Ghost Water

Let’s say you lived on the driest continent on earth where rainfall was unpredictable, drought followed by flooding rain, where water was a precious and valuable resource especially as the population grows and climate change worsens. What if you came up with a plan to buyback water from farmers so the water could go back into the river systems. Let’s say this was flood water - water that could only be collected when the land it fell on was inundated and let’s say the rain hadn’t fallen yet - it was more a promise, an IOU for rain that hadn’t fallen yet. With no actual memory of it, so it felt more like an absence than a loss, all 630 billion litres of it. Not a drop to be harvested, just ghost water.