have 800+, visitors fromb 110 countries and 600+ people who have worked here and carried what they learned elsewhere. And we have the infrastructure gap that this funding will close.

The land is ready for the next phase and so are we!

We are grateful for this opportunity to share this work and keep regenerating the earth alongside ourselves! Follow our journey on Instagram 🌿 https://www.instagram.com/purposeflow_living/