The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is engaging with land managers to discuss the issues associated with water abstraction for irrigation.

Abstractions for irrigation can have a significant impact on rivers and watercourses. During a recent assessment Scotland’s environment watchdog found that a large number of watercourses, particularly in the east of Scotland, were downgraded due to abstraction activities.

Information was gathered on the cropping patterns on farms and on the volumes of water required to support these crops.  This has been used to further refine the impact assessment work and has confirmed the significant pressure that abstractions place on certain watercourses during dry periods.

SEPA has developed a number of options to enable the sustainable use of the limited water available for abstractions and to ensure that the requirements of the Water Framework Directive are being met.

With a view to reducing the pressures on water resources, SEPA now intends to discuss the issues raised from this work with the abstractors who are farming in the impacted catchments. These discussions will cover issues such as:

•    abstraction data returns;
•    water efficiency;
•    the requirement to provide metering in the worst affected catchments in 2012;
•    water storage;
•    irrigation programming and methods of resource sharing;
•    ensuring that a certain base flow is left in the watercourse.

SEPA hopes that abstractors will engage in this review process to ensure that their views are heard and taken into account, and hopes to integrate this work with the diffuse pollution management programme currently underway in order to minimise the number of visits to land managers.

The Agency first issued licences for the abstraction of water in Scotland in 2005.  A significant number of these were for irrigation of crops and they were meant to reflect the historical practices carried out on farms.

However, it would appear that many applications were made for greater volumes of water than are actually used and that a proportion of applications were made for farming units that did not historically abstract water. Both of these factors have increased the pressure on available water resources.

SEPA will be contacting farmers in impacted catchments over the next 18 months to progress the reviews.