Archive for month: March, 2017

Dr Dustin Garrick, Co-director of the Smith School’s Water Programme, discusses the impact of water stress on urban-rural tensions at World Bank Water Week.

The World Bank Group’s Water Global Practice held its annual Water Week at the University of Maryland from March 13-16, bringing together over 500 participants from the Bank and beyond, to promote dialogue and learning around the theme of Delivering a Water-Secure World for All.

The event hosted a number of technical sessions around the Bank’s five practice areas – 1)Water Supply and Sanitation and Water Quality; 2) Water Security and Water Resource Management; 3) Water in Agriculture; 4) Water, Poverty, and the Economy; and 5) Hydropower and Dams – in addition to a series of plenaries.

This year, Dr Dustin Garrick, Lecturer in Environmental Management at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (SSEE), and Co-Director of the SSEE’s Water Programme, represented Oxford University in a plenary exploring water scarcity and climate change. World Bank Chief Economist for Climate Change, Marianne Fay, chaired the session which included representatives from Columbia University, Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

Dr Garrick’s presentation, entitled ‘Farm to tap?  Resilient cities and rural livelihoods in a water stressed world’, explored how water stress and severe drought have placed cities under pressure, threatening the engines of growth and strategic national interests. Dr Garrick began his presentation by framing the water resource allocation challenges facing cities competing with agriculture for scarce water supplies to enhance resilience to climate shocks.

After a summary of the hotpots and dynamics of rural-urban competition for water globally, Dr Garrick surveyed the rapid innovations in allocation policy, infrastructure governance and digital water solutions to measure and manage water risk. These experiences from fast growing cities and rural towns of Africa and Latin America illustrate the challenges and opportunities for innovation to sustain growth, reduce inequality and enhance freshwater resilience.

Dr Garrick’s participation in World Bank Water Week marks a continuation of Oxford University’s long-standing relationship with the World Bank. Recent notable collaborations include the high-level panel hosted by the Oxford Water Network at the Martin School in January.

Dr Simon Dadson, Associate Professor in Physical Geography at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment, explores his recent research reviewing the scientific evidence around natural flood management in the UK.

Flooding devastates communities and takes billions of pounds out of the UK economy. In 2015 Storm Desmond broke all the records with 341mm of rainfall in 24 hours in the wettest Lake District December since records began in 1788. The Association of British Insurers has estimated that Desmond cost £1.3 billion, but when you add on the uninsured losses and costs to the public purse for repairing critical infrastructure like flood defences, roads, bridges and railways, the total bill reaches more than £5 billion.

Historical evidence suggests that whilst the Cumbria floods are record-breaking compared with living memory, they are not completely unprecedented: periods of severe flooding hit the UK in 1947 and 1929, the latter half of the 19th century was particularly flood-rich, and geological evidence shows there were even bigger floods in the 17th century. Meteorologists say the spate of floods since the mid-1990s is down to an unusually warm North Atlantic bringing an intermittent stream of strong storms across the UK; and while the blame for the recent floods can’t be pinned for certain on global warming, climate change looks likely to increase flood risk in the future, with more intense summer storms and wetter winters in the uplands of the west.

Faced with the prospect of severe flooding continuing, governments and flood-hit communities are searching for solutions. Natural flood management – restoring the landscape to reverse or mitigate the impacts of agriculture and urbanisation – has hit the headlines regularly in recent years as a possible answer. Its advocates point to benefits for wildlife, biodiversity and landscapes; and the fact that it can be much more cost effective to manage flood risk at source than to deal with the aftermath of flooding when it occurs. But for policymakers, natural flood management presents a complex and delicate balancing act between the needs of different groups, including the public, farmers and landowners. Added to that is the more fundamental issue that its effectiveness at both small and large scales has been unclear.

An 18-month, comprehensive review of the scientific evidence on natural flood management, commissioned by the Oxford Martin School and aimed at helping to navigate these murky waters, has just published its results.

Carried out by experts from across the country, it found that the evidence for natural flood management is strongest when targeted at local problems with minor flooding. A good example of this is the community-led Pontbren Farmers Project in which tree ‘shelterbelts’ have been planted in carefully-chosen places on the hillsides. The local benefits to the farmers themselves are very clear, during small storms at least: the presence of trees (and the absence of livestock) increases the rate at which water soaks into the soil. The shelterbelts also stop soil silting up rivers and limit the spread of agricultural pollution downstream. But in spells of very wet weather the power of the trees to prevent flooding diminishes, leading to only a 2-11% reduction in flood flows. This reduction is not to be sniffed at, and of course there are the added benefits for biodiversity, soil conservation and the landscape. But ultimately it does not make for a reliable defence against the worst floods.

Another conundrum is that, in studies up to now, the collective effects of small-scale measures don’t seem to add up to a significant flood risk reduction over all. In one of the biggest studies of natural flood management, in the Hodder River catchment in Lancashire, the local water utility company tried initiatives such as reducing sheep numbers on farmland, and whilst a local impact was detectable, these measures had little effect in the main river. The project scientists later established that the maximum flood level was heavily influenced by several critical zones in the river basin, offering hope that these measures can be targeted in the future.

So do these issues mean natural flood management won’t be able to fulfil the promise many hope it holds? Reviewing the evidence shows it’s certainly not a silver bullet, and won’t protect against the effects of the worst storms, but the news isn’t all bad.

It’s likely to be best put into service where there’s a combination of risk of minor floods, and where there will be benefits for wildlife and the landscape. Natural measures can be implemented alongside traditional flood risk management too: in Pickering in North Yorkshire, the community has come together to provide protection against a one-in-25 year flood, although the jury is still out on how much of this is down to woodland measures in the uplands versus an engineered offline storage reservoir downstream.

There are more than 170 natural flood management schemes in operation in the UK: each put in place to tackle a pressing local flood problem, and often driven by the enthusiasm of community groups and responsible land managers. What we need now is proper monitoring and evaluation of these schemes, and the Environment Agency should fund them where they work and where they give value for money.

• Full paper – A restatement of the natural science evidence concerning catchment-based ‘natural’ flood management in the UK.

This post was first published by the Oxford Martin School.

Oxford research supporting water security in the Jordan Basin.

Jordan is one of the most water scarce countries per capita in the world. This situation has been compounded by the arrival of up to 1.5 million refugees displaced by the conflict in Syria, placing additional demands on water resources for human and economic uses.

Over the past 20 years, Jordan has made considerable progress in enhancing agricultural water productivity, which has allowed new water resources to be directed at higher economic returns in the non-agricultural sector. Food imports have also helped reduce pressure on the agricultural sector (and with it national water resources) to meet growing population food needs.

Despite Jordan’s impressive past achievements, best practice in agricultural water productivity elsewhere in near region demonstrates potential for further improvements in water productivity within Jordan’s agricultural sector. Such savings would allow new planned water resources to be more intensely directed at the industrial and service economy.

For the past year, with funding from the British Council’s Institutional Links program, Oxford University has been coordinating research partnerships in the region, to understand past trends in water resource use and to highlight the volumetric gains that could be achieved if regional best practice on agricultural water productivity were to be implemented in Jordan.

Focusing initially on national statistics for crop production and water use analysed by Oxford, the research has also involved farm-level interviews conducted by regional partners, which have broadly verified the trends of aggregate national data, as well as identifying different trends in agricultural knowledge and support in the region.

The results from the project ‘Delivering Food and Water Security for a Middle East in Flux (DeFWS) will be published in a working paper due out later this month. You can preview the headline findings in a recent Jordan Times article.