The water industry, working through Water UK, has commissioned a consortium of Atkins, Mott McDonald and NERA to carry out a major project on the resilience of water supplies over at least the next 50 years.
The project will aim to strengthen the overall resilience of water resources for all water users and to protect the environment.
The steering group for the project includes water companies, Defra, the Welsh Government, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and Natural England. The project is aiming to report in the middle of 2016.
To understand better the challenges the industry faces over the long term, and to help shape a high level strategy and framework for the long term planning of water resources in England and Wales.
The study, which covers England and Wales, will consider a range of issues, including:
- England and Wales’ long term water needs and practical steps required to meet it
- extending the interconnectivity between water companies’ existing resources, including through the use of canals and rivers
- consideration of opportunities and options for the operation of assets owned by the EA
- and new storage schemes.
The study will also seek to understand the potential impact of other sectors, including agriculture, energy abstractors, businesses, the wider UK economy and other critical national infrastructure - to understand their future water needs and potential for trading and/or other solutions to support resilience across all sectors.
In a briefing paper outlining the background to the research and setting out its terms of reference, Water UK said the water industry in England and Wales faces major challenges over the short, medium and long term. The challenges include the need to achieve sustainable levels of abstraction and a changing climate under which run-off and recharge rates are likely to reduce and under which severe events such as droughts will become more frequent and severe.
In addition, the population of the UK is forecast to increase by approx. 10 million over the next 35 years. These challenges will both add pressure to the areas already classified by the EA as being under water resources threat and increase the number of areas that fall under that classification, Water UK said.
Many of the water companies already have extended water resource management plans to consider worst case climate change, population growth and sustainable abstraction scenarios. However, while maintaining the balance between supplies and demand drives demand management approaches, in many scenarios demand management is unlikely to bridge the whole gap between supply and demand and new upstream resources may be required, according to the industry body.
Demand management to remain at forefront of any planning framework
The briefing paper says demand management will remain at the forefront of any future planning framework and consideration needs to be given to further scope to stretch the water sector’s ambition on sustainably reducing demand in the future. Upstream resource options in company specific plans include desalination, water re-use, groundwater recharge and winter storage. New solutions will need to be considered to provide resilience - options flagged up include:
First stage of the project will be to obtain a sector-wide view of resilience to provide clarity on the levels of service in companies’ water resource management plans and to understand how the levels of service might be achieved under the full range of possible future droughts. The analysis will then inform a debate on the costs and benefits of setting different minimum levels of service and on the future scenarios used in the long term planning framework.
The next step will be to consider the full range of options for delivering resilience, including cross-boundary collaboration.
“Potential asset requirements identified must be deliverable without legislative changes"
The individual outputs from the project tasks will be analysed and evaluated to confirm demand and supply side investment needed over the 25 and 50 year planning periods. The analysis will confirm, at high level, a framework for strategic water resource and transfer assets to secure resources for vulnerable areas of England and Wales. Water UK said it will be important that potential asset requirements identified are “credible and deliverable without legislative changes. “
Scope of the project includes a report on the capacity and connectivity of the current asset base via mapping existing large capacity water resources and transfer assets (including assets to be delivered in AMP6), including assets currently owned and operated by the Environment Agency. It will also map other potential transfer routes, including canals, rivers and other waterways.
Project to develop potential investment options – but no assets “wish-list”
The project will also aim to develop potential investment options, including investment in demand management as well as strategic assets, to bridge any gap between the planning scenarios and current/forecast system capacity, with indicative costs and benefits assessed for each option.
However, Water UK said the project will not produce an “assets wish-list.”
A number of other projects looking at UK water resources are separately also under way.
The Canals and Rivers Trust, together with a number of water companies, has separately commissioned Black and Veatch to assess the potential for the use of canals and rivers to transport water as part of a national resources strategy.
For example, in Lincolnshire, the Trent Witham Ancholme Scheme is likely to form a key part of a future system to transfer water to any winter storage asset in order to maintain long term supplies for WASCs and WCS operating in the east of England.
According to Water UK, pressure on water resources in the South East and East of England is particularly acute. Two groups, Water Resources South East (WRSE) and Water Resources East Anglia (WREA) have been developing collaborative long term plans - multi sector in the case of WREA.
Click here to download Water UK’s briefing paper setting out the terms of reference for the project.