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Dr Chris Lambert, Supply Demand Senior Technical Advisor, Thames Water

Putting the needs of stakeholders at the heart of drought research

“Climate change is decreasing water availability and this research has definitely demonstrated how that can cause significant problems in water treatment works and has given us a better understanding of different types of water resource options.”

Dr Chris Lambert, Supply Demand Senior Technical Advisor, Thames Water

From the initial proposal for funding in 2014 to the final event on November 7, 2019, About Drought was driven by the needs of the organisations, communities and people who would be relying on the results of its research. Their practical requirements, regulatory restrictions, governance and operational methods have informed the structure, design and accessibility of the datasets and tools.Even at the stage of drafting the funding proposal Thames Water was invited to review it by MaRIUS’ project leader Jim Hall, Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks at Oxford University.

Matching the needs of water industry, NGOs and government

Narrowboats on canal in Hungerford, Berkshire
Narrowboats on canal in Hungerford, Berkshire

Chris Lambert, who is responsible for developing Thames Water’s, Water Resource Management and Drought plans, joined the MaRIUS Stakeholder Advisory Group (SAG). The aim of drawing this expert group from industry, NGOs and government to steer the project, liaising with MaRIUS’ social and natural scientists, was to ensure its outputs, including the ‘impacts dashboard’, matched the needs of the group in an evolving policy context. This early access proved crucial to the benefits Thames Water has gained. 

Chris says: “Being on the SAG as well as being involved in the parts of the project that were relevant to Thames Water, gave me wider visibility of the total work of the project. I had a much better understanding of how we could use some of the research in developing Thames Water’s water supply strategy.“It led to us commissioning some tailored, specific work that gave us a better insight into the reliability of future water resource development and then we fed into our 2019 Water Resource Management Plan.” 

Algae growth impact on reservoirs and abstraction

Of particular interest was the work on algae growth in rivers and ‘drought coincidence’. As a result, Thames Water commissioned its own more detailed research on how projected algae growth could impact on extracting water from reservoirs in conditions of water scarcity or drought, slowing its passage through the filtering system and therefore the speed at which public demand for water could be met. 

Thames Water also commissioned the development of a bespoke application from MaRIUS’s water quality research data, focusing on the catchments of the Severn and Thames, and the added likely impact of climate change on water availability. There are further potential impacts of the timing and positioning of water abstraction, i.e. from the bottom of the river catchment as opposed to higher up, including for the health of the Severn and Thames catchments. The results led to a change in plans for the management regime of Thames Water’s reservoirs. 

Climate change is decreasing water availability

Chris says: “If you look into future likely scenarios, climate change is decreasing water availability and this research has definitely demonstrated how that can cause significant problems in water treatment works and has given us a better understanding of different types of water resource options. 

“Part of my role is to engage with academic bodies to understand the latest thinking and communicate it internally to our senior executives and board members and to our external stakeholders as well. Another part is ensuring we have effective communication for public and community consultation on our Water Management Plans for the more practical aspects of day-to-day water supply. Through my involvement with MaRIUS and About Drought I have found the events – such as the one-day water suppliers’ feedback workshop in Oxford – very useful in giving me visibility of what has been done and in supporting me in getting internal funding. 

“I have been able to follow-up with UK-based speakers who have always been very responsive and my colleagues have also found them very helpful. 

“I do think that it would be worthwhile continuing bringing this community together, even if it is just once a year, to keep us up to speed. The work isn’t going to stop just because About Drought has stopped. “It’s important to ensure the good work that has been done to date continues and doesn’t dry up just because the funding dries up.”

Interview by Sally Stevens

Posted October 2019

Tracey Dunford, Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Lead Specialist Planner Water Resources

Drought in Wales

‘About Drought’s workshop in Cardiff helped to really engage the interest of my peers and colleagues who deal with drought in Wales’

Tracey Dunford, Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Lead Specialist Planner Water Resources
Low water level in a South Wales reservoir
Pontsticill Reservoir in South Wales. CREDIT: Karl McCarthy

About Drought has given people creating water policies and strategies, face-to-face access to scientists at the forefront of drought research through a series of workshops held around the UK. Tracey Dunford, who has worked in water resources for Wales for 20 years, attended a wide range of workshops organised by MaRIUS and DRY, returning to Cardiff to share information about the programme’s latest datasets and communications research with her colleagues

Targeted workshop for Welsh audience

She says: “All the Drought and Water Scarcity and ENDOWS events I went to were extremely useful. I have been feeding back to my colleagues on the various outputs and they have been considering how to incorporate them into their decision making. The workshop About Drought held for NRW and the Welsh Government in Cardiff was especially useful as it was targeted to the Welsh audience. 

 “All our drought leads in NRW across Wales attended, including colleagues from biodiversity, fisheries, water resources, water quality, forestry and policy. It helped to engage people’s interest across our whole organisation and keep us all up-to-date with the current science.” 

The Natural Resources Wales/Welsh Government Workshop was held in December 2018, with delegates hearing directly about the research and outputs from About Drought and inviting them to help shape the final phase of activity. Initially the delegates heard from NRW who introduced the areas of their organisation that are most likely to be engaged with About Drought, which then gave way to introductions from the About Drought team. 

ENDWS Principal Investigator, Jamie Hannaford from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) introduced the programme. The agenda covered Water Supply with Dr Helen Gavin from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, Environment with Dr Nevil Quinn (University of the West of England) and Dr Francois Edwards (CEH), and Agriculture with Prof Ian Holman (Cranfield University). Following these introductions, the floor was opened for discussions and Q&A, to further discuss next steps for NRW’s and the Welsh Government’s involvement.

Engaging with experts in Wales

A separate meeting was held with NRW community colleagues in early 2019 with Prof Lindsey McEwen, Ruth Larbey and Emma Weitkamp of the DRY (Drought Risk & You) Project, working with communities and business. 

“These two helped to really engage the interest of my peers and colleagues who deal with drought in Wales, for instance our Hydrology and Agriculture Leads are now in direct contact with CEH and Cranfield University, providing their feedback on, for example, the UK Drought Portal, and with UWE to provide feedback on the environmental drought report cards,” says Tracey. 

“Our next stage is to consider all the data and outputs that have come out of About Drought and take stock of how we can use it. We need to put it into the context of Wales – for example, what are the drought impacts in Wales and the sectors most at risk? What does it mean for our natural resources including land, water and forestry? It can be easy to get overwhelmed by all the evidence. 

“During 2018’s prolonged hot dry weather we found the UK Drought Portal and the monthly Hydrological Outlooks useful, for example, for collating the Standard Precipitation Index triggers.” Being able to sit in a series of workshops around the same table as About Drought’s leading experts behind the data sets, has been invaluable for Tracey and for the programme team as well.

Two-way knowledge exchange

Tracey says: “It’s been beneficial both ways, not only did I get to know about so many things – including the drought communications work – but I was able to explain to the researchers that what works for England isn’t always necessarily right for Wales. Drought planning isn’t always the same, some of the policy and governances are quite different.

“I am concerned about losing contact with everyone now the programme has ended. Will I have ability to still contact people if we don’t understand something or we want a bit more background? 

“The briefing papers and one-pagers on topics have been very useful but I need to think ‘How is that useful for Wales? What are the most likely drought impacts? Where will they be? What are the short, medium or long-term impacts?’ As an organisation we in NRW need to take that forward. 

“It would be good to have it packaged up for Welsh policy, a synopsis of how drought affects Wales rather than topic by topic. In terms of decision-making we are re-visiting how we ‘do’ drought in Wales and we are going to find the About Drought datasets useful now that we are evolving our drought policy.”

Interview by Sally Stevens

Posted October 2019

Steve McGuire, Senior Scientist in Water Resources, Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)

Drought in Scotland

“It’s a common perception that drought doesn’t have an impact in Scotland, you see much a worse impact in other parts of the world, but it is all relative. In fact, drought is an issue for us with a widespread and big impact. That is something we had already been trying to communicate and summer 2018 helped to get the message home.”

Steve McGuire, Senior Scientist in Water Resources, Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)

From improved communications to more accurate monitoring, in 2018 the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) went into North East Scotland’s most prolonged period of water scarcity in decades better equipped, thanks to About Drought. 

New contacts also mean that SEPA’s Water Scarcity Team are able to build more Scotland-specific data and research into their new strategies. 

Two consecutive dry winters, low summer rainfall, higher than average temperatures and a period of soil moisture deficit that stretched a month longer than in 1976, caused impacts across the region in summer 2018. Steve McGuire had already been involved with the research programme representing SEPA, a key stakeholder, for several years and presented at About Drought’s Drought & Water Scarcity Conference in Oxford in March 2019 about how Scotland’s National Water Scarcity Plan was implemented in summer 2018 – its first major test.

Drought is an issue in Scotland – whisky production stopped

He says: “It’s a common perception that drought doesn’t have an impact in Scotland, you see much worse impact in other parts of the world, but it is all relative. In fact, drought is an issue for us with a widespread and big impact. That is something we had already been trying to communicate and summer 2018 helped to get the message home.” 

That impact affected fish stocks and crops and included halting whisky production, and with a relatively high proportion of private water supplies in some regions, these crucial issues led to the Scottish Government bolstering supplies with water in tankers in some areas. Steve says: “Many of the private water supplies are not robust enough to deal with an extreme event – they are often from shallow groundwater or springs – we are working together with the Scottish Government and Scotland’s Centre of Expertise for Waters to look at improving the existing private supplies.” 

Impact of water scarcity on timber industry

The Oxford conference, attended by 150 water experts, stakeholders, regulators and researchers, was a valuable opportunity for Steve and a small group of Water Scarcity Team colleagues to extend their contacts around the UK as well as internationally, and find out how water resources are managed in other countries. Those included a key connection with Forestry Commission research presented by Susan Davies of the University of Edinburgh, discussing drought-resilient tree species. 

Steve says: “It was the first time we had heard that anyone was looking at that for the Scottish Timber Industry, at the same time we had also started to look at water resources, policy and ecology plans for the different sectors in Scotland and we have been able to feed Susan’s research into those plans.” 

Steve had also joined one of DRY’s very popular regional community workshops, held in the Eden Catchment in Fife. 

“It definitely shaped how we produce our reports and ways to get the right message across, making people aware that water scarcity is an issue in Scotland, which helped us in the summer of 2018. It brought different people around the same table – Scottish Water, government, local farmers … groups like that were really good for getting other people’s points of view that we may not always see.”

About Drought’s Edinburgh workshop

Then in May 2019 About Drought held a workshop for SEPA and Scottish Water in Edinburgh which enabled a wider audience to discuss the programme’s outputs first-hand. Steve explains: “That was great because it meant we could get more people from SEPA to come along and the focus was on Scottish issues – it is useful to make use of experiences elsewhere and ensure we are following consistent approaches with other agencies, but there are also cases where a Scotland-specific approach is required.” 

As a result of that meeting, SEPA identified where it can feed improved data from its monitoring network into the UK Drought Portal and, in turn, draw from it near real-time data to better monitor and communicate situational updates. In the future it is leading to a collaboration, developing a forecast system providing advanced, accurate warnings of when water scarcity is developing.

Combining resources, data and effort

“We are speaking to CEH about combining our resources, data and effort to feed our live data into the Drought Portal and we envisage being able to use the tool with our own reporting which would be a significant step forward,” says Steve.

SEPA are using About Drought’s communications research to inform future messaging for different audiences, like pre-warning private supply holders of potential impacts of water scarcity and the need to protect the environment. 

Inspired by innovative communications project

SEPA were inspired by the innovative work by students from Falmouth University’s School of Communication Design on how to get water-saving messages across to hard-to-reach Millennials by About Drought’s social science co-ordinator, Dr Rebecca Pearce. 

With humorous video clips, posters and social media posts the students devised effective peer-to-peer campaigns. Steve explains: “It was really interesting to see their ideas, it’s a relatively new area to us. We really liked the ideas they had. 

“This wider and better understanding that we have from About Drought means we can develop ways to get our information out there and, importantly, to get a general understanding that water scarcity is becoming more of an issue in the future due to climate change. “It is something everyone needs to think about and everyone can have an impact.”

Interview by Sally Stevens

Posted October 2019

Nicola Dunn, Resource Management Scientist, Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHDB)

Working with farmers and growers

“There is so much to gain from discussions with other stakeholders, so much to learn from each other, that’s a big positive for the AHDB.”

Nicola Dunn, Resource Management Scientist, Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHDB)

Farmers felt the benefit of AHDB’s involvement in the About Drought research programme, receiving up-to-date accurate and relevant information during the summer of 2018 from AHDB, thanks in part to the relationships formed with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) and Cranfield University. 

“We were able to pull information together for farmers; explaining the current situation, where they could get help and actions to take when facing water shortages, stressed crops and stressed livestock,” says AHDB’s water expert Nicola Dunn, who previously worked for the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). 

Putting data into farmer-friendly language

“We were really able to focus on the information that would make a difference. 

“I had already made links with Cranfield, who were doing a lot of work on the agricultural side of the drought and water scarcity research programme, so knowing what they had already published, I was able to use it to help our audiences – the information was already there for us and I knew where to find it. 

“We put this work into farmer-friendly language, covering what could be done to save water, reduce irrigation programmes and contextualise some of the decisions farmers were making, and suggest modifications they could make right there and then.” Nicola attended the About Drought Showcase in March 2018, as well as workshops around drought communications, monitoring and the UK Drought Portal. She says: “There is so much to gain from discussions with other stakeholders, so much to learn from each other, that’s a big positive for the AHDB.”

Impact on health and welfare of livestock

The crop and livestock sectors felt very different impacts during and after the summer 2018 drought. Crop growers are more used to managing reduced and restricted water availability but cattle farmers, especially in the North West of England, were facing not just water shortages, but also problems caused by the heat wave on the health and welfare of their livestock, poor grass growth and the knock-on impact on winter feed silage, already impacted by February’s so-called ‘Beast from the East’ blast of freezing weather. For them, the drought had a much longer impact and morphed into a feed supply issue, which was a serious concern.

Advances in drought forecasting

The monthly Hydrological Outlooks from CEH have been particularly useful for the AHDB. Nicola explains: “The drought forecasting and advances in how Standard Precipitation Index information has been used, was useful for explaining current situations, helping our audiences to understand it visually and combining it with work the Environment Agency was producing. We are now developing communications based on the outlooks, and the maps are a really good tool for engaging with farmers as well as colleagues; it really helps everyone to understand the situation. 

“Following last summer, we need to do a lot of scenario planning for different outcomes, for example if we had had another dry winter, what would happen next summer? 

“The main things About Drought have given us are great links with Cranfield, CEH and the University of the West of England. The AHDB couldn’t afford to fund such a large research programme so we certainly support this type of work. 

“If we can develop forecasting abilities even further into something farmers can understand and use themselves in their planning that would be the gold standard outcome for us. I hope that we will continue working together, building on what the agricultural sector needs and supporting future research.” 

Interview by Sally Stevens

Posted October 2019

Miranda Foster, Senior Hydrologist, Yorkshire Water

UK Drought Portal put to the test in 2018 drought

“Some of this data is quite technical, having it visualised so clearly is very useful because it is so easy to share.”

Miranda Foster, Senior Hydrologist, Yorkshire Water
Miranda Foster
Miranda Foster, Senior Hydrologist, Yorkshire Water

Miranda Foster, a hydrologist with Yorkshire Water for 18 years, was just one of the programme’s water supply stakeholders who was able to use the UK Drought Portal to provide current, reliable and easy-to-access data in the prolonged dry spell in 2018. 

The UK Drought Portal is a near real-time tool allowing users to explore up-to-date data and monitor current regional dry weather status across the UK. The tool shows the relative magnitude of drought events within river basins and individual catchments, based on rainfall deficits over durations ranging from 1 to 24 months. 

It has been developed by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) as part of the About Drought research programme, using drought indicator datasets developed by the Historic Droughts project and DrIVER, which was also NERC-funded. Miranda says: “The Drought Portal gives us a spatial as well as a temporal picture and it confirms our data in a very quick and easy way. We have our own drought severity calculations for single sites but to have it shown for catchments is very useful. The visuals are easy to convey to others in Yorkshire Water and we used some of it to support our drought permit applications to look at the severity and extent of how conditions developed over time.” 

Providing early warning signs of drought

The Drought Portal is interactive and has been designed to support monitoring of water supply conditions and provide early warning signs of drought, exploring past drought characteristics in specific areas of interest as well as time frames, based on rainfall. Users can view Standard Precipitation Indexes (SPI), an indicator of drought that is widely used internationally for drought monitoring, by geographical area, including by postcode, and by time frame, going back to 1961. 

“Some of this data is quite technical,” says Miranda. “Having it visualised so clearly is very useful because it is so easy to share.”

The Drought Portal also contributes to CEH’s monthly Hydrological Outlooks and to the National River Flow Archive, with Yorkshire Water able to commission bespoke outputs. Miranda adds: “The bespoke river flow forecasts presenting data with a red, amber and green alert format as opposed to just tables and percentages has been very good and I have been able to feed that information to those who need it. 

Providing clear evidence to support drought permits

“For instance, last summer [2018] was the first time I have been involved in applying for drought permits. For quite a few years the focus had been on flooding because droughts were relatively unusual but as shown in 2017-18 they are still very much an issue and with climate change they are likely to be more frequent.” 

Yorkshire Water successfully applied for two drought permits to increase annual river abstraction limits in preparation for another dry winter and in anticipation of high winter demands in 2018-19, using evidence from the Drought Portal and many other analyses. These permits were granted but were not implemented as winter demands were not high and there was some recovery in reservoir stocks. 

Miranda says: “It has been very interesting to work with About Drought. We have used maps from the Drought Portal and our local Environment Agency colleagues have said they found these a useful clear depiction of the severity and extent of drought.”

Interview by Sally Stevens

Posted October 2019

Experiences and Stories

Story gathering and storytelling have been strong threads through the programme, stitching together humanities and science within and across work streams. These collaborations have been so successful that they have changed permanently the approach of some of our scientists and resulted in successful spin-off collaborations.

As well as welcoming ENDOWS researchers into their communities, embracing catchment Local Action Groups (LAGs), monitoring water scarcity and collecting data samples, some of these collaborators have been enthusiastic attendees of our About Drought Showcase conference in Birmingham and our Drought & Water Scarcity Conference in Oxford in March 2019, as well as project events such as the final DRY Project Conference in July 2019.

DRY Project in particular nurtured a high level of community engagement ranging from community performances to the production of the song, ‘A River Is A Snake’ by folk singer and songwriter Sharron Kraus.

These experiences and stories have been captured in cartoons, videos and blogs on the DRY website.