Category: Water

Why is there a difficult absence of water demand forecasting in the UK?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Image credit: Ralf Roletschek, permission from – Marcela auf Commons.
From August 2015 to January 2016, I was lucky enough to enjoy an ESRC-funded placement at the Environment Agency. Located within the Water Resources Team, my time here was spent writing a number of independent reports on the behalf of the agency. This blog is a short personal reflection of one of these reports, which you can find here. All views within this work are my own and do not represent any views, plans or policies of the Environment Agency.
 
In a world away from Melanie Phillips and David Bellamy, it is widely accepted that the twinned-spectres of climate change and population growth will likely affect levels of water availability in England and Wales, whilst also exposing the geographic imbalance of water supply-demand dynamics within the country. The Environment Agency has utilised a number of socioeconomic scenarios to predict total demand to change at some point between 15% decrease (if the nation undergoes a transition towards sustainability) to a 35% increase (in a scenario of continued and uncontrolled demand for the resource).
 
It is within this context that the need to understand future patterns of water demand has become essential for the future resilience of the nation’s water. The Labour government’s Future Water strategy (signed-off by Hilary Benn) 2008 set a national target of reducing household water consumption by 13%. This plan was further incentivised by Ofwat’s scheme to reward companies that reduce annual household demand by one litre of water per property, per day in the period 2010/11-2014/15.
 
What does our future household water use look like? Whilst per capita consumption will decrease, the number of people using the water grid will increase: resulting in a growth of overall demand. 22 predictions related to public water supply projected a median change of +0.89%. However there are additional complexities: as certain uses of water will decrease, others will increase; as appliances become more water efficient, they will be more likely to be used; and as one business closes, another may join the grid. It is this complexity that creates a great deal of uncertainty in gauging the future water demand of the sector.
Image credit: Nicole-Koehler
But, there exists a problem. Whilst the legally-mandated water management plans of the public water suppliers provide us with a wealth of forecasts of the future water usage within our homes, there exists a lack of available information on the current use of water within many other sectors and how such usage may shift and transform in the years between today and 2050.
 
This report lays out an extensive review of available literature on the current and future demand of a number of sectors within the UK. It found nine studies of the agricultural sector – with a median projection of 101% increase in water usage. Three studies of the energy sector projected a median decrease of 2% on a 2015 baseline. But, it also found some gaps that restrict our understandings of future water demand.
 
Want to find out how much water is used in the construction sector? Tough, no chance. The mining and quarrying sector – ready your Freedom of Information request. Want to calculate the future water footprints of our food and drink – prepare to meet that brick wall. If such information is available, it is not in the public domain. Without having a publicly-available baseline, how can we even dream of predicting what our future demand may be?
Crop irrigation.  Image credit: Rennett Stowe.
Water is not just turning on the shower in the morning or boiling the kettle at the commercial break. It is present in our food, our energy and our infrastructure. As a result, it is of the utmost importance that we look to gauge the water use of sectors. Yet, in this regard, we are blind. Although there do exist academic studies and research into the future water demand of the agricultural and energy sectors, this has proved limited and relatively inconclusive, due to the nature of the studies. Furthermore, there is an absence of any such work conducted across the manufacturing and industrial sectors (with the exception of the food and drink industry). This limitation of information makes providing a confident summary of what the water demands of many of these sectors will look like in 2050 highly difficult.
 
Yes, the key areas of missing research identified in this document do not necessarily equal a lack of information within these sectors – just that such information is either not publicly available or is very difficult to find. It would be unwise to believe that the sectors in question have no understanding of what the future may hold, regarding their water demand. But, in a world of the interdependencies of the food, energy and manufacturing sectors with water usage – it is important for research to know how this nation’s water is used, where it is used and how this demand can be met and/or decreased in an increasingly uncertain future. The food and drink sector is heavily linked to the agricultural sector; the power industry is linked to decisions made within the extractive industries (such as those surrounding fracking); and all are linked to mains water supply and direct abstraction.
 

These interdependencies and lack of information provide future water demand with even greater uncertainty. Whilst carbon emissions are monitored and water quality is policed, there continues to be a lack of transparency of how certain sectors are using this nation’s water. If this continues in a world that will increasingly be formed of policy and environmental trade-offs, there is a realistic danger that any potential water crisis may be much worse than we expect. 

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Ed Atkins, a PhD student at the University of Bristol who studies water scarcity and environmental conflict.

Ed Atkins

Read part two of this blog series Is benchmarking the best route to water efficiency in the UK’s irrigated agriculture?

Why do flood defences fail?

Posted on by janet.crompton

More than 40,000 people were forced to leave their homes after Storm Desmond caused devastating floods and wreaked havoc in north-west England. Initial indications were that the storm may have caused the heaviest local daily rainfall on record in the UK. As much as £45m has been spent on flood defences in the region in the previous ten years and yet the rainfall still proved overwhelming. So what should we actually expect from flood defence measures in this kind of situation? And why do they sometimes fail?

We know that floods can and will happen. Yet we live and work and put our crucial societal infrastructure in places that could get flooded. Instead of keeping our entire society away from rivers and their floodplains, we accept flood risks because living in lowlands has benefits for society that outweigh the costs of flood damage. But knowing how much risk to take is a tricky business. And even when there is an overall benefit for society, the consequences for individuals can be devastating.

We also need to calculate risks when we build flood defences. We usually protect ourselves from some flood damage by building structures like flood walls and river or tidal barriers to keep rising waters away from populated areas, and storage reservoirs and canals to capture excess water and channel it away. But these structures are only designed to keep out waters from typical-sized floods. Bigger defences that could protect us from the largest possible floods, which may only happen once every 100 years, would be much more expensive to build and so we choose to accept this risk as less than the costs.

Balancing the costs and benefits

In the UK, the Environment Agency works with local communities to assess the trade off between the costs of flood protection measures, and the benefits of avoiding flood damage. We can estimate the lifetime benefits of different proposed flood protection structures in the face of typical-sized floods, as well as the results of doing nothing. On the other side of the ledger, we can also estimate the structures’ construction and maintenance costs.

In some cases, flood protection measures can be designed so that if they fail, they do the least damage possible, or at least avoid catastrophic damage. For example, a flood protection wall can be built so that if flood waters run over it they run into a park rather than residential streets or commercial premises. And secondary flood walls outside the main wall can redirect some of the overflow back towards the river channel.

 

Thames Barrier: big costs but bigger benefits.
Ross Angus/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The Environment Agency puts the highest priority on the projects with the largest benefits for the smallest costs. Deciding where that threshold should be set is a very important social decision, because it provides protection to some but not all parts of our communities. Communities and businesses need to be well-informed about the reasons for those thresholds, and their likely consequences.

We also protect ourselves from flood damage in other ways. Zoning rules prevent valuable assets such as houses and businesses being built where there is an exceptionally high flood risk. Through land management, we can choose to increase the amount of wooded land, which can reduce the impact of smaller floods. And flood forecasting alerts emergency services and helps communities rapidly move people and their portable valuables out of the way.

Always some risk

It’s important to realise that since flood protection measures never eliminate all the risks, there are always extra costs on some in society from exceptional events such as Storm Desmond, which produce very large floods that overwhelm protection measures. The costs of damage from these exceptional floods are difficult to estimate. Since these large floods have been rare in the past, our records of them are very limited, and we are not sure how often they will occur in the future or how much damage will they cause. We also know that the climate is changing, as are the risks of severe floods, and we are still quite uncertain about how this will affect extreme rainfall.

 

At the same time we know that it’s very hard to judge the risk from catastrophic events. For example, we are more likely to be afraid of catastrophic events such as nuclear radiation accidents or terrorist attacks, but do not worry so much about much larger total losses from smaller events that occur more often, such as floods.

Although the process of balancing costs against benefits seems clear and rational, choosing the best flood protection structure is not straightforward. Social attitudes to risk are complicated, and it’s difficult not to be emotionally involved if your home or livelihood are at risk.
The Conversation

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Ross Woods, a Senior Lecturer in Water and Environmental Engineering, University of Bristol.  This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Ross Woods

Good Mooring!

Posted on by janet.crompton

Since the late 1990s, scientists at the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) have conducted annual cruises across the Fram Strait: the widest, deepest and most important exit point for sea ice in the Arctic. One of the main aims of the Fram Strait cruise (FS2015) is to recover, service and redeploy a sprinkling of oceanographic moorings- current profiling instruments and buoys tethered to hundreds of meters of cable, anchored to the seafloor. These have been continuously measuring the velocities of water masses within the East Greenland Current at preset depths. With continuous data over decadal timescales, the NPI are hoping to understand how the nature of the Arctic freshwater budget changes in an increasingly warming climate, how this will impact biological processes, and how it will affect other water masses on a broader scale as they interact in new ways.

1 of 6 oceanographic moorings being recovered for
servicing on FS2015.  Image credit: Laura de Steur /
Norwegian Polar Institute

I was lucky enough to lend a helping hand this September; my second cruise with the NPI after having had a blast working on the Norwegian Young Sea ICE 2015 (N-ICE2015) cruise for a month back in April 2015. After flying into Longyearbyen, Svalbard, and seeing the Research Vessel Lance waiting in the harbour for a second time, it felt very odd not seeing the ship surrounded by 1.3m thick pack-ice, which is how I’d left it after N-ICE2015. It wasn’t until I dropped my bag off in my cosy cabin and heard the familiar roar of the engines warming up (and having my room located right at the back of the ship I really mean roar…) that it felt like I was returning to my home away from home.

The mooring aspect of the cruise this time introduced a different dimension of risks that had to be accommodated: namely by the presence of sea ice above many of the moorings that needed to be recovered. This gave us an occupational risk that obviously only presents itself at the poles! On the N-ICE2015 cruise the engine didn’t have a huge part to play as we were passively drifting with the Arctic pack ice. This time round, whilst navigating the ice floes across Fram Strait towards Eastern Greenland, the Lance was actively smashing through and breaking up the ice above mooring sites to ensure that the mooring returned to the surface without being blocked on its ascent. As ice coverage can alter rapidly, it’s up to chance whether or not these moorings will be readily accessible. In the best case, there will be little to no coverage, so one only has to send a command to the mooring via radio signaling and the cable is released and brought to the surface- buoys and instruments attached. In a moderate case, ice will be extensive enough that the ship will have to meander round, breaking up the ice floes as best it can. For this reason underlying current speed and ascent rate of the mooring has to be considered carefully. It’s always a tense minute or two waiting for the buoys and expensive instrumentation to reach the surface, knowing it may never arrive if it gets stuck on an unfortunately located ice floe! In the worst case, the floes will be so thick and expansive that the mooring recovery process may have to be abandoned all together. For this reason, daily satellite images of ice extent were a very valuable necessity.

As well as observing the physical properties of the Atlantic and Polar Waters spilling southward into the Atlantic, extensive tracer sampling took place at and around the mooring locations by way of collecting water at standard depths. While it is common practice for oceanographers to measure parameters like salinity soon after the water is collected (the on-board salinometer quickly became a very close friend of mine, with 528 samples needing to be analysed during the cruise!) other tracers such as coloured dissolved organic matter (CDOM), nutrients, and 18Oxygen isotope will be analysed ashore. These tracers can tell us something about the source of this water, and by looking at its isotopic composition whether it comes from melted sea ice or from other meteoric sources- that is, water derived from precipitation and runoff. Precipitated water at high latitudes is strongly depleted in 18O, while sea ice meltwater is slightly enriched in it. By looking at the mass of ice loss in the Arctic and how much of it is flowing through the Fram Strait year after year, we’re able to gauge how much is entering the Atlantic or staying in the Arctic basin [1].

The thickness of the ice flowing through Fram Strait has decreased by about 1/3 since 1990 [2]. Part of this melting is related to inflowing, relatively warm Atlantic waters travelling northwards via the West Spitsbergen Current. However, the amount of melt-water that is exported through Fram Strait hasn’t changed very significantly in the past decade. Evidence suggests that the melt water is being stored in the Beaufort gyre- a clockwise-rotating mass of water in the Arctic [3]. While the flux of melt-water into the Arctic Basin has increased in the past couple of decades, tracer analyses tell us the main mechanisms by which fresh water is supplied is by runoff from North American and Eurasian rivers, and by relatively fresh Pacific inflow through the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska [1].

The large-scale circulation around the Arctic Ocean.
Figure: Paul Dodd / Norwegian Polar Institute.

It is possible that with inter-annual changes in Arctic wind forcing this growing reservoir of cold, fresh water could be directed southwards across Fram Strait, where it could disrupt the thermohaline circulation of the Atlantic.

Routine sea ice stations were also carried out on suitable ice floes, giving us the chance to stretch our legs and take some ice cores for further tracer sampling. Once analysed, these will allow us to see how the chemical compositions compare with that of the underlying waters. Working 6-hours on, 6-hours off could get pretty exhausting, so it was nice to unwind with the occasional sled race across the floe or by sharpening our ‘selfie skills’ to let the world of social media know how our research was going. All in the name of science…
The FS2015 team and I (centre), exploring an ice floe.
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This blog is by Adam Cooper, Earth Sciences graduate at the University of Bristol.

Historians at the science-focussed Festival of Nature

Posted on by janet.crompton

Last weekend, ‘The Power and the Water’ project ran its first ever stand at the Festival of Nature (FoN), Bristol’s annual celebration of the natural world. It was a first not only for the project but for the School of Humanities too, as it was the first time a non-science subject had been included in the University of Bristol (UoB) tent.

What we did

‘Hidden River Histories’ took the research that the Bristol-based team members are doing (Power and Water is a three-strand project with researchers at Nottingham and Cambridge Universities too) to create an interactive display that introduced environmental history to a diverse audience. We knew that the Festival is a popular event for all ages and backgrounds. Established in 2003, it is the UK’s biggest free celebration of the natural world with two days of free interactive activities and live entertainment across Bristol’s Harbourside. We wanted to introduce the field of environmental history to Festival-goers, and specifically some key themes in our project:  how the natural world is intertwined with the human; how past water and energy uses might inform current and future environmental values; and how local issues fit with global environmental change.

Our stand could not be boring: we were representing History and the Humanities among a sea of Science stands!  For the kids we knew would visit (Day 1 of FoN is Schools Day), we had to provide something interactive – something they could get their hands on. Luckily, in environmental history, we have no shortage of fascinating natural, and unnatural, items to work with. River waters from four ‘Bristol’ rivers, the Severn, The Avon, the Frome, and the often-forgotten Malago (Bedminster) bottled in clear glass took an idea that was originally inspired by a Canadian artwork [1]  to become an interactive way of thinking about tides, water quality, rivers-as-ecologies, and a quick way of testing people’s knowledge about their local rivers. Kids shook up the river waters and urgh-ed at the murky Severn and Avon. But they were fascinated to see old photos of salmon fishing and a beached whale in the estuary (in 1885), and we were able to talk about how ‘brown’ is not always ‘bad’, and how, from a salmon’s perspective, a nicely tidal, turbid (unbarraged!) River Severn is exactly where you’d want to be. The ‘pure’ Frome, on the other hand, was the river that was so dirty in the 19th century that the city chose to bury it.

The bottled rivers were a way-in to talking about Bristol’s watery past, but we also wanted to discuss Bristol’s water future, particularly with an issue that we’d observed on field trips down to the riverbank at Sea Mills (a suburb of Bristol). On the intertidal zone there, plastics are a huge problem, brought in on the tides. The issue of marine litter connects local environmentalism with a global plastics issue – the river banks of Sea Mills with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

We collected a huge array of discarded plastic items one morning in May. Guided through Health and Safety requirements by the Centre for Public Engagement, we decided to bag the plastic items (in yes, more plastic – the irony was not lost) and create a Trash Table, in which the rubbish was laid bare for the public to see, pick up, question and discuss. It had something of a forensics scene about it, compounded by the presence of numerous, enigmatic, lost shoes. We’ve been discussing ‘future archaeology’ as an interesting methodology, and it provided us with our key question: what stories would future historians and archaeologists tell about us now, based on these non-degrading plastics? In addition to confronting the environmental impacts of consumer culture, visitors to the stand could engage in some informal, but not inconsequential, narrative building.

Though an exercise in public engagement in itself, we were able to highlight other public engagement and knowledge-exchange initiatives we’ve been working on. Artist Eloise Govier has been collaborating with researcher Jill Payne on installations that encourage people to think about energy. Her high-vis block of polystyrene – sourced on our forage along the Avon – was a great talking point, likened to cheese, Spongebob Squarepants, fatbergs and a meteorite! Artists from the Bristol Folk House also contributed works, based on an outdoor workshop we ran at the Ship’s Graveyard on the River Severn at Purton.  We made them into free postcards that included our project website and contact info, encouraging future communication. The watercolours updated our visual record of the river and helped us to think about how people see and value the River Severn today, and how this connects with – or departs from – traditions of viewing land- and waterscapes in Britain.

Why did we come to a science based festival?

A 3-day presence at the Festival of Nature was the culmination of months of planning by me and Jill (Payne, researcher on Power and Water). We had our first meeting before Christmas, and plenty since! Was it worth the effort? Unreservedly, yes. In terms of disseminating our project research, FoN allowed us to communicate our work – and raise awareness of the vitality of environmental history at Bristol – to a huge number of interested citizens. We await attendance figures for this year but last year, over 4, 385 people attended the UoB tent. In 2013 it was 6, 284. This year the weather was good and there were queues to enter the UoB tent, so we are confident that attendance was a strong as ever [2].

But public engagement of this kind goes way beyond sheer numbers. The process of planning the stand has been productive, helping us identify the themes in our work that hold interest (and are therefore useful for telling histories, in and beyond academia). The photo of the 69ft whale beached at Littleton-on-Severn was a side-story to my research, but people were fascinated by why and how this creature came to Bristol. A trip to Bristol City Museum to track down the bones is being arranged, and the animal inhabitants of the river will be more visible in my work as a result.

Moreover, good public engagement goes beyond disseminating research. They may be buzzwords in funded research, but ‘knowledge exchange’ and ‘co-production of knowledge’ are very real benefits of engaging with groups and individuals beyond the academy. For a project like ours, which is interested in public environmental discourses and people’s relationships with place, talking with the public is a key source of information, and a way in which we can build research questions, identify key issues, and meet people who can aid our research. We learnt of more hidden rivers in Bristol, community action groups, and old records of the Severn Bore. We were also asked why we were not being more active on the issue of plastic waste, prompting us to reflect on the aims of the project, and the role of academics in communities where sometimes, actions speak louder than words. It was useful to recognize our strengths and limitations, as perceived publicly, and to articulate our key aim of providing sound research from which people can become informed, and motivated.  Getting involved in an event such as Festival of Nature is a useful reminder that rather than ‘us’ and ‘them’, we are the public too, offering a particular set of knowledge and skills but equally willing to learn from others.

As researchers funded by the public purse (through the UK Research Councils) the expectation that we take our work beyond the university is entirely reasonable. Public engagement is now built into funding applications, and the impact it can produce is a measurable output of research. Meaningful public engagement, based on principles of knowledge exchange and co-production, is a pathway to tangible impact, rather than a one-sided conversation. If we hope to achieve impact, that is, through our research change the way a group thinks or acts with regards to a particular issue or topic, then we must engage with the ‘group’; talk to them, identify key concerns, think about how our research can address issues and contribute to understanding and practice. The language of ‘impact’, public engagement and knowledge exchange, serves to reinforce the academic/public divide. The practice of such ideas, through events such as Festival of Nature, helps to overcome such distinctions. It’s also (whisper it) fun!

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Marianna Dudley, Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol.  It was kindly reproduced from the Power of Water blog post of the same name.

Marianna Dudley

The Power and the Water project would like to thank the Centre for Public Engagement (University of Bristol) for all their logistical and design support; the 2nd Year Biology volunteers that helped man the stand with enthusiasm; Eloise Govier, for the loan of her artwork and for helping on School Day; and Milica Prokic and Vesna Lukic, for filming, photographing, and mucking in over the FoN weekend.  

[1] Emily Rose Michaud, ‘Taste the source (while supplies last) (2006-present)’ in Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (eds), Thinking with water (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013), 133-38
[2] Thanks to Mireia Bes at the Centre for Public Engagement for attendance numbers.

Troubled waters

Posted on by janet.crompton

Water seems like the simplest of molecules, but its complexities have enabled all life on Earth. Its high specific heat capacity allowed early aquatic life to survive extreme temperature fluctuations, its ability to dissolve a wide range of compounds means it is used as a solvent for cellular compounds, and its powerful cohesive properties allow tree sap and blood to move upwards, against the flow of gravity.

ITV science correspondent Alok Jha discussed the incredible properties of water this week as part of a Cabot Institute and Festival of Ideas talk at The Watershed, Bristol.  This was part of a promotional tour for his new book, The Water Book. He amazed the audience with where our oceans came from (ice-covered rocks pelting the Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment), the strange properties of ice (a bizarre solid that floats on its liquid), and the possibility of water and life on other planets.

It was really the universal importance of water that struck me though. As Alok discussed, water is absolutely essential not just for life, but also to enable every aspect of our lives. Its unique properties make it a critical component of almost everything we make and do. In addition to household uses like showers and toilets, the UK uses a lot of water in manufacturing, agriculture and mining, amongst other things. One report suggested that the average person’s life requires 3400 litres of water a day in the UK, with a total global requirement of four trillion litres a year.

Water is scarce

Around 2.7 billion people are affected by water scarcity worldwide. Rivers are drying up or becoming too polluted to use, climate change is altering patterns of weather around the world and mismanagement of precious sources of fresh water has led to the prediction that by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages.

You only have to read the news to see the warning signs.Agriculture is a huge business in California, using 80% of the freshwater to raise livestock and grow two thirds of the USA’s fruits and nuts. California’s climate makes it ideal for growing a range of crops, assuming they can be irrigated. A recent NY Times article revealed that it takes 15.3 gallons of water to produce just 16 almonds, 1.4 gallons of water for two olives, and a whopping 42.5 gallons of water to grow three mandarin oranges. As Alok commented, the state is literally shipping its freshwater to the rest of the world as food. California is currently in its fourth year of drought, and strict laws banning water wasting have been put into place.

Last week, Californian farmers in the deltas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers volunteered to use 25% less water, in a bid to avoid even harsher restrictions being imposed by the state government. These reductions came after uproar from Californian citizens, for whom water wastage was already illegal.

Water conflict

 

Image credit: Katie Tegtmeyer. Image used under:CC BY 2.0

In Brazil, São Paulo has been suffering through the worst drought in more than 80 years. The water supply has been restricted to just six hours per day, but millions of citizens have also had several days without running water. Tensions are beginning to rise, with protests, looting and outbreaks of violence in the city of Itu. The Guardian reported one resident as saying: “We spent four days without water, and we saw what it was like. We saw people behave like animals in our building, so imagine 20 million people”.

Imagine billions.

Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi has declared water is now more important for his people than oil. Egypt has vowed to stop Ethiopia’s construction of a dam on the Nile at “any cost”. Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam look poised to suffer from China’s continued damming of the Mekong River. Water is predicted to be used as leverage, or as the target of terrorist attacks in the future. Paul Reig, Word Resources Institute, stated,

“Water is likely to cause the most conflict in areas where new demands for energy and food production will compete with the water required for basic domestic needs of a rapidly growing population”.

What can we do about this? It’s a problem almost as complex as the molecule itself, and I certainly don’t have the knowledge or expertise required to answer. Alok suggested that the value of water could be added into the final price of our products and services, to make people aware of how much they are consuming and to think twice before wasting it.

Whatever happens, we’re going to need massive global action on a range of issues. We need to use less water to grow our food and manufacture the items we use daily, we need to prevent shared resources being selfishly used, and we need better management systems in place to prevent further pollution or loss of freshwater. Only then will we be better prepared to face uncertainties of the future and ensure everyone has enough to drink.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.
Sarah Jose

 

Bringing science and art together – part 2

Posted on by janet.crompton

The Somerset Levels and Moors are a low lying region prone to frequent flooding due to a range of environmental and human factors. The history of drainage and flooding in the Levels is rich and unique, yet its present condition is unstable and its future uncertain. Winter 2013-14 for example saw extensive floods in the Levels that attracted significant media attention and triggered debate on how such events can be mitigated in the future. The Land of the Summer People Science & Art project brings together engineering PhD students with local artists to increase public awareness and understanding of the Somerset floods. Scientific understanding and traditional engineering tools are combined with the artists’ creativity to prompt discussions about the area’s relationship with floods in a medium designed to be accessible and enjoyable.

Having worked on the early stages of this project researching the history and hydrology of flooding and drainage in the Somerset Levels I thought I was well prepared for the art stages to follow. I was decidedly wrong! The first workshop involved making a standard engineering-style poster containing information in the area our group had chosen to focus on; in my case the future of flooding in the region. This was a pretty standard summary of climate change impacts, land use change and a critique on the present policy which will shape the region over the next 5-20 years.

The next workshop saw us transform this information into a more ‘arty’ format. We chose a newspaper style article from 5 years in the future. In civil engineering (my undergraduate background) there’s a strong perception that the public don’t know anything about engineering and that they demand only bottom-up management towards their own interests; and this was definitely present in my article. Regardless of the truth or fallacy in this assumption, taking this attitude will not gain you public support for your project and, importantly, you will very likely miss out on important information that stakeholders could provide you with.

Each group began work with a Somerset artist to create art out of their topics and ideas. Our group is currently putting together a ‘flood survival kit’ containing items which aim to bring together ideas about the impacts and mechanisms behind flooding. Putting this together has been constant interplay between engineers looking to add purpose to items and our artist looking to reduce purpose with a much heavier use of metaphors/symbolism. Items include purpose-heavy hand-made water filters (from drinking bottles and sand!) and metaphor-heavy sponges and boats (made from Somerset clay).

Additionally our group will be inscribing rocks around Somerset with a text-number which will provide flood relevant proverbs or information when a message is sent to them. This was inspired by tsunami warning rocks in Japan!

An original tsunami warning rock in Japan
courtesy of the Huffington Post, 4th June 2011.

On 25th March, all the groups presented their projects in an exhibition in the Exeter Community Centre.

Our most valuable return on these projects are the skills in working with the public we will gain. After all, even capital projects designed with a stakeholder’s desires and demands in mind won’t work if the stakeholder rejects them. The pre-industrial history of the Somerset Levels illustrates this perfectly as drainage works in the region have typically been vandalised and prevented from working due to public opposition (an interesting contrast to the present dredging-heavy mentality!).

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This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from the Bristol Doctoral College blog. It is written by Barney Dobson and Wouter Knoben who are currently studying engineering PhDs at the University of Bristol.

Read part one of this blog.

More about Land of the Summer People

This event was organised by Cabot Institute members Seila Fernández Arconada and Thorsten Wagener.  Read more.

Bringing science and art together – part 1

Posted on by janet.crompton

The Somerset Levels and Moors are a low lying region prone to frequent flooding due to a range of environmental and human factors. The history of drainage and flooding in the Levels is rich and unique, its present condition is unstable and its future uncertain. Winter 2013-14 for example saw extensive floods in the Levels that attracted a great deal of media attention and conflicting opinions on what to do how to prevent this from happening again. The Science & Art project brings engineering PhD students together with local artists, to increase public awareness and understanding of the Somerset floods. Scientific understanding and traditional engineering tools are combined with the artists’ creativity, in an effort to make discussions about the area’s history, present and future more accessible and enjoyable.

Coming from an engineering background, the prospect outlined above slightly scared me at first. As an engineer, you rarely use art as a tool in your work and, funnily enough, doesn’t appear during your university courses either. The few interactions with artists (as colleagues in a bar) and art (sporadic museum visits) left me very sceptic as to the success of this cooperation. Sure, art can be nice to look at, but what is the point of it when you’re trying to convey the results of your studies on flood risk?

This project is divided into a couple of workshops, and the differences between engineers and artists was apparent right from the start. We (the engineers) tried to convey as much knowledge about the Somerset Levels as we could cram onto our posters. Dates, history, water safety plans, references, whatever information was available. The artists then showed us some of their work. We saw sketches of landscapes reflecting in water, paintings of local soldiers in shoe polish and visual representations of sound waves to name a few things.

For the next workshop we were asked to change our original posters in any way we saw fit, based on the things we picked up from our first art workshop. This turned out to be not as easy as we’d hoped. After years of being trained to present information in a thorough and accurate way, making the necessary switch to create something that could be called artistic is difficult. We mostly managed to present the, admittedly dry, material on the posters into a somewhat more appealing way. The idea to do something else than conveying information was still difficult to bring into practice.

As the artists kept reminding us, it is not always necessary to convey knowledge to the viewer of our work. Sometimes it is enough to make someone think about a certain topic you think is important, or to simply present some specific theme in an intriguing, appealing or interesting way. In the third workshop we began to form ideas based on this line of thinking. Transferring information and creating knowledge for the viewer are still important parts of the work, but they have become secondary rather than primary objectives. Now we’re hard at the work to make our ideas become reality!

These workshops have been good to show some perspective. As a specialist, you would normally want to present as much of your gathered information and knowledge as you possibly can, but this quickly becomes overwhelming for someone unfamiliar to the topic. Collaborating with artists can be a good way to introduce a specialised topic to a wider audience in an entertaining and accessible way, while at the same time teaching us how laypeople might think about our subjects.
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This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from the Bristol Doctoral College blog. It is written by Barney Dobson and Wouter Knoben who are currently studying engineering PhDs at the University of Bristol.

Read part two of this blog.

More about Land of the Summer People

This event was organised by Cabot Institute members Seila Fernández Arconada and Thorsten Wagener.  Read more.

The challenges of global environmental change: Why we (Bristol) should ‘bridge the gap’

Posted on by janet.crompton

Our planet and the people who live upon it face profound challenges in the coming century. As our population, economies and aspirations grow we consume increasing amounts of precious and finite resource.  The side effects and waste products of this consumption also have profoundly negative impacts on our environment and climate, which  in a vicious circle will make it even harder to support our food, energy and water needs.


In order to live on this planet, we must bridge the gap between wasteful lifestyles based on limited resources to efficient lifestyles based on renewable ones. Nowhere is that more apparent than in our consumption of fossil fuels. Much of our prosperity over the past two centuries has derived from the exploitation of these geological gifts, but those gifts have and are causing climate change with potentially devastating consequences. These are likely to include more extreme weather, loss of marine ecosystems and droughts; in turn, these could cause famine, refugee crises and conflict. 


These climatic and environmental impacts will be felt locally in the European Green Capital as well as globally.  We live in an interconnected world, such that drought in North America will raise the price of our food. The floods of last winter could have been a warning of life in a hotter and wetter world.  Many of us in the South West live only a few metres above current sea level.  


In my own work with Cabot Institute colleagues, I have investigated not just how Earth’s climate might change but how it has changed in the past.  This shows that our climate forecasts are generally right when it comes to the temperature response to greenhouse gases, although perhaps they underestimate how much the poles will warm.  More concerning, Earth history reveals how complex our planet is; with dramatic biological and physical responses to past global warming events. During one such event 55 million years ago, rapid warming transformed our planet’s vegetation and water cycle: rivers in Spain that had carried fine grained silts suddenly carried boulders. And that ‘rapid’ warming event occurred over thousands to tens of thousands of years not two hundred a reminder of the unprecedented character of our current climate change experiment.

Flooding in Whiteladies Road, Bristol. Credit: Jim Freer



Consequently, despite our best understanding of some factors, climate change will make our world a more uncertain place, whether that be uncertainty in future rainfall, the frequency of hurricanes or the timing of sea level rise. This uncertainty is particularly problematic because it makes it so much harder for industry or nations to plan and thrive.  How do we ensure a robust and continuous food supply if we are unsure if the planet’s bread baskets will become wetter or dryer?  Or if we are unsure how our fisheries will respond to warmer, more acidic, more silt-choked oceans?


Underlying this uncertainty is a deep ethical question about who will bear the risk and the inequality issues hidden within our choices.  Most of us recognise that we are consuming the resources and polluting the environment of our children.  But the inequity is deeper than that it is not all of our children who will suffer but the children of the poorest and the most vulnerable.  Those whose homes are vulnerable to floods, who lack the resources to move or the political capacity to emigrate, who can barely afford nutritious food now, whose water supplies are already stretched and contaminated. 


Bristol in 2015 will not bridge the gap by despairing at these challenges, but we can lead in acknowledging them. We can lead in showing how to avoid the worst uncertainty and taking responsibility for the consequences of where our efforts fall short.  Most importantly, we can lead towards not just radical resiliency but inclusive resiliency. 

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This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

Prof Rich Pancost

Future Water 2013

Posted on by janet.crompton

Members of the UK water sector met at the end of June at the Royal Geographical Society in London for a one day national water policy conference, “Future Water 2013”, which aimed to address a number of water related policy issues surrounding building a more resilient water sector for the future.

The morning session started with a panel debate chaired by John Vidal (Environment Editor, The Guardian) and panel members Anne McIntosh MP (Chair of HoC EFRA Select Committee), Ian Barker (Head of Water, Land and Biodiversity, Environment Agency), Tony Smith (Chief Executive, Consumer Council for Water) and Alan Sutherland (Chief Executive, Water Commission for Scotland). The discussion aimed to explore how the water sector can remain resilient financially, technologically and environmentally in the future and how customers can benefit from new reforms.

Ian Barker highlighted the range of problems which the water sector faces in relation to the water supply and the environment. 2012 saw the UK face ~90 days in drought conditions, followed later by 72 days in flood.  The country experienced 11 major flood events and 200,000 properties were protected due to flood protection schemes across the country. This highlights the need for us to efficiently manage our surface water, whether there is too little or too much. One of the key questions is whether we are able to use past observations to predict the future? and therefore inform necessary reforms in the water industry, where we already have a legacy of 200 years of abuse of our water. The UK needs to be better prepared for shock events such as floods or droughts so that if we can’t predict them we can deal with them when they do occur. Ian Barker stated that a clear policy direction was needed to help the water industry to plan and these policy decisions need to be reinforced at government level through our regulatory bodies.

The other major issue raised in the debate was customer dissatisfaction with the water industry, prices continue to rise yet customers struggle to see what benefit they are getting from the extra money they have to pay out. Prices for South-West water customers have become unsustainably high, so much so that central government has had to step in to help customers who can’t afford their basic bills. Tony Smith highlighted that regulation should be more consumer focused so that water companies do not focus purely satisfying the regulator and not considering their customers. A similar problem was highlighted regarding bathing water, south-west England has the highest proportion of low-income households in England, yet has the longest length of coastline to keep clean. This cost is passed onto consumers who are already struggling to keep up with escalating costs.

Following this discussion, Sonia Phippard (DEFRA) introduced the new Water Bill which is currently going through Parliament. While all the details are yet to be agreed the Water Bill will tackle issues of resilience to future change, growth and investment in our water infrastructure and will introduce competition for business customers – meaning if they don’t like the service from their current supplier then they could opt for gaining their services from another company in a similar way to the energy sector. The bill will also outline market reforms which will aim to create retail and upstream competition as a driver for efficiency and quality of service provided by water companies, these reforms will be rolled out by 2017. Sonia Phippard suggested that it was important to encourage innovation in the sector and this could be achieved by encouraging new players into the water sector. For example, it could become possible for smaller water owners to sell excess water into the system. There will also be a formal review of the responsibility for water leaks to remove the many grey areas which currently exist; this will be added later as an amendment to the Water Bill. It was also highlighted that reforms relating to abstraction from rivers will not be included in the current bill, but will be covered by future reforms centring around sustainability which will probably be announced next year. Also water quality will be dealt with by the next round of EA River Basin Management Plans and so will not be specifically be covered by the Water Bill.

The current version of the Water Bill which is currently being introduced into parliament is available at: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2013-14/water.html

The morning session also saw John Penrose MP introduce his ‘radical’ paper “We deserve better” which discusses the current dissatisfaction amongst consumers with utilities and proposes to introduce reforms which would allow consumers to vote with their feet and switch supplier if they were not satisfied. It would also give customers the opportunity to buy from a company which provide ‘green’ water, similar to the system currently operating in the energy sector. For an executive summary and the full paper see: http://www.johnpenrose.org/images/wedeservebetter.pdf

The afternoon session began with interactive workshop sessions, I attended the session on “The impact of extreme events on freshwater ecosystems”. This session aimed to discuss what is resilience in freshwater? Where do we need it and do we currently have the right tools, including science, policy and practise tools. The discussion highlighted that restoring sections of rivers which were previously engineered can help ecosystems to recover and make them therefore more resilient if extreme hydrological or pollution events were to occur. High flow events are of particular ecological concern as in many areas these events can cause the combined sewage systems to interact with the river through overflow events, which will impact on the ecological health of the river. Managing water quality and maintaining god ecological health is managed through River Basin Management plans, the second round of which is currently being produced. As a pre-cursor to the RBMP’s the EA have produced a Challenges and Choices document, more details can be found at: http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/research/planning/33252.aspx

The afternoon session continued with a keynote address from Dr Vicky Pope (Head of Integration and Growth, Met Office) who outlined some of the environmental challenges and how the Met Office is working to tackle some of the current issues. Under the banner of climate change, northern Europe as already seen an increase in extreme rainfall. However, one of the biggest challenges is that we do not currently understand how north Atlantic weather patterns (El Nino, Atlantic multidecadal oscillation) will change under climate change and therefore how these will impact of UK weather. This remains one of the main scientific research questions. From a water sector perspective it is the climate variability rather than long-term change which is important and therefore the Met Office is working along with other project partners to provide better seasonal forecasts and predictions of climate variability as well as to provide better information regarding storms, drought and storm surges. The Met Office is starting to use their weather models in ‘climate change mode’ in order to begin to get improved local detail which is important for water management. This type of research has not been possible until recently due to lack of computational power, and even now this can only be one for small areas rather the whole country.

The day was rounded up with a discussion based around innovation and the need for improved water infrastructure if a more resilient sector is to be achieved. For example, currently the UK system relies on members of the public to report leakages rather than having monitoring systems in place which can detect failures and quickly alert the water company to the problem. It was quoted that all UK water companies combined only spent £18 million last year on research and development, despite huge profits. Currently there is no incentive for water companies to invest in research and development providing that they satisfy the regulator – market reforms may help in this respect. That said, some water companies are now beginning to invest in their local environment as it is becoming more cost-effective to reduce pollution at its source before it reaches the river rather than having to clean up the water after abstraction etc. This type of new thinking provides benefits for both the water industry and the environment, and any cost savings could hopefully therefore be passed down to the consumer.

The Future Water conference was a day packed with information and discussion which covered a whole range of issues facing the water sector, from financial to environmental pressures. It became clear very quickly that a co-ordinated effort is necessary if we are to create a water sector which can be resilient to climate change and the increased demands we are putting on our water and at the same time provide a service which is affordable and sustainable across the whole country. The challenge has most definitely been set……

This blog has been written by Dr Charlotte Lloyd, Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

Dr Charlotte Lloyd

Brinkmanship, flood insurance and science

Posted on by janet.crompton

The “Statement of Principles” on flood insurance agreed by the UK Government and the Association of British Insurers as a temporary measure in the year 2000 is due to expire on 31st July 2013. At the heart of this document is an undertaking by insurers to continue to provide cover for domestic property and small business customers as long the Government continues to manage the risk adequately.

Specifically the agreement says that cover will be provided for properties built before 2009 either if the risk is low or there is a commitment by the Environment Agency to reduce it to low within 5 years. ‘Low’ risk is arbitrarily defined as a property having a less than 1.3% annual chance of flooding, of which there are believed to be ~200,000 in England and Wales. In other words properties need to be protected against the 1 in 75 year event.

Premiums can still vary with risk and the Statement makes no explicit provision for affordability, but the agreement does allow owners of some at risk properties to continue to obtain cover (and hence for buyers of these properties to obtain mortgages). An implicit assumption is that for properties built after 2009 the planning system has been operating effectively and has only allowed development in low risk zones.

Negotiations over a replacement were clearly going to the wire but today a Memorandum of Understanding was agreed between the ABI and the Government. This involves the setting up of a flood insurance pool known as ‘Flood Re’ for the ~200,000 ‘high risk’ properties. Premiums for the ‘high risk’ properties will be set based on council tax band. Flood Re will charge member firms an annual charge of £180 million which equates to a levy of £10.50 on annual household premiums.

This represents the estimated level of cross-subsidy that already exists between lower and high flood risk premiums. The scheme will be up and running by summer 2015 and in the meantime, ABI members will continue to meet their commitments to existing customers under the old Statement of Principles agreement.

Clearly the questions most commentators have fixated on are “who pays?” and “how much?”. However, as a flood scientist a far more interesting question is “how will we know?” and this applies as much to the existing Statement as to any new agreement. To put this another way: are we confident that we can determine to reasonable accuracy which properties are ‘at risk’? You might think this is typical academic hand wringing, but actually answering this question is, in my view, critical to running an effective flood insurance business.

For any given site the 1.3% annual chance flood will not have been observed and the Environment Agency and insurers use computer models that simulate flooding to calculate what such events look like. To use these you need to know how big the 1.3% annual probability flow is and to have a detailed 3D map of the terrain. The model then uses more or less complex variations on Newtonian physics to determine how this volume of water moves over the land surface.

At particular places such models can be great, but all predictions have error and because of uncertainties in both data and models this is certainly the case with flooding. How big can these errors be? Well, in a recent study we found the plausible range for the current 1% annual probability flow for the River Avon in Warwickshire to be between 310 and 425 m3s-1: enough to make a significant difference to the area predicted as inundated. Ok, this isn’t the 1.3% level exactly, but you get the idea. Models also get worse as you zoom out because to be computationally tractable at regional to national scales they have to simplify the representation of terrain and flow which introduces errors.

Irrespective of what the ABI and the Government do in the future, this situation doesn’t change. The question of how good national scale flood risk assessments need to be to confidently manage risk and set insurance premiums is still unanswered.

This blog is taken from WillisWire and written by Cabot Institute Director Professor Paul Bates, University of Bristol and Willis Research Network (WRN) Senior Academic. Edits by Tim Fewtrell, Chief Hydrologist at the WRN

Professor Paul Bates, Cabot Institute Director
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