Tag: DRY

How will climate change affect permanent pastures?

As part of the DRY (Drought Risk and You) project, a field experiment was set up in three river catchments (the Frome in South Gloucestershire, the Don in Yorkshire and the Eden in Fife), to study the effect of reduced rainfall on the growth and biomass production of semi-natural grasslands.

The experiment had four aims: better understanding of how drought might affect UK grasslands; engaging local people in drought science (volunteers/ citizen science); provide a focus for engagement activities; and provide detailed information that could contribute to future hydrological models.

More information about the grassland experiment in the Frome catchment can be found in ‘How will climate change affect permanent pastures? Report on the DRY project rainfall manipulation experiment in the Frome catchment’ Ayling S. (2021).

How will climate change affect permanent pastures?Download

About Drought launches new children’s competition with Waterwise

A new creative challenge to children to read and enjoy this engaging book has been lauched by About Drought, DRY and Waterwise.

The challenge encourages children aged 5-13 to use their imagination to illustrate what their community would look like if we all used water more wisely.

Based on the award winning book: DRY: The Story of a Water Superhero, the challenge provides an ideal opportunity to engage young people to think about water use and enable positive behaviour change.

The competition is now closed, winners will be announced in due course.

On the Judging panel Professor Lindsey McEwen of UWE, who leads the DRY Project, says:

This is a crucial time to engage young minds with the topic of water as a precious resource. The DRY book is designed for Key Stage 2 but we know it has wide appeal including KS1 and KS3. We are looking forward to seeing exciting and innovative ideas from children who are thinking creatively about the difference that their actions can make to their community, the environment and our planet in our changing climate.

Professor Lindsey McEwen, UWE

For more information and to enter check out the competition page

TRANS.MISSION II – UK

Hay Festival and the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) joined forces for Trans.MISSION II, a new global project pairing leading environmental researchers with award-winning storytellers to communicate cutting-edge science to new audiences. The UK strand saw British writer and journalist Patrice Lawrence paired with scientists Dr Sarah Ayling, Professor Lindsey McEwen from the DRY project. Using the project’s work as inspiration, Patrice and the team have created a piece of creative writing to highlight the issues around UK droughts and water scarcity.

Patrice Lawrence is a British writer and journalist, who has published fiction both for adults and children. Her writing has won awards including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Older Children and The Bookseller YA Book Prize. 

The work was launched at Hay Festival Online festival on the 25 May 2020. The story, by Patrice Lawrence, is set in the not too distant future when London is running low on water…

More information about the Hay Festival and the Trans.Mission II project.

Book bringing drought research to children wins national award – DRY: Diary of a Water Superhero

A drought storybook for children has won a national award for its beautifully illustrated message about water scarcity in the UK.

In announcing the Geographical Association Publishers’ Silver Award for ‘DRY: Diary of a Water Superhero’ on Thursday, April 16th (2020), judges said ‘… this fantastic picture book found the perfect balance as a powerful personal story line, supported by excellent art work, delivering a range of interesting geographical facts’.

The book, written as a young girl’s diary, has been published by the Drought Risk & You (DRY) Project, which is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The story runs over the course of a year and tells how an ordinary schoolgirl in the UK transforms into a water superhero when a dry summer and winter with little rainfall lead to drought. Seeing life through ‘water goggles’, the girl shares her new-found love of water with her school and community, as the drought progresses.

The story and accompanying teacher notes were created by Prof Lindsey McEwen, who heads the DRY project and is Professor of Environmental Management and Director of the Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience at the University of the West of England Bristol (UWE); Dr Verity Jones, Senior Lecturer in Education at UWE; Sarah Whitehouse, Senior Lecturer in Education & Humanities at UWE and Dr Sara Williams, an environmental psychologist and researcher. The illustrations by artist Luci Gorell Barnes play a key role in projecting the relevance of the story and the science behind it.

The award was judged on the book’s impact, originality, quality and usability.

DRY: the diary of a water hero won the Silver Geographical Association Publishers’ Award

Prof McEwen said: “Our authoring team are extremely pleased to gain this external recognition for excellence. Our book aims to make new research accessible to, and engaging for, young children. The development of the book and teachers’ notes represents a new successful creative collaboration between University of the West of England Bristol’s Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience and its Primary Education specialists, working together with socially-engaged artist Luci Gorell Barnes.”

The DRY Project is part of About Drought, the UK’s Drought & Water Scarcity Research Programme, funded by NERC as part of UK Research Innovation (UKRI). Three themes of the research are explored in the book: classifying different types of UK droughts and their impacts; interrogating common misconceptions surrounding UK drought; and exploring what actions citizens might take to prepare for drought and how children can be agents for change in rethinking water behaviours.

The full Silver Award citation reads: “The judges thought that this fantastic picture book found the perfect balance as a powerful personal story line, supported by excellent artwork, delivering a range of interesting geographical facts. This results in a book that will engage and empower a KS2 audience studying water or wider environmental issues. The accompanying teacher’s guide is filled with challenging and thought-provoking activities that include developing the concepts of ‘water footprints’ and ‘UK droughts’. They are well designed to deepen pupils’ thinking and facilitate questioning, discussion and debate. The message that we can all be champions of change is a key one and will inspire children to take action.”

DRY: Diary of a Water Superhero is available to read online in English and Welsh

Teacher’s notes are also available https://dryutility.info/learning/ 

Top author turns research into a story for Hay Festival

An award-winning author specialising in teen fiction is writing a story based on About Drought and Drought Risk & You (DRY) research for the world-famous Hay Festival.

Patrice Lawrence, whose novel Orangeboy won the Bookseller Young Adult Prize and the Waterstones Prize for Older Children’s Fiction, has been partnered with About Drought through Trans.MISSIONII, a joint initiative by UKRI NERC and Hay Festival.

About Drought and DRY have already won plaudits for their innovative approach to research, data gathering and communications through storytelling, song, animations, video, cartoons and an educational book for primary school children. Patrice has been meeting with our researchers to plan a creative piece of writing aimed at starting conversations about drought with teenagers and young adults. It will be showcased at this year’s Hay Festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, from May 21-31.

Gripping storytelling for young adults

Renowned for gripping, contemporary writing, often set in black working-class communities, that connects with traditionally hard to reach young adult audiences, Patrice is finding it both stimulating and challenging to work with About Drought.

We met in the bustling Wellcome Collection café in London, swelled by shoppers and commuters sheltering from a late afternoon downpour and next to the Wellcome gift shop’s eclectic display of furry toy microbes, ‘earwax’ fudge and science-themed board games to talk about Patrice’s progress so far.

She immediately ‘confessed’: “I have no scientific background and I haven’t written about science before, so I have no idea why Hay chose me but part of the joy for me in writing is the sheer nosiness!

“I have met with Prof Lindsey McEwen, Dr Sarah Ayling and Dr Jill Thompson from the DRY project to talk through the messages from About Drought’s research and I’m now entwining them into a piece of creative writing.

Realistic look at what 2050 life will be like

“Scientists think differently from authors, I’m picking up little details and I am trying to work out how much creative licence I can have. I want to create characters that reflect the types of science in About Drought and I have been thinking ahead to 2050 – what will be different in the lives of those readers, surprising things that might have become precious and valuable – like water? Will the buildings they live, learn and work in be designed differently to cope with drought? Will we be eating different things? I want to weave those everyday differences into a very realistic portrayal of what life will be like and how we will be using water.”

Although the starting point to this story is very different for Patrice, the process is familiar. Her fiction for teens and young adults is careful not to talk down to readers and is not shy of tackling relevant issues such as crime, racism, housing and ‘lovely’ young characters who nevertheless do bad things, including knife crime.  Patrice is committed to working in schools, encouraging and inspiring young people from all backgrounds to read fiction and to write their own, regardless of their skills in spelling and grammar. While most of her books are set in London where Patrice now lives, she grew up in Sussex in an Italian-Trinidadian family.

With many books for children of all ages and adults to her credit, not to mention awards, Patrice has a successful formula for approaching each project. The approach for About Drought’s Trans.MISSIONII story is no different. She explains: “I always start with characters, I need to know who I am writing about, what the beginning situation is and the end. Then I play with the middle.

“I am writing it as a monologue, a first-person short story set in 2050 and narrated by a teenage character. I would love a young person to read it at the Hay Festival.  Young people’s voices are great. I spend a lot of time on buses, listening to young people chat to each other to capture their voices.

“What motivates me is engaging with teenagers and I do lots of work in schools with marginalised teens. They are not a ‘hard to reach’ audience, it is more that they are not reached in the right way.”

Trans.MISSIONII offers new platform

Patrice’s story will be performed / read at the Hay Festival which will also feature two other research project and artist collaborations – one from Colombia and the other from Peru. All three are aimed at communicating cutting edge science to new audiences through new methods. A video version will also be available.

Andy Fryers, Sustainability Director of Hay Festival, introduced Patrice to About Drought. He said: “We are delighted with this collaboration between the award-winning author Patrice Lawrence and the About Drought research project. Wherever we are in the world, Hay Festival is a home for storytellers, a space for writers and readers to come together and explore the biggest challenges of our time. Trans.MISSIONII offers a new platform for collaboration between storytellers from two different worlds: artists and scientists. We hope that by building this shared space for engagement at the cutting edge of environmental research with NERC, we can find new ways to imagine a better future together.”

Read more about the research, watch videos and listen to podcasts at www.AboutDrought.info

Follow Patrice Lawrence on Twitter @LawrencePatrice

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.