Continued from Part 1

Unlike the relatively high rainfall of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, England’s water situation is surprisingly perilous. London only has 90 days of water storage at any one time. A water industry insider told me that in 2012, shortly before the Olympics, the capital came within days of exceeding that tally. If it had, Thames Water would have been forced to cut supply to households and install public standpipes. That situation – dubbed “Day Zero” when Cape Town, South Africa, faced the same predicament in 2018 – remains a serious possibility.

Andrew Tucker, water efficiency manager at Thames Water, tells me bluntly that, in London and the south-east, “we basically don’t have enough product, going forward. Ultimately, we will need to bring new water supply into the system … All water companies in the UK rely on winter rainfall to recharge these systems … If we don’t get that winter recharge, it just drops and keeps on dropping, because our raw water storage [reservoirs] is actually quite small.”

Tucker is Australian and says mates back home find it funny that England can have a water problem, given its wet reputation. “We do get a lot of grey days. But grey doesn’t mean rain. Even drizzle doesn’t mean rain.” He gives me a quiz question: “Which Australian state capital city gets more rain on average every year than London?” I guess Sydney. “They all do.”

There are several reasons for England’s comparative lack of water storage, Tucker says. First, “every square inch of land has been used pretty intensively for the last thousand years and there’s not much room to play with”. Second, the south-east is relatively flat, with no valleys to dam. Third, we have a population poorly educated in the need for water saving or living with drought. And water is too cheap – or at least not valued. When we speak, Thames Water’s combined water supply and wastewater charge is about £2.20 per 1,000l. “You pay the same for one litre of water at WH Smith at the train station,” he says.

Tucker argues that education and cultural awareness are even greater drivers of water efficiency than price, though. He says they are trying to advocate the introduction of water-use restrictions, like in Australia, so “it becomes a cultural thing”. He notes that, in England, companies are “crucified in the media” for suggesting ways the public can reduce seasonal demand. When I suggest that, after months of heavy winter rain, the public perception is, “Well, why wasn’t that banked somewhere?”, he quickly interjects: “There is no bank. We want a bank. We’ve been prevented from getting a bank for 20 years.”

Thames Water estimates that by 2045, it will need to find an extra 350m litres of water supply a day. The “bank” that they’ve wanted for 20 years is the long-planned but never built Abingdon reservoir. First proposed by Thames Water in 2006, it would be the largest major reservoir built in southern England since Rutland Water in 1976, and capable of supplying their entire shortfall with one big project.

The problem is, as Tucker identified, the region has no valleys to flood. The site near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, is perfectly flat, fertile farmland. The only way to build is up – what’s known as a “bunded reservoir” – and Thames Water wants a 150bn-litre capacity, which could take nine years to build, according to local campaigners, covering more than 6sq km of land, with built-up banks 30 metres high – making it the largest bunded reservoir in the world. This wouldn’t just be a blot on the landscape, it would be the landscape.

A public inquiry in 2010 produced a 326-page report concluding that the Abingdon reservoir proposal did not meet the statutory requirements and that a reservoir of that size was not justified by the evidence. That didn’t stop Thames Water from putting it – with minor tweaks and changes – into every five-year management plan since. Now rebranded the South East Strategic Reservoir Option, as a joint proposal between Thames Water and Affinity Water (supplier of drinking water to the south-east, owned by various fund managers), it looks likely to finally go ahead.

England does need more water storage – and London’s 90-day supply is clearly untenable with dry summers set to increase. But does it need a giant sledge-hammer solution to land in rural Oxfordshire? Or, as local campaigners the Group Against Reservoir Development argue, are there myriad other, less damaging, options on the table? One of which is the storage beneath our feet.

Regenerative agriculture, a system that works without ploughing, has begun to attract attention in places as far-flung as the US, Australia and the UK. The idea of the “no-till” method is to prevent soil disturbance at all costs. Tilling (another term for ploughing) is “like a tornado coming through an ecosystem”, explains Evan Wiig, a former rancher who now promotes regenerative farming for the Community Alliance With Family Farmers. The plough destroys the connections between “the fungi, the nematodes, the earthworms, all of that subterranean ecosystem. The more you can keep that intact, the better water-holding capacity you have.” Healthy soil is a sponge of crisscrossing roots, wormholes and mycorrhizal fungi, all of which retains moisture, maintains nutrients and captures carbon. You also find healthy, recharged aquifers beneath.

Unlike in the western US, where artificial irrigation is necessary, farming in the UK is almost entirely rainfed. But the rains are becoming less and less reliable. James Alexander’s family has been farming in Oxfordshire for generations. “There’s no seasons any more,” he said. “For the last three years, we’ve just had wet and dry. It does get a little colder in the winter, but not like it used to … the last two winters have been two of the wettest on record, but actually that rain’s only fallen in about six weeks.”

It was May when I visited in 2021, and he asked, rhetorically: “Remember April showers? We only had 2mm of rain last month.” That’s why he now prefers no-till farming. He described conventionally ploughed fields as containing “sad soil”, simply a dead growing medium to hold the plants upright; many litres of pesticide and fertiliser need to be sprayed to grow anything in it. The topsoil also compacts under the constant heavy machinery, forming a hard cap layer, causing nearby roads to turn into muddy streams with each significant rainfall.

Out on the no-till field, meanwhile, his boots never get muddy. The soil forms an intricate sponge that soaks up water, both delivering it down to the groundwater and maintaining moisture for the crops. The undisturbed mycelial fungal network has been found to supply 80% of a crop’s nitrogen requirements and up to 100% of its phosphorus requirements, and to provide water to crops in times of drought.

We gain underground water storage too. And not just a marginal gain. Water supply, and water storage, all comes down to capturing rainfall – and there is no greater surface area in England than farmland. Jake Rigg, then director of corporate affairs and communities at Affinity Water, in the east of England, told me he had asked an agricultural research institute to establish how much more water can go to the natural underground aquifer using no-till techniques. “And they said, ‘You’re talking about having an Abingdon reservoir-sized amount of extra water in the aquifer’.” Such a volume would, in effect, solve England’s water-scarcity problem. Without, by the way, having to build the Abingdon reservoir.

On England’s south coast, Southern Water are now paying farmers to leave crops on their fields over winter, rather than bare, tilled earth – financially incentivising no-till farming. This is not only for the groundwater-recharge benefits, but also to reduce nitrates from conventional farming leaching into the groundwater and rivers. Robin Kelly, catchment risk management officer at Southern Water, told me that “nitrate concentrations in many of our groundwater sources are high and rising, and it is this trend we are focusing on and trying to reverse. The results clearly show a benefit of having continuous green cover over the winter.” In the first year of the scheme, farmers near Brighton were offered £35 per hectare of overwinter cover crops. In some regions, this has since increased to £109/ha. The simple calculation is that it’s more expensive for water companies to treat the water than it is to pay the farmers not to pollute it in the first place.

We can all do our bit to capture the rain. While the average Briton uses more than 150l a day, performance artist Chloe Whipple spent a year living on just 15l of mains water a day. Key to her success – which began via a project matching local artists with scientists, and paired her with Exeter University’s water expert Dr Peter Melville-Shreeve – was rainwater. A small grant helped her to get a 200l rainwater butt plumbed into her toilet. Collected rainwater was counted as free to use. And it changed her relationship with the rain for ever.

Despite living on the relatively dry south coast, “there is so much rainfall,” Whipple says. “I mean, obviously, there’s more and more dry periods now. But there’s so much that we could be harvesting and storing.” You might think, then, that Whipple’s message would be that everyone should do more to reduce their personal water use. It is partly that. But her main message is quite different. “I feel like, a lot of the time, the onus is on us as individuals to completely change our behaviour, and buy all the stuff we need to be self-sufficient – that it’s our sole responsibility … When really it’s a much bigger picture.”

Melville-Shreeve has tried to engage housing developers and water companies with large-scale rollouts of domestic rainwater capture, only to be frustrated; Whipple, too, sees a lack of engagement from the very authorities tasked with averting the coming water crisis. “There’s just literally no one making decisions for the long term, it’s so shortsighted,” she says.

The waste that happens in our water systems, the pollution of our rivers, the leakages in the underground pipes, the building codes that allow developers to build water- inefficient houses: all that happens before we even turn a tap on. The wastage, the 150l a day, is built into the system. There is a lot we can do as individuals, but those things almost all boil down to water-efficient appliances, rainwater capture and greywater recycling, all of which could and should be integral to water company practices and building regulations. In Belgium, for example, you don’t consider installing a rainwater-capture tank in a newbuild home – you have to.

Should we all be showering with buckets by our feet to capture the water and reuse? It’s not a bad idea. In parts of the world that have experienced water rationing, such as Cape Town, and mining towns in Australia, it remains a common practice – once you’ve lived it, the lessons tend to stick. But the bigger wins are to be found in changing water company practices through regulation, and incentivising new farming practices through education and compensation: Defra’s environmental land-management services payments can incentivise regenerative and cover-crop farming methods, and compensate for the restoration of floodplains. This should include beaver reintroductions, which have been found to regenerate and restore rivers and wetlands.

We canalised our rivers, drained our land, overpumped our groundwater, dried our wetlands, burned our peat, killed off our keystone species, all in the belief that modern engineering had decoupled us from our dependence on the natural system. It was always hubris.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/15/drought-is-on-the-verge-of-becoming-the-next-pandemic?utm_term=649275cb856300bea170ac9973fe1f0e&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUK&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUK_email