Tag: water

Belo Monte: there is nothing green or sustainable about these mega-dams

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

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Google Maps

There are few dams in the world that capture the imagination as much as Belo Monte, built on the “Big Bend” of the Xingu river in the Brazilian Amazon. Its construction has involved an army of 25,000 workers working round the clock since 2011 to excavate over 240m cubic metres of soil and rock, pour three million cubic metres of concrete, and divert 80% of the river’s flow through 24 turbines.

 

The dam is located about 200km before the 1,640km Xingu meets the Amazon. kmusser, CC BY-SA

Costing R$30 billion (£5.8 billion), Belo Monte is important not only for the scale of its construction but also the scope of opposition to it. The project was first proposed in the 1970s, and ever since then, local indigenous communities, civil society and even global celebrities have engaged in numerous acts of direct and indirect action against it.

While previous incarnations had been cancelled, Belo Monte is now in the final stages of construction and already provides 11,233 megawatts of energy to 60m Brazilians across the country. When complete, it will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in the Amazon and the fourth largest in the world.

Indigenous protests against Belo Monte at the UN’s sustainable development conference in Rio, 2012. Fernando Bizerra Jr / EPA

A ‘sustainable’ project?

The dam is to be operated by the Norte Energia consortium (formed of a number of state electrical utilities) and is heavily funded by the Brazilian state development bank, BNDES. The project’s supporters, including the governments of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) that held office between 2003 and 2011, have justified its construction on environmental grounds. They describe Belo Monte as a “sustainable” project, linking it to wider policies of climate change mitigation and a transition away from fossil fuels. The assertions of the sustainability of hydropower are not only seen in Brazil but can be found across the globe – with large dams presented as part of wider sustainable development agendas.

With hydropower representing 16.4% of total global installed energy capacity, hydroelectric dams are a significant part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions. More than 2,000 such projects are currently funded via the Clean Development Mechanism of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – second only to wind power by number of individual projects.

While this provides mega-dams with an environmental seal of approval, it overlooks their numerous impacts. As a result, dams funded by the CDM are contested across the globe, with popular opposition movements highlighting the impacts of these projects and challenging their asserted sustainability.

Beautiful hill, to beautiful monster

Those standing against Belo Monte have highlighted its social and environmental impacts. An influx of 100,000 construction and service workers has transformed the nearby city of Altamira, for instance.

Hundreds of workers – unable to find employment – took to sleeping on the streets. Drug traffickers also moved in and crime and violence soared in the city. The murder rate in Altamira increased by 147% during the years of Belo Monte construction, with it becoming the deadliest city on earth in 2015.

In 2013, police raided a building near the construction site to find 15 women, held against their will and forced into sex work. Researchers later found that the peak hours of visits to their building – and others – coincided with the payday of those working on Belo Monte. In light of this social trauma, opposition actors gave the project a new moniker: Belo Monstro, meaning “Beautiful Monster”.

The construction of Belo Monte is further linked to increasing patterns of deforestation in the region. In 2011, deforestation in Brazil was highest in the area around Belo Monte, with the dam not only deforesting the immediate area but stimulating further encroachment.

In building roads to carry both people and equipment, the project has opened up the wider area of rainforest to encroachment and illegal deforestation. Greenpeace has linked illegal deforestation in indigenous reserves – more than 200km away – to the construction of the project, with the wood later sold to those building the dam.

Brazil’s past success in reversing deforestation rates became a key part of the country’s environmental movement. Yet recently deforestation has increased once again, leading to widespread international criticism. With increasing awareness of the problem, the links between hydropower and the loss of the Amazon rainforest challenge the continued viability of Belo Monte and similar projects.

Big dams, big problems

While the Clean Development Mechanism focuses on the reduction of carbon emissions, it overlooks other greenhouse gases emitted by hydropower. Large dams effectively emit significant quantities of methane for instance, released by the decomposition of plants and trees below the reservoir’s surface. While methane does not stay in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide (only persisting for up to 12 years), its warming potential is far higher.

Belo Monte has been linked to these methane emissions by numerous opposition actors. Further research has found that the vegetation rotting in the reservoirs of dams across the globe may emit a million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year. As a result, it is claimed that these projects are – in fact – making a net contribution to climate change.

Far from providing a sustainable, renewable energy solution in a climate-changed world, Belo Monte is instead cast as exacerbating the problem that it is meant to solve.

The ConversationBelo Monte is just one of many dams across the globe that have been justified – and funded – as sustainable pursuits. Yet, this conflates the ends with the means. Hydroelectricity may appear relatively “clean” but the process in which a mega-dam is built is far from it. The environmental credentials of these projects remain contested, with Belo Monte providing just one example of how the sustainability label may finally be slipping.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Ed Atkins, Senior Teaching Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.  This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Ed Atkins

The muddy debate: Is the Severn Estuary biologically productive?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Severn Bridge by Philippa Long

Traditionally, the Severn Estuary has been mistaken for an expansive, featureless landscape, dominated by fast-flowing muddy waters that prevent any pelagic biological activity. Although the latter could be true in terms of phytoplankton development, new research has shed light on the vital role that the benthic algal system has on controlling nutrient dynamics in the estuary.

Estuaries form at the margins between the land and the sea. The complex movement and mixing of freshwater and seawater governed by the tide, along with the trapping and recycling of continentally supplied nutrients and sediment, makes estuaries some of the most ecologically viable ecosystems in the world, in line with the biological productivity of coral reefs and tropical rainforests.

The Severn, the largest of 133 estuaries in the UK, has a mosaic distribution of intertidal mudflats, saltmarshes and wetlands, making it a unique habitat for a wide range of species. Alongside nationally scarce plant species, important wildfowl, wader populations and migratory European birds inhabit and refuel in the biologically-rich banks of the estuary. The estuarine waters are also home to over 100 fish species that use the estuary as a nursery, supporting many of the UK’s commercial fish stocks. With such a wide socio-ecological and economic importance, it is clear why the Severn was designated a Special Area of Conservation in 2009.

However, it’s less obvious as to why it has been over two decades since there have been systematic sampling studies in the Severn. Reviews have come and gone during this time, widely associated with renewable energy projects such as the Severn Barrage, but have often repeated findings from the 1990s. Furthermore, any commercially driven studies and their findings are often not disclosed to researchers or the public. This has left, in many aspects, knowledge of the Severn and its current ecosystem condition in a state of limbo. One aspect that’s often overlooked in many hydrological systems and is often overshadowed by carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, is the element silicon, which may be one of the most important nutrients in the Severn’s environment.

Sand Bay by Holly Welsby

Why is silicon important?

Dissolved silicon is an important nutrient in aquatic environments, and is essential to siliceous organisms, for example, photosynthetic diatoms, which use dissolved silicon to form their shells (or frustules) made from biogenic silica. Diatoms are broadly categorised as ‘centric’ (round), usually occupying the surface oceans, and ‘pennate’ (long and thin), inhabiting coastal and seafloor environments, including sea ice, and intertidal mudflats such as those in the Severn Estuary.

Despite their small size, diatoms are an important group in supporting most food webs, and due to their abundance, contribute close to half of all surface ocean productivity! Diatoms are a key factor in affecting climate change due to this high productivity, as they remove the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and export the organic carbon from the surface ocean to the seafloor when they die. Dissolved silicon and biogenic silica have been widely used to study marine silicon cycles but the impact that diatoms may have on estuarine cycles, and the potential influence on river silicon inputs to the ocean, has only recently come to light.

Silicon cycling in the Severn Estuary: new research

After the receding of the tide, large intertidal mudflats form along the shores of the Severn Estuary, which has the second largest tidal range in the world! These nutrient-rich intertidal mudflats are inhabited by pennate diatoms that live in microbial mats, called biofilms, on the mudflat surface. These biofilms, which are visible to the naked eye (the golden-brown shimmer that can be observed on the mudflats at low tide), are low in biodiversity but high in diatom abundance. Biofilms are an important food source to many mud-dwelling creatures, such as estuarine ragworm and laver spire snails, and migratory visitors such as the whimbrel and ringed plover. These ‘sticky’ mats also contribute to sediment stabilization, through the production of an organic rich network around sediment grains, and control nutrient fluxes to the overlying water.

Biofilm on the intertidal mudflats of the Severn by Holly Welsby

Compared to the well-studied carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, the importance of silicon in the Severn Estuary is less well understood. New research that has been carried out at the University of Bristol has aimed to tackle this gap, with an in-depth, seasonal study of silicon cycling along the Severn river-estuary-marine continuum. Each season in 2016, the surface and bottom waters of the Severn were sampled aboard Cardiff University’s research vessel.

It was found that the strong tidal forces and seasonal river flow fluctuations controlled dissolved silicon and other associated nutrients. In line with previous studies, the high mud water content – referred to as turbidity – limited water column primary productivity by blocking out light. This meant that there was minimal biogenic silica production in the water column itself. Instead, biogenic silica depended on the suspended particulate matter, and displayed seasonal cycles associated with benthic biogenic silica production by the diatom biofilms on the mudflats. In other words, the suspended sediment in the Severn not only originated from the rivers discharging into the estuary, but also from the erosion of the intertidal mudflats. This erosion of the mudflats in this high energy system, led to the suspension of the diatom biofilms, and so increased the biogenic silica concentrations in the water column.

This research has shown that since the 1990s reports, diatom biofilm biomass (i.e. their presence) has increased on the mudflats. These diatoms were also efficient at photosynthesis, resulting in a high potential to cycle silicon. These biofilms break up and reform rapidly between tides meaning that a large amount of silica is shuttled from the mudflats to the water column every day. This benthic biogenic silica export, which is transported further compared to dissolved silicon, could dissolve and replenish the Celtic Sea, with the dissolved silicon ready to be used by plankton that supports our commercial fish stocks.

Severn River in winter by Tim Gregory

Looking ahead

The Severn Estuary – in all its natural wonders – is a valuable resource in terms of renewable energy, tourism and business. Many of us also call it home. But what does the future hold for these diatom biofilms on the mudflats of the Severn Estuary? In many ways, their prospects are low. With extreme weather events, erosion and coastal squeezing causing a loss to our mudflat and saltmarsh habitats, influx of microplastics and associated toxins, alongside proposals for large construction projects that may alter sediment/nutrient loadings and deposition patterns, the future of these biofilms hangs is in the balance. But based on recent findings, these diatoms are tolerant to the mudflats harsh environmental conditions, which suggests they have the capability to adapt to these adverse conditions. Diatoms are a miraculous species, and their benefits to the estuary is not fully recognised.

We are beginning to understand that there is a limit to the degree that we can modify our environment, but if we could only assign an economic value to this biologically productive system, perhaps the benthic diatoms future on the Severn Estuary mudflats could be aided.

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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute member Holly Welsby, from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Water City Bristol!

Posted on by janet.crompton
Foot selfie at secret swimming spot

If you don’t fix things in words, they might float away. So, briefly, a skeletal accounting —

  • 3 open-water swims
  • 2 workshops in maritime writing
  • 1 public lecture
  • 1 trip up the canal locks to Saltford
  • 2 days at #MT2018 (Marine Transgressions Conference)
  • 2 keynotes
  • ~ 12 panels
  • 1 Blue Humanities roundtable
  • 2 receptions
  • [a poetry reading that I missed]
  • And many half-garbled memories, starting in the middle —
The Llandoger Trow, where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk

Toxicity, the Ocean, and Urban Space (Wednesday)

I was trying some new things for this public lecture, knowing that the audience would swirl together academics with non-academics, be mostly composed of city-dwellers, and further include mostly those with a particular interest in the sea. Unpicking the knots of writing and thinking I’ve been chasing down in the wake of Oceanic New York, my talk splashed through some recent watery adventures, included images of Thanos the purple God of demonic Malthusianism, strayed into verse in three of my own poems, and — maybe? — crossed wild water to make landfall with hopeful gestures toward Ocean citizenship. How can our Cities and our bodies prepare themselves for and live with rising waters? I’d like to speak that as a not-only tragic story.

Public lecture at the University of Bristol

The Henleaze Swimming Club (Monday)

On Monday afternoon, jet-lagged and still-missing my baggage from the overnight flight in via Dublin, I bought a replacement suit & goggles from the hotel & Uber’d up to Henleaze, a former quarry that’s been a private swimming club since 1919. This gorgeous, narrow, fresh-watered lake now overflows with people, half with swimmers and half fisherfolk. What better anti-jet lag tonic can be?

Underwater Bristol (Tuesday)

Building on the perpetual inspiration of underwaternewyork.com, I hatched a plot with members of the U of Bristol English faculty to incubate some to-emerge-later responses to Bristol’s waterways. So many glorious things! A sailboat named Svendgar that I spotted a few days later for sale in the harbor. Brown mudflats. The kayaks that were paddled around the Bay by the Inuits kidnapped in Frobisher’s Second Voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. A football pitch next to a Cadbury Chocolate Factory that I’d seen earlier that morning while riding a canal boat up five locks to Saltford. Plastic. Breeding eels. What will they all become?

Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon

A secret monastic pool (Wednesday)

Having been promised a bit of true English wild swimming on the condition that I not mention the name or location of the waters in which I would plunge, I suppose I was a bit surprised to come around the corner of the quiet country lane to discover maybe sixty students lining the pool’s far bank, sunning themselves in post-exam freedom. The secluded pool, built “in the Middle Ages” to store fish for the Abbey of St. Augustine (founded 1140), now hosts lily pads, a gorgeous 15-foot tall purple rhododendron, supposedly a few tench, and — alas! — some horseflies that enjoyed landing on my bald head. It’s an excellent place for an afternoon’s swim. Thanks to my hosts for taking me there!

Bristol Harbour on the last night

Sea-themed creative writing workshop (Wednesday)

I was deeply impressed by the almost-dozen enthusiastic  Bristol undergrads who submitted maritime poetry and prose works for an post-term bonus workshop. I was joined also by Shakespearean Laurence Publicover and poet David Punter, and we spent a thrilling two hours wrestling with the joys and frustrations of writing with and into oceanic spaces. The student writing was gorgeous and wonderfully ambitious, from a narrative built from fragments of a diary from the S.S. Great Britain to a brilliantly post-Agatha Christie cruise montage, a boat-launching story, several quite lovely lyrics about blue spaces, and a hashing of Pip’s dream of drowning from Moby-Dick that spoke to my Melvillean core.

Clevedon Marine Lake (Fri)

Diving into Clevedon Marine Lake

Located as far upstream as big boats could travel the tidal Avon, Bristol today is water-filled but brackish rather than salt. Much of my time there was semi-marine, from the walks along the harbour to the floating bar the Marine Transgressions Conference decamped to after our final keynote. But though the Avon is tidal for a long distance and boasts (I am reliably assured by tide-guru Owain Jones from the Environmental Humanities department at Bath Spa) the second-highest tides in the world, there’s not a lot of open salt water in the city. I wanted to swim in the Bristol Channel (still known in Wales as the Severn Sea), so the morning of the conference’s last day I met swimographer Vanessa at an early hour that precluded other swimming companions, and we Uber’d out to the Clevedon Marine Lake. I’ve seldom or never seen a more starkly ideal swimscape. The pool is built, framed in by concrete and stone, but at high tide the swell tops the wall and fills the pool with ocean water. The tide was near the ebb when we arrived that morning, and over 100 yards of brown mudflat extended below the “lake,” reflecting the gray sky up toward us. The water was perfect — cool but not cold, salty but not bitter, manageable even though I’d forgotten my goggles in the hotel, and a generous 250m per lake-length. One of the few other swimmers who was also there on a grey misty morning was a man training for 70km in Lake Geneva. He churned in slow circles around the lake and planned to swim through dinner time. We had panels to rush back to in Bristol, but I was tempted just to keep swimming.

#MT2018 Marine Transgressions Conference (Thursday & Friday)

In front of Nancy Farmer tiles with Vanessa Daws at Clevedon

My visit to Bristol was fortuitously timed with an interdisciplinary conference on Marine Transgressions — a geologic term of art for moments in which the sea invades the land. Packed in to the last two days of my stay, the conference’s turbulent energy kept me going even when my own energy flagged. From Helen Rozwadowski’s amazing opening keynote on Jacques Cousteau and utopian fantasies of homo aquaticus in the 1950s and ’60s all the way through Tim Dee’s gorgeously lyrical evocation of the human and avian intertwinings of gulls and landfills, #MT2018 was an stirring mixture. I can’t do justice to all the great panels and papers that I heard over the two days, but I was struck by the variety of disciplinary perspectives — lots of poetics, history, and environmental humanities, but also marine law, policy, science, technological remediation, and other things. All these were joined together by a shared passion for the oceanic “blue” — though of course we all know, and we repeated as a kind of refrain over two days, that the ocean is also and meaningfully green, gray, purple, and many other colors — including gold, in the memorable image of the geochemist Kate Hendry describing the glimmer of microscopic diatoms on the salt flats of the Severn estuary at low tide.

Blue Humanities Round Table (Friday)

The best parts of a small conference come from listening to new things, and also from catching an extension of someone’s work over a beer at the floating bar after the day’s sessions. But in addition to many great discoveries, I’ve seldom had more fun at an academic presentation than I did chairing a Blue Humanities Round Table near the end of the second day. The amazing panel of disparate thinkers and makers included Owain Jones, whose hydrocitizenship project connects Bristol’s to its people and its past; Vanessa Daws, swimographer and immersive artist; Kate Hendry, a biogeochemist whose fields work takes her to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields; and my friend from the CT Shoreline Helen Rozwadowski, historian of science and founder of the Maritime Studies Program at UConn Avery Point. I started us out with a general question — “What can you do because of your focus on the sea that you could not do otherwise?” — and our conversation waterfalled down through several memorable twists and turns into a fantastic question period. With thanks to Alexandra Campbell and her twitter-agility, here’s a partial reconstruction of the ship we built as we sailed along:

  • The sea is not a metaphor (quoting Hester Blum) — except that sometimes it is, and sometimes its metaphors rub against and into the real salt water.
  • The sea is history (not-quite-remembering to quote Derek Walcott) — and given a few generations of blue humanities historical scholarship it should hopefully become more richly historicized.
  • The sea disorients and distorts, always and relentlessly, even as humans respond partially to that disorientation.
  • Is water alien? Does it come from outer space or from inside the earth’s core? Why might it matter? (in dialogue with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)
  • The sea’s lack of visibility redoubles its its moral challenge, informs the cultural history of its monstrous depths, and increases the force of its alien elements. (I rambled here about the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” poster art on the walls of Catch-22, the fish & chips place where I ate my first Bristol meal.)
  • Does the weakness of human eyesight underwater attenuate our moral connection with sea creatures? (A Levinas-ian question, though we didn’t mention his name)
  • Can science “illuminate” (Kate’s word) the sea in ways that increase its ethical claims on human subjects?
  • What are the politics of the interdisciplinary ocean? How can the sea speak to social justice, especially remembering the twin horrors of the slave trade and transoceanic capitalism (which two things might actually be parts of the same thing)?
  • Can the sea be a space of hope? (Last question, I think? We said yes. But I’m not sure that we’re sure.)

 

Selfie with mermaid and Vanessa Daws in Clevedon

“Under the sea everything is moral”

The hardest and most evocative phrase of the conference came when Helen quoted Cousteau or one of his fellow sea-utopians in her opening keynote. What might it mean for “everything” to be “moral” beneath the waves? “It’s all subtle and submarine,” says Walcott, thinking about Atlantic slavery and Caribbean beauty. Owain quite rightly objected that the underwater industriousness for which Cousteau was a booster has fouled our waters. The panel speculated together about the morality that emerges from the shared vulnerability of terrestrial human bodies in deep waters. I thought about, but did not share, a terrifying vision of drowning and struggle from Macbeth —

Doubtful it stood / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art (1.2)

There’s another way, it occurs to me now as my big green metal bird arcs past the southern tip of Greenland, in which the undersea might be “moral.” It’s not that all undersea activities are permitted or approved, but that the questions we face — what we talk about when we talk about oceans — become starkly and painfully ethical. As mer-scholars, academic selkies, blue humanists, we swim into hard questions about disorientation, about buoyancy, about living-with alien lives. We face questions of social justice and tragic history, of oceanic dislocation and ongoing violence. Moral urgencies splash into marine lakes in the West Country and haunt overcrowded refugee boats in the Eastern Med.

The sea supports and threatens human life. What moral dilemmas fix us from the cold glaze of a fish’s eyes?

Floating bar

Thanks to all who were there this week, and in particular to my hosts at the University of Bristol, the Perspectives on the Sea cluster run by Laurence Publicover, the Brigstow and Cabot Institutes, and all the people who made Marine Transgressions possible! I’m looking forward to my next visit to Bristol already.

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This blog has been written by Professor Steve Mentz, St John’s University, New York. The blog has been reposted with kind permission from Steve’s original blog.

Olive oil production in Morocco: so many questions

Posted on by janet.crompton

No standard salad would be complete without olive oil. Our friends the lettuce, tomato and cucumber now come automatically accompanied by the vinegar and the oil, the oil and the vinegar. Perhaps in a bottle, perhaps in a sachet, perhaps in some kind of over complicated vinaigrette processed by a supermarket near you, along with lots of salt and some corn syrup, a 21st century salad in the Western world would be naked without an olive dressing.

This weekend, after an intensive academic seminar in Morocco[1], we studious seminar attendees were rewarded with a field trip. So I was taken out to visit three agricultural holdings in action. They all grew olives, but apart from that, had little in common. These three: large, medium and small producers in turn gave us a hugely insightful opportunity to witness agricultural change in action. Since the turn of the millennium the large site, on previously colonial, then state-held land had been an apple orchard and had now turned to olive oil. The medium one had been focused on cattle, making use of previous common land, that was now enclosed land, and was now diversifying with oil, watermelons, and more. The small producer produced a full range of things including olives for their own oil and most recently had established a side income in both fish and honey production.

Firstly, we learnt how to make money. Morocco’s heavily financed agricultural development programme, Plan Maroc Vert, which aims to intensify the agricultural system into a new-age competitive beacon of the modern food system, offers attractive incentives to spruce up agriculture in the country with new machines. All you need is to write a proposal (a report), have money to invest (from bank credit perhaps) and an impressive part of your money will be returned to you in state subsidies within two years.

So, for example, all three of the small, medium and large producers we visited, had benefited from a 100% state subsidy for irrigation of their crops. In the case of the ‘super-intensive’ large producer this meant state funding for the irrigation of 65,780[2] olive trees from groundwater on a rapidly declining water table. Some of the more landscape-savvy of the seminar group reminded us that olive trees had been grown in the region for centuries precisely because they did not need this kind of constant watering but could grow deep roots and access scarce water themselves. This, however, is not of interest to the ‘super-intensive’ producer. This producer is simply interested in the logic of economic growth, which in this case says: plant the trees closer, and add the chemical nutrients to the water while you’re at it. And so, these 65,780 trees are watered with the addition of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and ammonium, yet no studies are evident of what all these substances may be doing to the groundwater. By any other logic this would be a big concern, nitrogen pollution, particularly. Nitrogen pollution of water supplies, or more simply, of the nitrogen cycle, is one of the only planetary ecosystem boundaries that we have already crossed as a human race. This was not relevant in the lesson of how to make money.

Yet, I work with people, so where were they in the Moroccan olive grove? Well, it seems they have been replaced by a machine in this super-intensive oil production. The company, with links to power as far up as it goes, has invested in a machine that drives over the trees like a bridge. It shakes their branches and collects their olives.  So much for an investment in rural employment.

Some new olive trees defy the machine but are pretty un-reliable as employers too. These trees that the machine can’t manage provide jobs for only a very precarious seasonal and short-term workforce. I was told that 100 people would be employed for a space of around 200 hectares, and these jobs would last 2-3 months. The company assured us though that these workers would get both contracts and, in order to have those contracts, bank accounts. Thank goodness the banks aren’t losing out.

I should be kinder in tone about the small and medium sized farmers that we visited. Not only did their olive oil taste a lot richer, but they invited us to tea, and allowed us to share their experience of oil production more closely.  They humoured our partial language skills and our many, many questions. This was the second major thing we learnt on the trip – we were a team. We were a slightly chaotic, and erratic team, but really quite effective. A little like slugs on a cabbage, we chewed up every bit of information every which way.

Releasing a group of 13 researchers at a family farm, was a bit like inviting children to a playground, or providing clowns with an audience. Each of us found something to play with, interact with, reflect upon and smile. Some of us looked at the trees or identified the plant specimens. Others wrote notes, or took pictures, or carried out semi-formal interviews with whichever family member we felt most comfortable with. Others played with material toys, climbing ladders, smelling fruit or knocking on enormous oil containers to discover them empty. As we found the olive branches, force-fed powder food through irrigated pipes, or in the smaller farm providing shade for some resident chickens, this seminar group grew together, discovering the knowledge of the peasant farmer.  This experience was far richer and engaging than any power point presentation or report.

More images can be found on the original blog.

References

[1] “Workshop on Agricultural Labour and Rural Landscapes in the Arab World” Organised by the Thimar collective and supported by the École Nationale d’Agriculture de Meknès, the Leverhulme Trust and the London School of Economics.

[2] Calculated based on 286 plants/hectare in a cultivated area of 230 hectares, this was the details of the holding advertised by the company.

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This blog is written by Lydia Medland, a PhD student at the University of Bristol’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies who is looking at the role of seasonal workers in global food production, specifically in Morocco and Spain.  This blog has been reposted with kind permission from her Eating Research blog.  View the original blog post.

Lydia Medland

Read Lydia’s other blog: Watermelon work

MSc Environmental Policy and Management Course Trip to Warsaw, Poland

Posted on by janet.crompton

Each year, students on the MSc Environmental Policy and Management program receive funding to plan an educational trip in Europe. Previous cohorts have chosen to visit Berlin, Copenhagen, Riga, and Amsterdam. This year, we democratically decided to visit Warsaw. We chose to do so not because the city and Poland are exemplary in environmental management, but rather because they have real challenges facing them in the transition to a low-carbon future.

The energy sector represents the biggest environmental challenge in Poland and government leaders are reported to actively oppose European Union climate change targets (Kowalski, 2016). After its most recent election (2015), the country announced that energy policy would prioritise the exploitation of domestic coal deposits. Indeed, there is a historical and cultural attachment to coal in Poland, as the coal industry was influential in the country’s socio-economic development in the period between World War I and World War II, and during the post-World War II Communist era (Kowalski, 2016). More recently, coal has been promoted as a path to increase Poland’s energy independence, particularly from Russia, by reducing the need for imported fuel.

Poland has consistently been one of the biggest coal producers in the EU (Lukaszewska, 2011). A large majority of the country’s electricity generation (80 – 94%) comes from coal-fired power plants fuelled by domestic hard coal and lignite (Kozlowska, 2017; Lukaszewska, 2011). The dominant position of these fossil fuels in Poland’s energy mix presents a significant challenge in the fight against global climate change. We arranged meetings with the Polish Climate Coalition, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Greenpeace Poland to learn more.

Our first meeting was with the Polish Climate Coalition. As our large cohort climbed the stairs to their office, it soon became clear that we would not all fit in and so we turned back and headed for a local café just around the corner. Walking with Krzysztof and Urszula, they seemed apologetic, but they need not have been. We found the experience to be an honest representation of how a grassroots organisation may operate when fighting for causes arguably more important than having a fancy corporate office. The Coalition is an association of 22 NGOs engaged in climate protection and includes Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and ClientEarth. It was established under the outright belief that humans are responsible for climate change.

Over the next 90 minutes, Krzysztof and Urszula provided us with an in-depth overview of the energy sector in Poland. We learned that the dominant driving force for current practice is a flawed interpretation of energy security which focuses on supply in lieu of other considerations, such as tackling fuel poverty and environmental pollution or ensuring stable, long-term access to energy.

The Polish energy sector is seemingly outdated and inadequate in the face of 21st century challenges. It was particularly concerning to hear that the combination of both a dry winter in 2014 and a hot summer in 2015 significantly reduced the water levels in Poland’s rivers. These rivers are the primary source of water for cooling the country’s coal-fired power plants, and in August 2015, power restrictions were imposed on 1,600 of the biggest companies in Poland as a result (Olszwski, 2015). The population face an ever-increasing risk of power blackouts due to the vulnerability of the energy sector from over-reliance on coal. If hot summers persist (temperatures exceeded 24C on the day of our visit in May!), then such vulnerability will surely continue.

One thing became clear in that, despite the major challenges which Poland faces, there are good people like Krzysztof and Urszula who are willing to fight the uphill battle, within a context where motivation must surely be difficult to find.

Upon arrival at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, for our second meeting, we were welcomed into a light, air-conditioned conference room where water and nibbles were laid out for us. While our physical environment was starkly different to our first meeting, we soon realised an overarching theme in Poland.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a politically independent ‘green visions’ think tank with 30 offices worldwide. Their work is divided into three programmes and we met with Katarzyna from the Energy and Climate programme in Warsaw, whose work aims to intensify the discourse about the challenges presented by energy transformation and climate change.

Much of Katarzyna’s message reinforced what we had learned in our first meeting. However, it was particularly interesting to enter into a discussion about air pollution toward the end of her presentation. We learned that coal is not only the primary source of electricity production, but is also still burned, alongside rubbish and other discarded materials, to heat homes in the winter, creating an ever-worsening problem with smog in Warsaw and across Poland. We were told that in the winter of 2016 – 2017, smog was so thick that you could not see your hand in front of you. In January 2017, air pollution in Warsaw was so bad that local authorities decided to limit local emissions by making public transport free for a short period. Approximately 45,000 people in Poland die each year from air pollution (Kozlowska, 2017). The total population is around 38 million (“Population, total,” 2017).

Our final meeting was with Greenpeace, and this took us away from the city centre to their office in what was once a very large home. Many of us took advantage of Warsaw’s bike rental scheme, called Veturilo, to make the almost 6-kilometre ride from our hostel along cycle lanes, roads, and even the sidewalk.

The office culture immediately felt distinct to that of the previous two organisations. Staff dressed more casually; unmade bunk beds showed us where visiting volunteers can stay; bumper stickers and sketched environmental messages decorated some walls; and stuffed bees the size of large dogs hung from the ceiling (purportedly they have used the bees for campaigning). The efforts of Greenpeace Poland depend less on paper and pen and more on influential signage and community engagement.

Our contact, Anna, shared stories of human chains to call attention to the rivers that have dried up because of open-pit lignite mining. She taught us about the mining process, showing us on a map of the country where current mines are operating and new ones are planned. The process destroys landscapes, diverts massive volumes of water, and forces displacement of people. The low energy content of lignite means power plants must be built immediately adjacent to the mines. Since opening about 10 years ago, Greenpeace Poland has had some successes. Anna shared her involvement in advocating for the sale of excess renewable energy back to the grid, which ultimately came to pass, at least temporarily. To highlight that the battle for environmental progress is constantly uphill however, the government later reverted this policy, and at the time of writing has not reinstated it.

Despite a certain level of negativity in our meetings, Anna’s anecdote provided some optimism. The temporary success depended on using political divisions and public advertising focusing on the benefits to individuals. Though a small step, it shows that sometimes addressing the self-interest of the general public can be an effective way to combat environmental issues in a country with Poland’s political context.

Due to a lack of climate change education in Poland, environmentalism must be achieved through its benefits to the public rather than through traditional means. Indifference towards environmentalism is something that can be seen in other countries, and to us provided a good indication of how hostile public attitudes can be addressed to allow for environmental and climate protection. One of the authors, Michael, comes from Texas and found parallels between the situation in Poland and that back home. Progress cannot depend on a shared sense of responsibility to address climate change, in which many people do not even believe. Counterproductive financial interests are rampant. However, reframing the conversation to discuss savings from energy efficiency, economic opportunities in renewables, and energy security can achieve gains in the low-carbon transition. In Texas, wind power has boomed not because of political or public will to move beyond fossil fuels, but because of its economic viability.

We are truly grateful to the School of Geography for affording us the opportunity to undertake this trip. Beyond learning more about the energy system in Poland and organisations working to improve it, we became closer as a cohort and had a wonderful time.

The reader can reach out with any questions on the trip or the program to the authors of this blog post: Mark Nichols (mn16169@my.bristol.ac.uk), Allan MacLeod (am12313@my.bristol.ac.uk), or Michael Donatti (md16045@my.bristol.ac.uk).

References
Kowalski, K., 2016. In Poland, efforts to rescue coal industry will likely come up short. [online] Available: https://pl.boell.org/en/2016/09/26/poland-efforts-rescue-coal-industry-will-likely-come-short

Kozlowska, H., 2017. When it comes to air pollution, Poland is the China of Europe. [online] Available: https://qz.com/882158/with-air-pollution-skyrocketing-warsaw-is-severely-hit-by-polands-smog-problem/

Lukaszewska, H., 2011. Poland’s Energu Security Strategy. Journal of Energy Security.

Olszewski, M., 2015. The Polish Energy Drought. [online] Available: https://energytransition.org/2015/09/the-polish-energy-drought/

“Population, Total.” The World Bank, 2017. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL.

Brexit, trust and the future of global environmental governance

Posted on by janet.crompton

Post-Brexit vote, we are posting some blogs from our Cabot Institute members outlining their thoughts on Brexit and potential implications for environmental research, environmental law and the environment.  
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Is Brexit the canary in the mine for global environmental governance? 

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has troubling implications for global environmental governance. Water pollution, air pollution, and climate change have no regard for political borders. The world needs supranational political institutions to facilitate a coordinated response to these challenges. The EU is a relatively effective supranational institution for progressive environmental governance. EU nations have enjoyed major improvements in recent decades in areas like air quality, bathing water quality, nature preservation, and acid rain. The EU is one of the most constructive voices in global climate governance.

The decision to leave is therefore likely to present some setbacks with regard to regional environmental governance. But more importantly it signals broad disenchantment with supranational political institutions more generally. People resent and distrust them as distant and undemocratic. And it’s not just the British public that feels this way. The impulse to withdraw and disengage is increasingly evident across Europe and the USA.

This trend is all the more worrying when we look at the profile of the average Leave voter. A recent YouGov survey of British voters found that Leave supporters are deeply distrustful of just about everyone. They don’t much trust academics—as Vote Leave’s Michael Gove put it, “people in this country have had enough of experts.” Nor do they trust the opinions of think tanks, economists, or international organisations like the UN. Just 8 percent trust British politicians. By contrast, a majority of Remain voters generally trust academics, economists, business leaders, and international organisations. (Neither group trusts journalists or, perhaps more positively, celebrities.) But, as we now know, voters for Remain are in the minority.

This ‘trust deficit’ is at the root of the post-factual politics that seems to have taken hold across much of the Western world.

Without trust in ‘experts’ such as environmental scientists we will not be able to build an informed consensus about the nature of the problems we face, let alone go about solving them. Without trust in politicians we will not be willing to accept difficult decisions with short-term costs but long-term benefits, including for younger and future generations. Without trust in supranational institutions, such as the EU and UN, we will not be able to coordinate our efforts in addressing many of the greatest threats to human welfare, all of which are supranational in nature. 

There has been much commentary about the generational divide in the Brexit vote, perhaps offering some hope for the future. Younger people supported Remain by a wide margin indicating a willingness to remain engaged with Europe. But younger generations turned out in much smaller numbers and low youth turnout is consistent with the evidence that millennials are less politically engaged than previous generations. They are also less trusting. (See evidence of mistrustful millennials here and here).

In short, young people appear to be more open to international cooperation, but disinclined to engage with domestic politics. In the worst case scenario, this could be a recipe for divisive politics in which motivated minorities on both sides of the political spectrum seize the centrist vacuum to promote their worldviews through formal political institutions.

What then does the future hold? The cacophony of narratives of next-steps is almost unprecedented in British history. No one appears to have a clear plan with an emergent consensus. But there is one potential ray of hope in this political drama. If young people—and millennials in particular—are shocked into engaging more actively and passionately with formal political institutions, the Brexit vote might well turnout not to be the canary in the mine so much as an important moment of political awakening.

Let us hope this is the case. For the future of environmental governance is ultimately in the hands of our worldly but politically disengaged youth.

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This blog is written by University of Bristol Cabot Institute members Dr Sean Fox (Political Economy of Development & Urban Geography) and Dr Malcolm Fairbrother (Global Policy and Politics), both from the School of Geographical Sciences.

Sean Fox

Read other blogs in the Brexit series:

The Nikki Project: Designing a rainwater harvesting system for an African health centre

Posted on by janet.crompton

Last summer three Engineers Without Borders (EWB) members conducted a six week recce on water supply in Nikki, Benin, last summer. After building contacts with local engineers, schools and hospitals, sourcing handwritten archived data, and finding many interesting answers to our questions, we are now working hard on designs for a rainwater harvesting system and planning this summer’s work. This blog is about our project, why it’s important and how we’re going about it.

Main high street in Nikki, northern Benin.

The Nikki Project aims to address water supply problems in the small district of Nikki, Benin. A big layer of granite near to the ground surface means there is only a seasonal water table. This means the Benin government’s method of borehole water supply, which works for the rest of the country, does not work here. Citizens are given a few hours of water supply per day (at the best of times). This water is cut until 2 am and rarely lasts past 5 am; certainly not ideal for schools and hospitals that need water for treatment during the day. Instead, citizens turn to private boreholes, wells and at the worst times, an untreated lake outside the city.

Map showing Benin at the bottom of the image.

Engineers Without Borders Bristol are partnered with a Spanish charity, OAN International, who identified this problem two years ago and asked EWB Bristol to help tackle Nikki’s water supply issues. Last summer our aim was to build a partnership with a local service, who we trusted to maintain the system in our absence and who we thought would be a good working partner to trial our designs.

Back in the UK about 25 of us meet every week to work on this project. Our main task this year has been the design of a rainwater harvesting system for a small health clinic. This clinic was established by two male nurses, funded from the money they earned working for the Benin national health service. They run the clinic by working 12 hours shifts each, with dedication and fantastic vision. Like all health services in Benin the centre charges for their services, but unlike the hospitals makes no profit from the sale of medicines. The hygiene measures taken were extraordinary for Benin; to paraphrase a Spanish medic volunteer, this was ‘the first time [he] has seen a Benin child being told to wash their hands’. The clinic deals, amongst other things, with malaria and pregnancy: the two biggest causes of death in the area.

The health clinic that EWB are working with to provide a rainharvesting water supply.
The EWB Bristol team surveying the health centre site in Benin.

Our rainwater harvesting solution will consist of a large 90,000 litre storage tank, a water treatment system, and a small water tower to gravity feed the water into existing taps in the clinic. The tank will collect water during the rainy season and store it safely until the dry period when no water is available from the government supply.

This type of system has become very successful and widespread elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, and if successful this type of system could be expanded to suit more clinics or schools in the region. We chose to work with this health centre because of the nurses’ incredible dedication to their cause; before we had finished explaining the concept, they had already started discussing how they would start saving up for it. While contributing to the materials is certainly something we are discussing as the cost of materials and labour is not high in Benin, a sense of ownership is key to the system being maintained properly and thus being a success.

An example of pipes not properly attached and fallen down in the wind leading to an abandoned RWH tank. This tank was built 2005. The current staff have no recollection of it ever functioning.

We are still exploring design options for our rainwater harvesting system:

  • Should the pump be manual or electric (practical in everyday or with a higher risk/cost of replacement)?
  • Should the water be chlorinated in the tank or after the tank or both? Is it worth the money if it will be chlorinated again anyway?
  • Would someone prefer a monthly job or a daily job in maintaining the water treatment system? If we use a Bernoulli chlorinator will it make chemical concentrations easier or more difficult to control? Possibly easier if they understand and potentially disastrous if they do not?
  • What construction materials are best? This needs to be considered with respect to practicality, local skill availability, durability and what is culturally accepted.
We are affiliated by Engineers Without Borders UK who are there for advice, provide pre-departure training for volunteers and offer insurance while out there. We have gratefully received £2,000 from the university Alumni Foundation and £11,000 from the Queen’s School of Engineering to support the project and the lab testing we’re planning before the trip this summer. We will be blogging and updating our website as the project progresses.
For more information about this project, photos, travel reports and journal entries can be found on our website: beninwater.my-free.website.
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This blog is written by Daniela Rossade, a 2nd year mechanical engineering student at the University of Bristol and is running this project as part of Engineers Without Borders Bristol.
Daniela Rossade
EWB Bristol is always looking for advice and people who have experience with rainwater harvesting and international development to learn from. We also value feedback on our ideas. If you are interested your help would be gratefully appreciated.  Please contact Daniela at ds14678@my.bristol.ac.uk.

Is benchmarking the best route to water efficiency in the UK’s irrigated agriculture?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Irrigation pump. Image credit Wikimedia 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 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. 

Approximately 71% of UK land (17.4 million hectares) is used for agriculture – with 9.3 million hectares (70%) of land in England used for such operations. The benefits of this land use are well-known – providing close to 50% of the UK’s food consumption.  Irrigated agriculture forms an important fulcrum within this sector, as well as contributing extensively to the rural economy. In eastern England alone, it is estimated that 50,000 jobs depend upon irrigated agriculture – with the sector reported to contribute close to £3 billion annually to the region’s economy.
It is estimated that only 1-2% of the water abstracted from rivers and groundwater in England is consumed by irrigation. When compared to the figures from other nations, this use of water by agriculture is relatively low.  In the USA, agricultural operations account for approximately 80-90% of national consumptive water use. In Australia, water usage by irrigation over 2013/14 totalled 10,730 gigalitres (Gl) – 92% of the total agricultural water usage in that period (11,561 Gl).
However, the median prediction of nine forecasts of future demand in the UK’s agricultural sector has projected a 101% increase in demand between today and 2050. In this country, irrigation’s water usage is often concentrated during the driest periods and in the catchments where resources are at their most constrained. Agriculture uses the most water in the regions where water stress is most obvious: such as East Anglia. The result is that, in some dry summers, agricultural irrigation may become the largest abstractor of water in these vulnerable catchments.
With climate change creating a degree of uncertainty surrounding future water availability across the country, it has become a necessity for policy and research to explore which routes can provide the greatest efficiency gains for agricultural resilience. A 2015 survey by the National Farmers Union  found that many farmers lack confidence in securing long term access to water for production – with only a third of those surveyed feeling confident about water availability in five years’ time. In light of this decreasing availability, the need to reduce water demand within this sector has never been more apparent.
Evidence from research and the agricultural practice across the globe provides us with a number of possible routes. Improved on-farm management practice, the use of trickle irrigation, the use of treated wastewater for irrigation and the building of reservoirs point to a potential reduction in water usage.
Yet, something stands in the way of the implementation of these schemes and policies that support them: People. The adoption of new practices tends to be determined by a number of social factors – depending on the farm and the farmer. As farmers are the agents within this change, it is important to understand the characteristics that often guide their decision-making process and actions in a socio-ecological context.
Let’s remember, there is no such thing as your ‘average farmer’. Homogeneity is not a word that British agriculture is particularly aware of. As a result, efforts to increase water use efficiency need to understand how certain characteristics influence the potential for action. Wheeler et al. have found a number of characteristics that can influence adaptation strategies. For example, a farmer with a greater belief in the presence of climate change is more likely to adopt mitigating or adaptive measures. Importantly, this can also be linked to more-demographic factors. As Islam et al. have argued, risk scepticism can be the result of a number of factors (such as: age, economic status, education, environmental and economic values) and that these can be linked to the birth cohort effect.
This is not to say that all farmers of a certain age are climate-sceptics but it does point to an important understanding of demography as a factor in the adoption of innovative measures. Wheeler et al. went on to cite variables of environment values, commercial orientation, perceptions of risk and the presence of an identified farm successor as potentially directing change in practice . Research by Stephenson has shown that farmers who adopt new technologies tend to be younger and more educated, have higher incomes, larger farm operations and are more engaged with primary sources of information.
Yet, there is one social pressure that future policy must take into account – friendly, neighbourly competition. Keeping up with the Joneses. Not wanting Farmer Giles down the lane knowing that you overuse water in an increasingly water-scarce future. This can be harnessed within a system of benchmarking. Benchmarking involves the publication of individual farm’s water use, irrigation characteristics and efficiency and farming practice. Although data is supplied anonymously, individual farmers will be able to see how they measure up against their neighbours, competitors and others elsewhere.
Benchmarking is used in other agricultural sub-sectors. A 2010 survey found that 24% of farmers from different sectors used benchmarking in their management processes. This is particularly evident in the dairy sector, where both commercial and public organisations use the methods as a way to understand individual farm performance – an important example of this would be DairyCo’s Milkbench+ initiative. In 2004, over 950,000 hectares of irrigated land in Australia, 385,000 hectares in China and 330, 000 hectares in Mexico were subjected to benchmarking processes as a mean to gauge their environmental, operational and financial characteristics.

The result is that irrigators would have the means to compare how they are performing relative to other growers – allowing the answering of important questions of ‘How well am I doing?’ ‘How much better could I do?’ and ‘How do I do it?’ Furthermore, this route can be perceived as limiting the potential for ‘free-riding’ behaviour within a catchment as well emphasise the communal nature of these vulnerable resources. We’ve all seen ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ result in increased consumption – benchmarking provides us with an important route to use this socialised nudging for good.

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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 1 of this blog series Why is there a difficult absence of water demand forecasting in the UK?

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
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