Water management and climate extremes: Protecting our vital resources
Without change, there simply isn’t enough water available to meet our future societal needs and that of the environment. JBA’s Technical Director, Mark Smith discusses how can we approach water management differently to meet this challenge.
When considering resilience, it is useful to categorise hazards in terms of shocks and stresses. The majority of media and public attention in the UK is usually placed on shocks such as flooding. This is understandable when it comes to the immediate and potentially devastating human consequences of such hazards. However, it also possibly means we fail to give sufficient attention to the risks posed to society and the environment from stresses, such as dry weather and drought, and miss solutions that address different aspects of climate resilience.
As outlined earlier this year in the EA’s summary of revised draft regional and water resource plans, by 2050 in England for public water supply alone we face a supply-demand deficit of nearly 4,800 million litres of water per day (Ml/d), more than a third of water currently put into supply. When looking at the indicative breakdown of key drivers and pressures on future water needs, on the face of it climate change's impact on resource availability ‘only’ accounts for around 12% of the impact. However, this is a critical additional ‘ratchet effect’ when applied against the backdrop of existing needs to improve drought resilience (around 14%), addressing unsustainable abstraction (around 50%) and upward pressures on demand (around 24%).
In practice, climate change also has underlying influences on some of the other categories of need, such as environmental destination or future demand. The plans are designed to be adaptable and ensure suitable provision for the long-term uncertainty in climate scenarios, with higher emission scenarios having the potential to pile significant further pressure on resources.
To make matters worse, other sectors such as agriculture and energy are also facing increasing demands for consumptive water abstraction and/or supplies. The effects of climate change are likely to contribute increasingly to this, such as the increased need for irrigation for food production, but also, our pursuit to mitigate climate change is as well. With the transition to net zero in the energy sector bringing about increasing projected and new demands for water (for example, for hydrogen and carbon capture technologies), the interconnectivity of policy and societal drivers is rising in prominence.
Quite frankly, without change, there isn’t enough water available to meet our future societal needs and that of the environment. A messy conflict between these competing ‘demands’ is a possible scenario, resulting in potentially sub-optimal overall outcomes for society.
Stepping up awareness of the collective challenge
When it comes to public attention and the media, water resources and water supply have been comparatively the ‘silent service’, largely limited to the occasional ‘hosepipe ban’ or the cyclic outcry at water company leakage levels. In the UK, we have a persistent perception of water availability driven by a view that ‘it’s always raining here’. We need to break this by collective, sustained effort if we are to ensure future climate resilience. To do this we need to communicate increasingly with a focus on the consequences of interest that register with the public (which may depend on the setting), giving the foundations of the ‘buy-in’ for the firm action we need to take.
We’re now starting to see water resources becoming a tangible barrier to economic development in some areas of the country. There are real barriers to achieving net zero and the green economy, and risks to agricultural production. It’s important to move the story from one focussed on (or targeted at) water companies to one reflecting the combined cross-sector challenges we face with water availability.
Ensuring frameworks and processes facilitate holistic planning
I’m not at all concerned about us having the technical solutions or wherewithal to deliver them. However, it does concern me that the way we have to work isn’t always conducive to identifying and effectively deciding upon solutions, and translating those into tangible delivery beyond the planning stage. Given the scale of the challenge, we need to be able to deliver both demand-side and capital investment in new supply-side solutions.
Our organisations, processes and frameworks potentially drive us to think independently about a given site or river, a resource zone or sector – and even, worse, can even disincentivise us to consider these things collectively. We’ve made huge strides in broadening the understanding of the interconnections and awareness between sectors in the first regional water resources planning round, and we need to continue to build upon this. With such pressure on resources in future, we need to make the most effective, optimal decisions we possibly can, some of which will be difficult – and we need to equip ourselves to do so.
To do this we need to be increasingly comfortable working in a less ‘binary’ (pass-fail) manner, one where we explore system trade-offs and risks across a range of different objectives and criteria, including across disciplines and sectors. Our processes need to be able to account for ‘adjacent’ systems (issues) where relevant (for example, land use availability, energy grid capacity, regional socio-economic development etc.) so that decisions represent ‘best-value’ at a societal level. Planning processes at the regional and national levels need to be able to consider the trade-offs between local and broader-scale environmental impacts, avoiding displacing impacts to different areas whilst ‘solving’ them somewhere else.
Critically, to do this, we need to have effective cross-government policy steers and regulatory frameworks which facilitate decisions on the allocation and planning of water ‘on balance of priorities’ across all sectors. There needs to be increased government-driven activity to coordinate and ensure strategic planning of water resources across all sectors, which interfaces with the existing regional planning processes that support and help facilitate cross-sector collaboration.
Valuing water differently
To minimise the pressure on ever scarce resources under a changing climate, we need to start valuing water differently, better incentivising its efficient use and helping to create the driver for more water efficient solutions both domestically and commercially.
Too often, new developments start from the perspective or assumption of water being available and plentiful. We need to move to implement the government-led water labelling and tighter building standards, as assumed within most water resources plans. And if we want to incentivise lower domestic use, in the end I feel the government needs to plan for a mandated transition to universal metering; many water companies still face an uphill battle to convince billpayers to opt for a water meter voluntarily at a time of low trust in the water industry.
We need to think beyond simple ‘block allocations’ of water, and consider once again in detail the potential long-term benefits of a more dynamic abstraction licencing regime to promote and allow better resource sharing or flow regimes.
Taking a broader view of ‘resources’ in our solutions
We have big challenges to address to ensure climate resilience but with an equivalent challenge on the investment available to do so. We need to ensure every pound spent is as effective as possible, and this means considering wider benefits or impacts in every choice we make. We literally can’t afford to focus on one issue at a time.
With constraints on investment to meet our environmental outcomes, we need to think about packages or portfolios of measures rather than simply as ‘water quality’ or ‘flow’. Evidence is critical to these choices, and we also need to increase our evidence base to support and consider the effective deployment of nature-based solutions. We need to progressively improve interfacing and engaging with other areas of water planning, considering our decisions in the context of drainage/wastewater systems, supply system/asset resilience, flooding etc., wherever possible.
Given the transition in water resources planning to ‘long-term best-value planning’ principles, we already have the framework to reflect wider benefits of importance into our decision-making. We must strive to evolve and improve the maturity of these processes in future. We also need to see other discipline and planning areas doing the same, if we are to meet this collective climate resilience challenge.
