Water Stewardship in the 21st Century

The impacts of extreme weather are being felt by us all and scientific research points to a likely worsening of weather patterns in the next decades. Therefore, it is imperative to think carefully about how we build the infrastructure of the future to increase the resilience of our societies.
Over the past three years the UK has experienced some of the most varied and extreme weather events and seasonal trends ever recorded. We may not be able to link these directly to climate change, but since 2011 we have seen examples of precisely the type of extreme conditions that climate projections suggest are likely to be the norm in the future. Are we preparing well to cope with these changes? Will our water infrastructure meet the changing pressures and demands? Will our landscape be resilient and able to buffer extreme weather? As communities, are we willing to adapt our behaviour to a changing climate? These are questions that we all need to urgently consider.

As a water company, we at Anglian Water need to understand what role we play in the water cycle and, more widely, in a society tackling these challenges. In the UK, water companies are privately owned and provide either only water services to their customers or, in addition, treat used water before returning it to the environment. Water companies prioritize improving customer service, maintaining assets and infrastructure, improving drinking water quality and the quality of water returned to the environment, and managing the balance between supply and demand.

To put this into perspective, in the region where Anglian Water operates — East Anglia and the east midlands — we are investing £2.3 billion over the period 2010-2015 to achieve those objectives1for the benefit of the 6 million domestic customers and 110,000 businesses who rely on us every day to maintain their quality of life and sustain their operations respectively. At 137 local water treatment works, Anglian Water abstracted, treated and supplied 1.1 billion litres of high-quality drinking water through 38,000km of water mains every day last year. Over 900 million litres of used water were taken back, through 76,000km of sewers, and treated in 1,124 water recycling centres before being returned to the environment. Looking to the future, water availability should not limit society's ability to support a growing, thriving and healthy population. Water companies are required to provide services for new developments (domestic or industrial) wherever they emerge, but are not statutory consultees in the planning process. To raise the water issue up the agenda, we have worked with the Environment Agency and local authorities to provide information on pinch points using documents called water-cycle studies. However, when a decision is made, we are sometimes left with the challenging task of dealing with the water-related impacts.

Our region is fast growing, has a long coastline and much of the land is low lying; that is why we have focused on managing the impacts of housing growth and climate change in our business planning. We have developed a sustainable road map for our business — 'Love every drop' — to ensure we deliver the long-term outcomes we have identified when planning for the period 2015-2020. Ten outcomes were agreed during a consultation process that saw tens of thousands of our customers give their views on our future direction as part of our regulatory business planning process for the period to 2020 (http://go.nature.com/eFmOZH).

The water challenges
The UK's 2012 Climate Change Risk Assessment stated that "by the 2080s, reductions in summer river flows may be significant across the UK, with the largest decreases in southern and eastern England. By the 2080s almost the whole UK population may be living in areas affected by a supply-demand deficit unless significant action is taken both to reduce the demand for water and to increase supplies"2. In other words, in a number of instances, we will have to cope with 'too little' water (Fig. 1a). However, too much water brings other challenges; the report also states that the area of land used for high-quality horticultural and arable production, which is liable to flood at least once in every 3 years, could rise from the present level of 30,000 ha to 75,000 ha by 2050 and to 130,000 ha by 2080. The area of the UK's agricultural land at risk from flooding is projected to increase by 150% by 20802. If these predictions were not enough to gain widespread attention, then the extreme weather that we have experienced in the UK since the release of the risk assessment report should have provided enough of a dramatic illustration

Read more

Media

Taxonomy

• Water Scarcity
• Sustainability
• Water Integrity