Securing Water Solutions in an Era of Climate Extremes

The impact of climate change on our day-to-day weather is evident.

In the wake of a summer when months of drought gripped some regions of the UK, rainfall in late autumn and winter fell with intensity and persistence, submerging vast areas of farmland under water. 

This is the age of ‘whiplash weather’, a phrase recently coined by scientists and forecasters to describe the flip between these extremes.

Wild swings in weather are expected to be a regular feature going forward and that is clearly a worrying prospect for farming businesses.

But there are groups of farmers who are pursuing solutions to shore up their business resilience, aided by an Environment Agency (EA) initiative.

The EA commissioned Brown&Co to produce screening studies on behalf of groups of farmers in several English counties to investigate collaborative options for establishing water resource.

The Local Resource Option Screening Study is an initiative which encourages collaboration for enhancing water resilience or supply for groups of abstractors. Proposed strategies for several groups were drawn up by a team at Brown&Co.

Water balances across the farms were reviewed and potential alternative water resources options investigated, including near Sudbourne, Suffolk, in the Nar catchment near Kings Lynn, the Lower Bure catchment, Norfolk, and in the Tidal Bure catchment near Great Yarmouth.

Farmers were involved in ranking the solutions identified to narrow them down, allowing Brown&Co to investigate the shortlisted options in more depth.

In Aldeburgh, for example, the top options identified were aquifer recharge, outflow collection, automation of abstraction, and water sharing. In the Tidal Bure catchment building a reservoir was investigated.

Brown&Co has just completed two further screenings, on fenland at Brandon, and on the Isle of Axholme at Wroot near Doncaster.

This innovative collaborative approach is not restricted to England; in Wales, Natural Resources Wales has commissioned Brown&Co to identify soil management opportunities in the Cadoxton river catchment in the Vale of Glamorgan, ones that farmers could adopt to improve water retention to prevent flood water reaching the town of Dinas Powys.

As a next stage, the EA, Defra and other agencies will identify barriers to progressing the projects identified and how these could be addressed. 

To help progress further water resource resilience, the EA is also disseminating the ideas in the Brown&Co reports with organisations such as the Water for Food Group, the independent lead point of contact for technical matters relating to water resource planning and food.