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By Mark Trebilcock
Founder and CEO
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America cannot build climate resilience while allowing its soil to deteriorate.
As flooding, drought, and extreme rainfall put communities under growing pressure, policymakers must recognize healthy soil as essential infrastructure and make its protection a requirement in development and land-use planning.
The warning signs are already here. In November 2026, the Associated Press reported that an unusually intense El Niño was channeling heavy moisture into passing storms across the American Southwest, increasing the likelihood of extreme rainfall and flash flooding.
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While scientists highlighted El Niño as a major contributing factor rather than the sole cause, the resulting storms triggered severe flooding and water rescues across parts of Arizona and Colorado, and much of the Western United States.
The flooding exposed a problem that extends beyond emergency preparedness. We continue to focus on moving excess water away from communities without giving enough attention to the condition of the ground receiving it.
Why are we investing so heavily in drainage and disaster response while overlooking the natural infrastructure that can help manage rainfall at its source?
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Soil is not simply dirt beneath our feet. It is a natural water-management system. Healthy, uncompacted soil absorbs rainfall, supports vegetation, stores moisture, and helps slow runoff.
Its condition affects everything from agricultural productivity and food security to roads, homes, and municipal drainage systems.
When soil is compacted, stripped of vegetation, or depleted of organic matter, its ability to absorb water can decline.
Rainfall then travels across the surface faster, carrying valuable topsoil into waterways and increasing pressure on drainage infrastructure. What looks like an agricultural problem can quickly become a public safety and economic problem.
This is the infrastructure conversation we are missing.
The scale of the problem is difficult to dismiss. In August, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released its Status of the World’s Soil Resources 2026 assessment.
It found that soil management remains unsustainable in many parts of the world, despite advances in scientific knowledge and available solutions.
The FAO reports that healthy soils produce more than 95 percent of the food we eat and help filter and store water. Soil health is directly connected to food security and public safety.
Communities Pay Later
How did we overlook something so fundamental? For decades, development has rewarded speed and immediate output.
Land is cleared, graded, and compacted to make construction easier. Vegetation and organic matter are treated as obstacles. Drainage systems are then expected to move water away quickly.
These choices may simplify projects upfront, but communities pay later through erosion, damaged roads, unstable slopes, and repeated repairs.
Concrete channels, retaining walls, and storm drains have important roles. I am not saying that engineered infrastructure should disappear. I am arguing that it cannot carry the entire burden.
A hard structure cannot restore lost organic matter or make compacted ground absorb rainfall. When we separate engineering from living systems, we create weaknesses.
Regenerative land management offers a better direction and, in fact, improves over time. Maintaining vegetation, reducing soil disturbance, rebuilding organic matter, and improving water infiltration can help restore the ground’s natural functions.
On slopes, terracing and planting can slow water and give roots a chance to hold soil in place. The right approach differs by location and soil type, but the principle is consistent: manage water where it falls, and let natural systems work alongside engineered ones.
Action is Needed
The choice is stark. If we keep treating soil as expendable, communities will face more runoff, erosion, pressure on farms, and bills for emergency response and infrastructure repair.
If we protect soil as an asset, we can ease pressure on drainage systems, support food production, protect waterways, and make landscapes better equipped to handle extremes.
Prevention will not eliminate floods or droughts, but it can reduce the damage they cause.
That shift requires action. Governments should require soil-health and water-infiltration assessments for major development and infrastructure projects.
Building codes should reward practices that preserve vegetation, reduce compaction, and restore degraded land. Developers, engineers, farmers, and communities must help set standards suited to local conditions. Public investment should support restoration before failure, not just repairs afterward.
I have spent years observing what happens when we work against a landscape’s natural behavior. Water follows gravity. Bare, compacted ground gives it fewer chances to soak in.
Ignore those realities, and the costs appear on a hillside, in a flooded street, or on a taxpayer-funded repair bill.
We cannot control a storm. We can decide whether the ground beneath our communities is prepared to absorb the rain. Policymakers and developers must make soil health a measurable requirement in land-use and infrastructure planning.
Resilience starts before the water reaches the drain.
Mark Trebilcock is the founder of Dirt Locker, an environmental engineering company based in Southern California that creates interlocking terracing systems to prevent soil erosion and stabilize sloped land. All views are his own.
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