While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach by Tim Smedley
Source: The Guardian, 15.06.2023 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/15/drought-is-on-the-verge-of-becoming-the-next-pandemic
Baitings Reservoir in Ripponden, West Yorkshire, UK in summer 2022 when the total stock of water in England’s reservoirs was at its lowest level since 1995. Low water levels have exposed a normally submerged bridge. CREDIT: Adam Vaughan/LNP
During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. But, as I discovered, this won’t last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.
Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable. Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply. As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. It’s simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.
Little old England manages to encompass many global water problems – scarcity, overabstraction, pollution, underinvestment, government and regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct – all within the confines of one small country in the far west of Europe.
The UK’s average annual rainfall is about 1,100mm, compared with less than 300mm in Pakistan or double figures in Egypt. However, despite our winter storms, significant parts of the UK are staring down the barrel of empty water butts. Much of that four-figure rainfall average is propped up by the rainy Highlands of Scotland, Wales and northern England. In south-east England, where I live, the average annual rainfall lingers around 600 mm – comparable with Lebanon or Kenya, and drier than Sydney, Australia. This also happens to be the UK’s most populated area, with about 18 million inhabitants packed into just 19,000 km sq, including London’s 1,500 km sq. And it’s drying up, fast. Government figures show that, in England, 28% of groundwater aquifers, the layers of porous sand and rock that hold water underground, and up to 18% of rivers and reservoirs, have more water taken out than is put back in. This is clearly unsustainable.
Not a single one of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health – this includes chalk streams, a delicate habitat almost entirely unique to England. However, much of the public remains oblivious to a problem that we are all, at least in part, responsible for causing. More than half of the freshwater abstracted in the UK is for household use. The average British resident happily uses 153l of water a day, through showers, toilets, dishwashers, washing machines and garden hoses. Yet climate-change projections show that dry summers in England will increase by up to 50%, with the amount of water available reduced by at least 10-15%.
Freshwater shortages, once considered a local issue, are increasingly a global risk. In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.
There’s only ever the same, finite amount of water churning around in our water cycle. Every drop of water on Earth has been here since the beginning of time, constantly recycled. Up to 60% of the adult human body is water (even bone is a surprisingly splashy 31%). When you die and are cremated or buried, that water will be released again, to the atmosphere or the earth. We are as intimately connected to the water cycle as rivers and lakes are.
[Image/Lake Urmia in the north-west region of Iran, pictured in 2018, has shrunk by 80% over the last 30 years]
Yet, from the Yellow River in China to the Colorado River in the United States, many rivers no longer reach the sea. Often artificially straightened and dammed, water is sucked out and channelled off to supply farms, industries and households. Great lakes, from the Aral Sea in central Asia to Lake Urmia in Iran, have nearly disappeared. Groundwater aquifers, from the Ogallala and Central Valley in the US to India’s Upper Ganges and Pakistan’s Lower Indus, are being depleted faster than they can refill. The remaining freshwater is increasingly polluted with sewage and fertilisers, causing algal blooms that smother and choke ecosystems.
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England could run short of water within 25 years
Exclusive: Environment Agency chief calls for use to be cut by a third
Source: The Guardian, 18.03.2019 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/18/england-to-run-short-of-water-within-25-years-environment-agency
“We need water wastage to be as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby.”
Sir James Bevan, Former Chief Executive, The Environment Agency
England is set to run short of water within 25 years, the chief executive of the Environment Agency has warned.
The country is facing the ‘‘jaws of death”, Sir James Bevan said, at the point where water demand from the country’s rising population surpasses the falling supply resulting from climate change.
However, this could be avoided with ambitious action to cut people’s water use by a third and leakage from water company pipes by 50%, he says, along with big new reservoirs, more desalination plants and transfers of water across the country.
“Around 25 years from now, where those [demand and supply] lines cross is known by some as the ‘jaws of death’ – the point at which we will not have enough water to supply our needs, unless we take action to change things,” Bevan told the Guardian, before a speech on Tuesday at the Waterwise conference in London.
“We need water wastage to be as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby or throwing your plastic bags into the sea,” he said.
In the speech, Bevan says: “Water companies all identify the same thing as their biggest operating risk: climate change.” By 2040, more than half of our summers are expected to be hotter than the 2003 heatwave, he says, leading to more water shortages and potentially 50-80% less water in some rivers in the summer.
The population of the UK is expected to rise from 67 million to 75 million in 2050, increasing the demand for water. But Bevan says the average person’s daily water use of 140 litres could be cut to 100 litres in 20 years by more efficient use in homes and gardens. Currently, about a third of water is lost to leaks or wastage.
The most controversial change needed to increase supply is building new mega-reservoirs, such as that proposed near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. “We have not built a new reservoir in the UK for decades, largely because clearing all the planning and legal hurdles necessary is so difficult and local opposition so fierce,” Bevan says. The government plans to streamline the planning process. “That will be controversial, but it’s the right thing to do,” says Bevan.
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The battle to save England’s chalk streams, one of the planet’s rarest habitats
Rivers are especially vulnerable to water abstraction and global heating, but now there is hope for River Chess
Source: The Guardian, 6.06.2021 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/06/the-battle-to-save-englands-chalk-streams-one-of-the-planets-rarest-habitats
Conservationist Allen Beechey remembers a time, in the 1990s, when trout swam along the River Chess as it meandered through the centre of his home town of Chesham. “It was a gentle, reassuring sight and it helped trigger my love of nature,” Beechey said last week.
Then came the droughts, the river dried up – sometimes for several years at a stretch – and the fish died out. They have yet to come back to the Buckinghamshire town.
But Beechey has a dream that one day trout will return to this part of the river, which is one of most important chalk streams in England. It would be a signal that this critically important but highly endangered habitat was returning to good health after years of damage caused by increasing water abstraction and other threats.
[Image: Jake Rigg, of Affinity Water, on left, and Allen Beechey, by the River Chess. Photograph: Robin McKie/The Observer]
These hopes were raised recently when the local water company, Affinity, announced it had stopped abstracting water from the Chess. Previously it had been taking out about 6m litres a day from the river from two pumping stations at Chesham and Chartridge, a nearby village. This abstraction has now been halted and water for the region is now being piped in from other areas of southern England, including regions close to the Thames.
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Book
‘Smart, sobering, and scholarly.’ – Steve Brusatte, the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of DinosaursA gripping, thought-provoking and ultimately optimistic investigation into the world’s next great climate crisis – the scarcity of water. Water scarcity is the next big climate crisis. Water stress – not just scarcity, but also water-quality issues caused by pollution – is already driving the first waves of climate refugees.
Rivers are drying out before they meet the oceans and ancient lakes are disappearing. It’s increasingly clear that human mismanagement of water is dangerously unsustainable, for both ecological and human survival. And yet in recent years some key countries have been quietly and very successfully addressing water stress.
How are Singapore and Israel, for example – both severely water-stressed countries – not in the same predicament as Chennai or California? In The Last Drop, award-winning environmental journalist Tim Smedley meets experts, victims, activists and pioneers to find out how we can mend the water table that our survival depends upon. He offers a fascinating, universally relevant account of the environmental and human factors that have led us to this point, and suggests practical ways to address the crisis, before it’s too late.
