Adapting to climate change: Public water supply in England and Wales

Abstract

This paper describes an assessment of the ways in which water supply companies in England and Wales are adapting to climate change, evaluated in the context of a model of the adaptation process. The four components of the model are (i) awareness of and concern about the potential impacts of climate change, (ii) adaptation strategy, (iii) the concept of an adaptation space from which options are selected, and (iv) the notion that three groups of factors influence awareness, strategy and option selection: susceptibility to change, internal characteristics of the organisation, and regulatory and market context.Public water supply in England and Wales is provided by private sector companies, subject to environmental and economic regulation. Hydrological simulations suggest that climate change has the potential to reduce the reliability of supply sources over the next few decades. The industry in December 2004 completed a review of investment requirements over the next five years.Awareness of climate change is high in the water industry, but by developing assessment procedures and incorporating them into the investment review the regulators forced companies to consider explicitly the potential impacts of climate change in a consistent and rigorous manner. These analyses combined climate change with other pressures on water resources, and in practice companies did not attribute specific investment decisions or proposals to climate change or indeed any other individual drivers. The broad strategy adopted by all water supply companies -to maintain standards of service -is determined by regulatory controls and market considerations, but the degree of concern about the impacts of climate change and precise adaptation options necessary to address supply-demand imbalances varied between water supply companies, reflecting local geographic conditions. The water supply companies and regulators have different perspectives on the relative merits of supply-side and demand-side measures, reflecting different organisational priorities.The 2004 investment review determined that no specific actions were necessary to deal with future climate change, but that measures set in place -in terms of methodologies and investment in investigations into specific resource developments -provided a sound foundation for more specific actions in the next investment review in five years time. The paper concludes by summarising the factors assisting and constraining adaptation over the next few decades.

Water availability in +2°C and +4°C worlds

“…The CMIP3 GCMs were processed in an identical manner to allow direct comparisons in the analysis. MacPDM is a semi-distributed daily water balance model that has been used in previous assessments of global water resources [7][8][9]22,23], and at its heart is a simplified version of the probability distribution model by Moore [24]. The model contains modules that simulate snowpack, lakes and wetlands but does not include a glacier component.…”

Resistance and Resilience of A Stream Salamander To Supraseasonal Drought

“…Farmers in the Sahel also use traditional water harvesting systems to supplement irrigation practices. [WGII 9.6.2.1, 9.5.1, For example, such adaptations have been implemented for flood preparedness in the UK and the Netherlands (Klijn et al, 2001;Richardson, 2002), for water supply in the UK (Arnell and Delaney, 2006), and for water planning in general in Bangladesh.…”

“…Water management in the face of climate change therefore needs to adopt a scenario-based approach (Beuhler, 2003;Simonovic and Li, 2003). This is being used in practice in countries such as the UK (Arnell and Delaney, 2006) and Australia (Dessai et al, 2005). However, there are two problems.…”

European Climate Services

“…Traditionally, climate has not played a particularly big role in this kind of decisions, but the rapidity of the climatic changes and our growing capacity to predict some of them mean that this information is now playing a much more prominent role (Arnell and Delaney 2006;Larsen et al 2008). For example, the viability of drilling and refining operations around the Caspian Sea (Zonn 2005) or the Persian Gulf will depend on a combination of freshwater availability, sea level rise and maximum daily temperature.…”