Blog – Page 7

A Water Strategy for UK Agriculture

Increasing the farming sector’s resilience to drought and water scarcity risks

Water is at the heart of farming and agri-businesses, particularly in eastern England, the east midlands, and south-east, the driest and most water-stressed areas in the UK. Without water most agri-businesses would simply not survive. Irrigated agriculture supplies the UK’s agri-food industry with substantial quantities of high-quality potatoes, fruit and vegetables. But increasing regulation, droughts and a changing climate all threaten the sustainability of this industry and the rural livelihoods it supports. While other sectors and businesses have water strategies, the agriculture sector does need. Agriculture therefore needs a water strategy to ensure that it receives a fair share of the nation’s available water resources.

To address this need researchers at Cranfield University have been working in partnership with the National Farmers Union (NFU), the UK Irrigation Association (UKIA) and other stakeholders to develop a collective vision. The strategy sets out some guiding principles and proposes actions grouped according to the following themes:

Manage current and future demand in abstraction ‘hotspots’
Address environmental challenges linked to over-abstraction and climate change
Build water infrastructure to provide resilience for farming businesses
Promote business growth and support multi-sector stakeholder engagement

The strategy is now available Download

Drought and Agriculture Synthesis Report

The Agricultural Synthesis report summarises the key findings that emerged from the five Drought and Water Scarcity programme projects to help the UK agriculture and horticultural sector to better understand, forecast, manage and respond to the challenges posed by droughts and water scarcity. The report summarises how drought and water scarcity affects agriculture, and the consequent impact on rainfed and irrigated agriculture. The report also considers drought forecasting and whether drought and water scarcity impacts can be reduced.

Agricultural synthesis report Download

About Drought Download Nov 7th

All the data, all the learnings, all the resources, all in one place!

Thursday, November 7, 2019 from 10 am to 3.30 pm
Location: The Royal Society, London, SW1Y 5AG
Registration: via Eventbrite – free to attend but spaces are limited (note that registration closes on the 23rd of October)
Programme: draft programme (PDF)

Draft programme for the About Drought Download conference (available as PDF from in page link) — Draft programme

About Drought Download is the final event of the 5-year UK Drought and Water Scarcity Research Programme, showcasing the difference our work is already making. Register via Eventbrite – there is no charge for this event, but registration is necessary and spaces are limited. Please note that registration closes on the 23rd of October.

See the draft programme, so you can plan to attend this accessible, stimulating day. The event is aimed at decision-makers in water supply, the energy industry, policy, business, environment, agriculture or the public sector. Visitors can engage with hands-on multi-disciplinary programme outputs, listen to and question programme experts in a wide range of drought-related fields, network with people working on drought, and meet users of the outputs from the programme.

How is climate change affecting water supply in the UK?
What does it mean for policy and industry?
What forecasting breakthroughs have been made & how are these already being used?
How can we protect the UK’s natural landscape from water shortage?

DRY (Drought Risk & You) Final Conference July 3rd

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019

Location: UWE Bristol Exhibition and Conference Centre, Filton Rd, Stoke Gifford, Bristol BS34 8QZ

Register: Click here

Interdisciplinary explorations in ‘DRY Thinking’ – bringing together stories and science for better decision-making in UK Drought Risk Management

Come and join the ongoing conversation at the final event for DRY (Drought Risk & You) part of About Drought, the UK’s £12m drought and water scarcity research programme.

Drought in the UK is a pervasive, creeping and hidden risk. How can ‘the hidden’ be revealed and how can science and stories work together, in this process, to support better decision-making in UK drought risk management?

This conference is the next stage in an ongoing dialogue, not only between different disciplines, but also but between researchers and stakeholders.

Over the past five years, DRY has worked with diverse sectors in seven catchments in England, Scotland and Wales – co-researching droughts past and scenario-ing droughts future, with strong attention to thinking about adaptive solutions and behaviours. DRY has explored how science and narrative can be brought together, in different ways and on different scales, to support statutory and non-statutory decision-making of a wide range of stakeholders, the general public and communities.

Core to this research has been a series of ‘creative experiments’, exploring how science can be used as a stimulus for stories and stories as a stimulus for science. This has included creative scenario-ing of possible drought futures and explorations in how drought might be visualised using science interweaved with storying.

DRY’s interdisciplinary team has involved drought risk scientists (hydrologists, ecologists, agronomists) working with hazard geographers, social science researchers in health and business, along with those working in media and memory, and applied storytelling.

This conference shares themes researched within the DRY project, including how we might:

Rethink ‘drought data’ – its hybridity and variations in scale
Explore drought values and perceptions that influence behaviours
Scenario future drought working with science and narrative
Exploring drought cultures within the UK
Develop ‘DRY Thinking’ as a process – Drought Risk and You

The conference will be accompanied by the DRY Exhibition, showcasing resources generated by the DRY process, including the DRY Story Bank, the DRY Utility and DRY Action Learning Resources (e.g. around UK Drought Myths in engagement).

Organised by Professor Lindsey McEwen (UWE, Bristol), Emma Weitkamp (UWE, Bristol), Joanne Garde-Hansen (University of Warwick), Antonia Liguori (Loughborough University), Mike Wilson (Loughborough University) and the DRY consortium

For any further information, please email: DRY@uwe.ac.uk

Drought and public water supply

Tuesday 2 July 2019
Location: Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford
Online registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drought-exchanges-water-supply-registration-63381974191

DROUGHT Exchanges: Water Supply

We invite you to attend this free event to hear about the datasets and findings of the UK Droughts and Water Scarcity research programme that specifically focus on public water supply and the water industry. This event will be of interest to all those involved in managing water resources, from water companies, regulators, consultancies, researchers, and many others.

This workshop follows one held in October 2018, and has the objective of raising awareness of the national and regional datasets available now and forthcoming, report on progress with the research and feedback at the October event, and gain insights on the water industry’s specific needs so we can shape the final outputs. We are very keen that this is a participatory, two way exchange and hope to have your contribution and insights on what data and outputs are of use to your work. You do not need to have attended the October workshop to come to this event in July.

By attending this event, you can:

Hear about the programme of research examining the effects of drought and water scarcity in the UK
Learn about the datasets, information and findings arising from the research programme, with a specific focus on information of relevance or of interest to public water supply
View ‘drought libraries’ that integrate new historical and future hydroclimatic datasets, for stress-testing water supply systems
Find out about the hydrological modelling undertaken in the Drought and Water Scarcity programme, and datasets arising, free to use
Hear about the latest developments in national-scale risk-based water supply modelling
Interact with new prototype real-time drought monitoring and early warning systems
Share your work, information and decision-support needs in relation to drought and water scarcity
Meet others interested in this subject
Discuss the current and forthcoming findings and outputs to ensure its suitability and usefulness for practitioners and regulators in the public

Groundwater supply during droughts workshop

Monday 1 July 2019
Location: Priory Rooms, Birmingham
Registration: Online registration

Aims of the workshop

Groundwater supply during droughts: image of draft programme — Groundwater supply during droughts: draft programme

As part of the UK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme funded by NERC, we are planning a one-day workshop for groundwater professionals with an interest in water supply. The workshop will be held at the Priory Rooms in Birmingham on Monday 1 July. The aim of the workshop is to generate evidence and take guidance from the community for the production of two outputs. The first output will be a short policy brief on groundwater drought planning and management in the UK, similar in form to the Houses of Parliament POSTnotes series. The second output will be a longer commentary-style article for the peer-reviewed literature on the current state-of-the-art related to groundwater drought planning and management practices and an assessment of future applied research directions and requirements.

Context

We believe that opportunity to reflect on the status of the UK’s current groundwater drought planning and management practices and on future research needs is timely given a range of recent government and industry initiatives. Reducing the risk of harm to people, the environment and the economy from natural hazards, including drought, is one of the core goals of the Governments’ 25 year plan to improve the environment that was published last year. In England, water supply companies are just completing revisions to their Water Resource Management Plans and Drought Plans and will soon be preparing for the next planning cycle. In addition, over the last couple of years there have been a number of significant technical developments, for example publication of the UKWIR Drought Vulnerability Framework in late 2017; outputs from the NERC-funded UK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme, and the opportunities offered by the publication of the UKCP18 data.

Audience

We envisage that the workshop will be of interest to a wide range of groundwater and water resource professionals. Such as water company hydrogeologists responsible for groundwater aspects of drought management planning and operational water resource issues (e.g. groundwater resource situation reporting and forecasting); environmental regulators with responsibilities for groundwater resources, such as Environment Agency staff; and, consultants and academics with an interest in groundwater supply and drought.

Registration

Registration for the workshop is online and will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Please note places are limited so early registration is encouraged. The draft programme is available to download.
Workshop convenors: Matt Ascott, John Bloomfield and Rob Ward (British Geological Survey)

Contact: Matt Ascott at British Geological Survey email: matta@bgs.ac.uk phone: 01491 69 2408

Draft programme

The draft programme is available as a PDF download: draft programme.

Report back from Drought & Water Scarcity Conference

Drought and Water Scarcity: addressing current and future challenges, International Conference

View presentations below

This international event was held at Pembroke College, University of Oxford over 20-21 March 2019.

Speakers from around the world gathered to present and discuss their research on drought and water scarcity. There was an impressive range of data, topics, in-depth knowledge and communication insights which demonstrated the breadth and interdisciplinary nature of research into drought and water scarcity.

Delegates heard that drought and water scarcity are expected to become more severe due to the influence of climate change and pressure on water resources from economic and demographic changes. The impacts of this affects hydrology, agriculture and farming, industry and communities. Water and the lack of water effects every aspects of society and the environment, and the lack of water has profound consequences.

You can see the full programme here.

A number of the oral and poster presenters have kindly given permission to share their work. You can access the presentations by clicking on the links below.

Presentations available to view

Amanda Fencl, University of California, Davis – “Interconnections between Research on Groundwater, Drought and Climate Change”

Anne van Loon, Birmingham University – “Drought in the Anthropocene: vulnerability & resilience”

Antonia Liguori, Loughborough University – “Learning around ‘storying water’ to build an evidence base to support better decision-making in UK drought risk management”

Ayilobeni Kikon, National Institute of Technology Karnataka – “Application of Optimized Machine Learning Technique in Drought Forecasting Using SPI”

Caroline King, CEH; co-authored with Daniel Tsegai, Programme Officer, UNCCD Secretariat – “A review of methods for drought impact and vulnerability assessment”

Cedric Laize, TBI & GeoData Institute – “Relationship between a drought-oriented streamflow index and a series of riverine biological indicators”

Christopher Nankervis, Weather Logistics Ltd – “Use of Copernicus seasonal climate forecast model data to improve the accuracy of long-term forecasts: the UK Summer Rainfall Insights project.”

Daniela Anghileri, University of Southampton – “Strengthening research capabilities for addressing water and food security challenges in sub-Saharan Africa”

Emma Cross, Environment Agency – “The 2018 heatwave; its impacts on people and the environment in Thames Area”

Elizabeth Brock, Met Office; Katherine Smart, Anglian Water – “Re-analysis of historical events using up to date extreme value techniques, to determine the return period of historical and stochastic droughts, with particular reference to ‘severe’ or 1 in 200 year return period events”

Feyera A. Hirpa, Ellen Dyer, Rob Hope, Daniel O. Olago, Simon J. Dadson, University of Oxford – “Finding sustainable water futures in the Turkwel River basin, Kenya under climate change and variability”

Fiona Lobley, Environment Agency – “2018 dry weather and its impacts; looking ahead to 2019”

Frederick Otu-Larbi, Lancaster University – “Modelling the effects of drought stress on photosynthesis and latent heat fluxes.”

Granville Davies and Miranda Foster, Yorkshire Water – “Water resources in Yorkshire, UK in 2018: drought management, perception and communication”

Harry West, University of the West of England, Bristol – “Examining spatial variations in the utility of SPI as a 3-month-ahead environmental drought indicator”

Henny van Lanen, Wageningen University & Research – “The 2018 NW European Drought: warnings from an extreme event”

Katherine Smart, Anglian Water; Elizabeth Brock, Met Office – “Re-analysis of historical events using up to date extreme value techniques, to determine the return period of historical and stochastic droughts, with particular reference to ‘severe’ or 1 in 200 year return period events”

Kerstin Stahl, Freiburg – “Customizing drought indices to improve drought impact monitoring and prediction”

Kevin Grecksch, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford – “Achieving water efficiency through social norms in the public sector”

Len Shaffrey, NCAS, University of Reading – “Has climate change increased the chance of events like the 1976 North West European drought occurring?”

Lucy Barker, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology – “How severe were historic hydrological droughts in the UK? Insights from a systematic characterisation and ranking of events back to 1891”

Mark Smith, Hydro-Logic Services (International) Ltd – “Recent trends in water resources planning and management, and the rising importance of planning processes in reflecting the ‘consequences’ of relevance and interest to customers and stakeholders”

Massimiliano Pasqui, CNR – “A customizable drought monitoring and seasonal forecasting service to support different users’ needs”

Matt Fry, CEH – “The Historic Droughts Inventory: an accessible archive of past drought impact information for the UK from diverse documentary sources”

Miranda Foster and Granville Davies, Yorkshire Water – “Water resources in Yorkshire, UK in 2018: drought management, perception and communication”

Mike Morecroft, Natural England – “Drought impacts on the natural environment and lessons for climate change adaptation”

Nikos Mastrantonas, CEH – “Drought Libraries for enhanced resilience in long term water resource planning in the UK”

Paul Whitehead, University of Oxford – “Impacts of climate change on water quality affecting upland and lowland rivers, wetlands and delta systems”

Peter Anthony Cook, NCAS-Climate, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading – “Variations in the West African Monsoon from reanalysis and model results”

Peter Kettlewell, Harper Adams University – “Mitigating drought impact on crop yield by applying film-forming polymers”

Rob Wilby, Loughborough – “Challenging the mantra of wetter-winters, drier summers in the UK”

Ruth Langridge, University of California, Santa Cruz – “Groundwater management in planning for drought: experience from California, USA”

Sandra Santos, Wageningen University – “Improving institutional frameworks integrating local initiatives from communities exposed to drought and water scarcity in Ecuador”

Stephen McGuire, SEPA – “Assessing the impacts of water scarcity in Northeast Scotland through the summer of 2018.”

Wiza Mphande, Harper Adams University – “Elucidating Drought Mitigation with Antitranspirants in Spring Wheat”

About Drought research to feature at RGS-IBG annual conference

Innovative work from the DRY (Drought Risk & You) Project including storying drought, drought media and communication triggers for changing water use, will be presented at the prestigious annual RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society with the Institute for British Geographers) international conference. The conference is being held at the Royal Geographical Society in London from 27th to 30th August 2019.

Prof Lindsey McEwen, Professor in Environmental Management at UWE Bristol

The session is titled ‘Linking new interdisciplinary research into UK drought risk to explorations of the summer 2018 drought impacts’ and is being organised by Prof Lindsey McEwen, Professor in Environmental Management at UWE Bristol & Lead PI Project DRY, and Rebecca Pearce, Research Fellow, University of Exeter & About Drought Social Science Coordinator. The draft programme is due to be published this month.

Contributing papers and authors (including non-presenting authors) are:

‘Daylighting the hidden’: interdisciplinary reflections on theory and practice of storying drought – Lindsey McEwen (University of the West of England, UK) (presenter), Liz Roberts (University of the West of England, UK), Antonia Liguori (Loughborough University, UK) and Mike Wilson (Loughborough University, UK)
Drought media – Joanne Garde-Hansen (University of Warwick, UK) (presenter)
Achieving water efficiency in the public sector through social norms – Kevin Grecksch (University of Oxford, UK) (presenter)
Changes in household consumption during the extreme summer weather in 2018 – Rob Lawson (Artesia Consulting, UK) (presenter)
Understanding the hydro-climatic conditions of the 2018 drought: experiences and lessons from the UK livestock sector – Gloria Salmoral Portillo (Cranfield University, UK) (presenter), Tim Hess (Cranfield University, UK) and Jerry Knox (Cranfield University, UK)
Unexpected Impacts of the 2018 drought in Cornwall: What has changed since 1976 and what does this tell us about future droughts? – Rebecca Pearce (University of Exeter, UK) (presenter)
If you can’t take the heat, get out the kitchen – when heat and water impacts of drought combine – Sarah Ward (University of Exeter, UK) (presenter), Kimberly Bryan (University of Exeter, UK) and Timothy Taylor (University of Exeter, UK)

Full programme details will become available on the RGS-IBG website and booking is open.

About Drought experts at EGU General Assembly 2019

Experts from across the UK’s £12m drought and water scarcity research programme – About Drought – will be sharing insights at EGU2019, including Dr Katie Smith who has been invited to present a keynote talk.

Droughts and water scarcity jointly pose a substantial threat to the environment, agriculture, infrastructure, society and culture in the UK, yet our ability to characterise and predict their occurrence, duration and intensity, as well as minimise their impacts, has often been inadequate.

From the new ‘Shiny’ app to share and visualise data to a searchable archive of past drought impact information from diverse documentary sources going back 160 years, as well as podcasts and drought myth-busting videos, About Drought has brought together science and social sciences in a successful interdisciplinary approach that addresses current and future water scarcity challenges.

Four projects have been funded as part of this major programme with an additional final project – ENDOWS (known as About Drought) – focusing on engaging with stakeholders, practitioners and the public to involve them in the programme and to disseminate information about the findings, outputs and datasets that everyone can use. ENDOWS is also enhancing operational drought management through improved monitoring and early warning of drought which is being co-developed with stakeholders during the ongoing dry weather. Research also covers the impact of climate change and weather it is increasing the chance of events like the 1976 North West European drought occurring. The programme is funded by NERC, ESRC, EPSRC, BBRC and AHRC.

Although the programme does not wrap up until later this year, last year’s drought across Europe called elements of its outputs into operational use ahead of schedule, by water suppliers, regulators and policy-makers. You can hear about this and other aspects of the programme during EGU2019 in Vienna, April 7-12.

The four projects are:

Historic Droughts – understanding past drought episodes to develop improved tools for the future.
IMPETUS – improving predictions of drought to inform user decisions.
MaRIUS – managing the risks, impacts and uncertainties of drought and water scarcity.
DRY – Drought Risk & You – bringing together stories and science to support better decision-making for drought risk management.

Katie Smith (Drought Analyst & Modeller, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK)

Monday, April 8, 14:00-14:15 Room B

Keynote talk for session “Hydrological extremes: from droughts to floods” – What’s past is prologue: Reconstructing historic flow data to inform management of future hydrological extremes.

Read the abstract.

Follow Katie on Twitter @katieasmith26

Lucy Barker (Hydrological Analyst at Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK)

Monday, April 8, 14:15-14:30 Room B

Session “Hydrological extremes: from droughts to floods” – UK Hydrological Droughts: how severe were historic events? Insights from a systematic event characterisation and ranking over the last 125 years. Read the abstract.

Monday, April 8, 16:15-18:00 Room -2.16

Session “Using R in Hydrology”. Lucy is a co-convenor and will be presenting her Shiny app, developed within the Historic Droughts project, as a demo of how you can use Shiny to share and visualise data. Read the abstract.

Follow Lucy on Twitter @lucybarkerjane.

Mike Bowes (Nutrient Hydrochemist & Group Leader on River Water Quality and Ecology, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK)

The work Mike will be presenting is not directly funded through About Drought but the understanding of the causes / triggers of algal blooms in the River Thames will be used within ENDOWS this year to predict how the size and magnitude of algal and cyanobacterial blooms may change under future climate scenarios / future droughts.

Monday, April 8, 14:00-14:15 Room 2.31

Session “Advancing understanding of hydrochemical and ecological processes controlling fate of natural organic matter, nutrients and pollutants in freshwater and engineered systems using state-of-the-art methods” – Utilizing high-frequency, automated monitoring to determine nutrient sources, fates and impacts on microbiology in the River Thames catchment, UK. Read the abstract.

Nikolaos Mastrantonas (Research Associate Hydrologist, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK)

Nikos is contributing to development of stakeholder bespoke visualisation schemes for sub-seasonal/seasonal forecasting of river flows and in the development of nationally consistent datasets, aiming to enhance resilience in the UK public water sector.

Friday, April 12, 16:15-18:00 Hall X3 Poster 85

Session “Extreme meteorological and hydrological events induced by severe weather and climate change” –Drought Libraries: a nationally consistent toolkit for improved resilience in the UK public water supply sector – poster presentation. Read the abstract.

You can follow Nikos on Twitter @NikMastrantonas.

Find out more from About Drought:

Watch a news report from the About Drought Showcase

View our drought myth-busting videos featuring water users, regulators and About Drought experts:

Listen to our podcasts featuring audio anecdotes with people recalling the 1976 drought, gardening, wildfire, media coverage of drought and water saving campaigns.

Browse this About Drought website to discover more about our research, latest events and sign up to the About Drought newsletter.

Thank you: Drought and Water Scarcity: addressing current and future challenges, International Conference

Thank you to all the guest speakers, presenters, poster pitchers and delegates who joined us from the UK and around the world for our Drought & Water Scarcity Conference on March 20-21.
The impressive range of data, topics, in-depth knowledge and communication insights demonstrated the breadth and interdisciplinary nature of the research that makes up About Drought.
We are preparing a post event e-pack that will feature content from the event and will be emailed to delegates.
Coming up we have workshops aimed at those using our research. If you would like to be notified of these and our other events, please subscribe to our programme newsletter via our homepage (bottom left) or email info@AboutDrought.info.