As a lead-up to COP28, which took place in early November in Dubai, the CIWEM Central Southern branch annual seminar series for 2023 examined the extreme future of water in a period of climate emergency, whether it was having too little or too much of it.
Managing and communicating the risk of a future where we faced both an increasing risk of flooding and an increasing risk of droughts was a major challenge for our sector. Over three days, we heard from a wide range of experts in their fields about the impacts of too much and too little water on people and the environment, and some of the innovative solutions trying to address this challenge.
All three one-hour sessions comprised short presentations from a range of speakers followed by a facilitated discussion.
This was part of the CIWEM Climate Emergency Adaptation & Resilience series.
This webinar took place on 17 October 2023.
Make a start so hi yes I’m Jed Ramsey I’m the outgoing chair for the S Central Southern Branch my day job I work at Council leading project groundwater and today we’re going to be looking at climate change and future extremes of water and focus for today’s uh webinar
Is looking at the impacts of that over the next two days we’ve got another webinar each lunchtime so hopefully you can maybe drop into one of those or both of those as well um just a few little housekeeping notes leis if you want to go on a slide please um the webinar is
Going to be recorded we normally publish them on YouTube sometimes after and if you got any technical issues please use the chat feature on Zoom to report those and we’ll s in the background we’ll try to help out with that um we will have a question session
So the format of the webinar is three talks followed by Q&A a kind of panel debate at the end so if if you have any questions as you as it goes through please put them in the Q&A bit of the chat so there’s a chat and there’s a Q&A
So if you use the Q&A for any questions at the end we will try to get through as many of those as we can uh does count CB CBD today um and a little bit about SYM um hopefully you’ve heard of CM I’m sure probably many of you members for those
Of you are not um I am a charted member with sirm it’s a really good thing to do in terms of your career getting professional development recognition um and we’ve run great events like this as well it’s a royal chartered professional body and is an independent charity so for example you
Know everything we’ve done today um and we’ve organized this really as volunteers as being part of the committee and just a little bit of promo on S what we’ve got coming up so one thing I’d highly recommend taking a look at is the S podcast which is called
Planet possible um it’s put together by Nikki roach’s former president and really great interesting topics so if you do like podcasts highly recommend having a look at those um another couple events we got coming up on 6th to 8th of December we’ve got the urban drainage group running their annual conference
Which is a real life inperson conference um there was really technical good solid content for those and on the 11th of November we’ve got fast track to chartership which like I said if you do want to get chartered that’s a good session to attend to help you get
Through that um leis I think we can go on another slide and the links to those are in the uh chat yeah now we’ll move to the talks I’ll just introduce Joe Bradley who’s with us today h Joe’s worked on many aspects of water management during her
30-year career in the UK she’s completed 28 years of the E environment agency where she focused on many pollution prevention topics but in the last decade Joe’s attention has been on pollu ution from Urban services and Roads and she’s worked for SDS limited for four years specifying storm water treat treatment
Devices and sub schemes and in September 2020 she became director of operations for storm water Shepherds UK where she’s now dedicated to puru better storm water management and the development of a funding mechanism to develop that man management something personally I would really entirely support uh so now I’ll
Hand over to Joe for her presentation thanks thanks Jed next slide please leis thank you so I’m talking today about um managing too little and too much water particularly using sustainable drainy system so I just thought just in case that we’ve got any people in the room who aren’t familiar
With Suds sustainable Drainage Systems I do one slide just as an intro so um Suds are drainage systems that try to mimic the natural drainage that would have been on a site before it was developed and this is an excellent example this is a small um Basin at the bottom of
Residential development uh it captures the surface water that runs off that development when it rains and it reduces flood risk and and the driver for Suds initially for the first decade or so was really all around flood risk reducing flood risk and capturing water infiltrating water and storing water on
Site to reduce flood flood rist Downstream but at the same time a good Suds device like this one will also deliver improvements in water quality by filtering out pollutants and an imunity benefit for the people who live there because it’s a beautiful place and a habitat for wildlife and this was is a
Fantastic habitat for wildlife um I was down there 10 days ago and it was buzzing with dragon flies and there were small birds coming in to eat the seeds off the plants it was it was genuinely a really beautiful place the one thing that we’ve not thought enough about in
Sud’s design is when there’s too little water um so I’m just going to talk a little bit about how do we make suds both climate change resilient in themselves but also how do we get our studs to help us make our Urban spaces more climate resilient next slide please
Louis so I’ve talk talked about SS Plus or SS with knobs on um so it’s about getting better at SS we’ve been brilliant at SS we’ve they’ve come an awful long way since we first started talking about them but we’ve got I think
Into a bit of a SS rut so we see a lot of ponds on residential developments we see a lot of skinny moan swailes that don’t really do much for biodiversity and we’ve got to move on Step Up A Notch because every Suds device every rain Garden every Bas they have the
Opportunity to do magnificent things partly for nature so to help us with our biodiversity collapse and to reverse that but also um saving water and making water available for other people to use for other things so we’ve got to get better at not only holding the water in
Our Suds so that we reduce flood risk and but saving it so that we’ve got it for those dry periods and hot weather but also sharing it um we’re a bit rubbish um not not not not us in the room I’m sure we’re all beautiful and
Marvelous but there are people who are a bit rubbish at sharing things and I think we need to get better at recognizing the opportunities to share water and and I’ll talk a little bit about how that contributes to habitats for wildlife as well um next slide
Please Louis is an animation so I just wanted to put a SL a mention of this this was published I think last week I certainly only became aware of it last week um the state of global Water Resources 2022 it’s not an easy read um I’ve not
Read it all in detail it’s only just come out but it definitely talks about deep longlasting deep-seated droughts across certain parts of the world but also smaller droughts but more frequent droughts across huge parts of the world and this requirement to to recognize the value of rain water and storm water and
To start thinking about how we can make better use of it next slide Louis please so just to bring that down to scale I’ve gone Global and now I’m going tiny um just to bring us back to focus this is a a rain Garden in North London and um
It’s an award-winning rain Garden in North London and it’s a fantastic Suds device when it rains hard the water runs off the road and the Pavements and goes into the rain Garden you can see the the space there in the curb for the water to get in the water then soaks into the
Ground so it reduces flood RIS Downstream the soil horizons capture some of the pollutants the plants create a really pretty um linear device of flowers and plants and shrubs at the front of a parade of shops and it creates somewhere for pollinators to feed and small mammals to hide and
Insects to uh carry out their their entire life cycle that’s all fine until it stops raining but this was in uh the back end of 2022 when it stopped raining for about six or eight weeks and it basically died and although it recovered quite quickly when it started raining
And the local Authority replaced some of the the dead plants the point is we’ve created that habitat for wildlife and then we’ve let it die and so we’ve let all those things that rely on it die if we’re genuinely going to create habitats wildlife in our Urban spaces as part of
Our sub schemes we have to be honest about that and say this is this is a home or or a a refuge or a feeding station for insects and small mammals and invert and we have to sustain it because otherwise everything that relies on that
Is dead and so I’m going to talk a little bit more about how we can do that next slide please L and click again because this has got some extra text so this little hedgehog I use this slide a lot and I know it’s sad but this little
Hedgehog died in that first lockdown do you remember the very hot sunny weather we had in the first lockdown um and lots of people were playing out and lots of people were enjoying the outside space but this uh little hedgehog died somewh where I think hartfordshire where
There’s there was no surface water so when it stops raining not only do our sustainable Trang devices die back or die off but also there’s no surface water anymore there’s fewer ponds I think 50% of the ponds in the UK have got been lost in the last 30 or 40 years
There’s less surface water about in people’s Gardens we we don’t like wet places in our Gardens so we tend to eradicate them and so creatures like this when the rivers and the Stream the chalk streams dry up that some of the small streams even in chalk um areas
Like sorry clay areas like Lancashire some of the small streams will dry up the ponds dry up small creatures like this have got nowhere to go and they died and lots of them died um and and even even this year we’ve had Hedgehog deaths reported on on social media as well
So it it’s we’ve got to get better I don’t want to be all twe and talk about sort of saving little fluffy hedgehogs but we’ve got to get better at recognizing that we are creating habitats for these creatures and we have to make them sustainable habitats next
Slide please Lou so the best way to do that is to think about ecosystems I’m not an ecologist and I apologize to ecologists in the room because you know this better than me but we have to think about the entire ecosystem right down to the microscopic organisms in the soil
Horizons the microscopic fungi the connectivity between species through that fungal Network and then that the whole ecosystem from the soil horizon into the plants up into the trees tree canopy up your green wall onto your green roof the whole thing has to be connected and the whole thing has to
Exist in its entirety it’s not good enough to have just a tree pit with nothing else around it you need lots of tree pits and then you need a green wall and a green roof to provide roosting and nesting and feeding opportunities for the creatures that are going to live in
Your tree so start with your soil and I challenge you all when you’re next out and about in your local town to look for open soil horizons or open grass surfaces with with soil that’s accessible to invertebrates and insects because we are eradicating them all the
Time and that’s where I think Suds can really help Suds can start to bring back the soil and that will be a brilliant thing the trick then is to keep that soil moist so I’ll mention that again in a minute next slide please Louis and then this is my other bug bear
Is lights um fairy lights on trees presson City C City Center has a parade of trees all the way down the main road they’re really Subs devices just Urban trees but they’re all illuminated with fairy lights and so we create these things and we we tick a box when we do
The planning application we ticked the little biodiversity yes we’re creating habitat for wildlife and then we illuminate it so actually it’s not a habitat for anything because anything nocturnal can’t live there anything that needs the space and the Darkness can’t live there it interferes with the the
Water management of that tree because it interferes with the way the tree functions and it’s just a bluming nightmare so we need to St with the fairy lights and also in bigger sud spaces be much more sensitive about how we illuminate them I know we have to
Keep them safe I know we have to keep them uh so that people feel safe going into them but we can do that without lighting the entire thing and without lighting up the bushes and the trees and the shrubs and the soil and The Damp dark soggy spaces that we’ve created for
Creatures we mustn’t then illuminate them all night because then that spoils the effect for everybody next slide please and this is something I I love and in fact I was at Sheffield greater green the other day and the apple trees in Sheffield greater green were fruiting
Have to say my daughter and I dried an apple but they were very small and weren’t quite ripe so we we regretted that but there’s this is something else we can do we we we bring these creatures into our Urban centers we bring in birds and insects and small mammals and then
We don’t feed them we must provide food for them but also food for us how lovely if children walk into school school or people walking around the local town can pick a an apple or a damson or a fig or a perhaps figs are a bit Posh but rasberries and blackberries we can
Introduce these things into our Urban green spaces both to provide food for the ecosystem but also to provide food for ourselves and to get people talking and I know that local Authority teams will say well hang on a minute the Fallen fruit is a nightmare it attracts
Wasps it makes a mess it can be slippy on the surface but that’s not a reason not to do this that’s just a reason to find a better way to manage it and so we’ve got to be we’ve got to push back harder and say actually we’ve got to do
This it isn’t an option anymore so let’s get on with it next slide please L and so this is probably the Crux of what I’m trying to say we’ve got to recognize that the water that falls from the sky is precious and it’s not just precious for drinking water it’s
Precious for everything and we have a responsibility almost to capture it and and re re introduce it into the environment in a in a way that Su sustains that environment so we talk about capturing rain water for toilet flushing this um water butt in the image here is a smart water butt which
Captures rain water for use in the garden but also empties itself in the in the in the event of a prevailing storm so that’s a fantastic flood risk management device because it creates disaggregated storage across all our homes in a catchment to capture rainwater in the in the Advent of a
Storm but we can use that water for watering the garden and if we’re really clever we can use the water for flushing toilets but we’ve got to get better than that we’ve got to then take that water and reintroduce it back into the environment so if every one of the shops
On that street in North London had a water butt then when that little rain Garden starts to look saggy and desperate they could water the rain Garden themselves they could take ownership of that rain garden and keep it alive themselves and if these little water butts that were introducing in
Lots of homes in water stressed areas had a leaky pipe going into a shallow disc fish that would provide a water supply for wildlife that was sustained throughout the long dry period it’s about this sustainability but also sustained provision if we’re going to create habitats for creatures we must
Keep them alive if we’re going to provide water for creatures we must make sure it’s there every day if we’re going to create damp dark spaces for creatures to hide from the heat when we have hot spells then we must make sure they’re available in those hot spells so we’ve
Just got to get better at managing storm water next slide Louis please um so this this is Extreme I grant you that and and I’m delighted to say it’s not Britain this is Argentina last year but wildfires are coming and we have had a few in Britain in urban
Centers we’ve also have we’ve got Morland fires in Lancashire on West panine Moors we particularly get Morland fires and so we need to start thinking about capturing that water and when I talked about capturing and sharing that water potentially we can capture that water and have it as a provision for
Firefighting at the same time but this picture I just wanted to read you a little bit of the text that went with this picture in the press release because this came from um like I say AR Argentina and a guy called Andrea boki who’s the president of the Chamber of
Tourism said the animals do not have water we leave water for the monkeys in the trees and for the alligators we leave two or three thousand liters per day when we do not need it to put out the fire the Ester is dry so in that region they’re having to supplement
Water for wildlife already and then when there’s a fire there’s not enough water because they need the fire the water for firefighting and then the the animals perish anyway now I’m not saying that’s going to happen in downtown bucking any soon but we need to think about that and
Think ahead to when those sorts of events happen in the UK and even just drought long hot dry spells heat effects we’ve got to manage the water now because we’re still building devel building developments and and highways and and and schools where we’re trying
To just get rid of the water as fast as we can off the surface we do our flood risk management we have an attenuation Pond we have our Greenfield rate run off and we’re just trying to get the water into the pond or the Basin or the tank
And then let it go as soon as the storm passes we’ve got to get better at keeping that water and recognizing its value and holding it somewhere where we can use it next slide please Lis last slide I promise um this I don’t want sometimes people accuse me of being a
Bit twe and talking about creatures vising creatures and I probably am a little guilty of that but I’m conscious that this isn’t The Wind in the Willows anymore this is a climate crisis just press the button again Lewis I apologize I don’t apologize for this image this is
A um common toad a dead common toad population of toads is is collapsing in this country and we have to that’s that’s across the board across all species pretty much and we can help we can do we’re all in this room we’re all doing Water Management we can help to
Fix that so that’s our challenge last slide Louis just my contact details if anybody wants to uh join in thank you very much great thanks Joe really interesting and inative talk um we’ll move straight on so just as a reminder yeah if you do have any questions in the Q&A and we’ll
Have a discussion at the end um we now move on to John uh John Whitmore from jba Consulting John’s a technical director and ecologist with a particular interest in freshwater fish John has worked in the field of environmental science for 25 and started his career in the Fisheries function of the
Environment agency for moving to jba in 20 in 2007 right J hand over to you at this point thanks than so much Jed and good afternoon everyone thanks for having me at the webinar today um as Jed said I’m an ecologist I’m not a climate scientist um but this presentation
Focuses on sign posting to data on the abiotic impacts of climate change that can be used in ecological River restoration and longitudinal connectivity improvement work next slide please so um in terms of the content the presentation I’ll start with some background information on the UK government climate change risk
Assessment then I’ll provide you with a quick climate projection overview where I’ll signpost to some tools and guidance that you can apply to River restoration projects um and I’ll also cover an example of JB’s ongoing work which is unlocking opportunities to explore and potentially mitigate um these impacts next slide
Please so as a quick intro to climate risk in the UK the UK government is required under the 2008 climate change act to publish a climate change risk assessment every five years um the most recent was the third one last year and this report provides the evidence-base to inform government L National
Adaptation programs in England Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland um the third climate change risk assessment in line with previous assessment remains consistent in its Central thesis uh and these are there will be substantial increases in Winter daily precipitation both frequency and in intensity and especially in Western Britain similarly summers are projected
To be hotter and drier with the potential for more summer drought and this obviously all has implications for river flows and flood and Water Management these changes likely to impact the state of freshwater ecosystems and water regulation services including water quality and water flows in the future so there is a clear need
For adaptation um I think it’s also important to recognize that climate change effects will interact with ongoing and new anthropogenic pressures such as new and emerging pollutants invasive species and land use change such as changes in growing season um so all in all the water and environment
Sectors will have to continue to develop our dynamism and challenge ourselves to do better next slide please so over the next few slides I’ll highlight some of the tools that are in the public domain that are available to support the water environment sector in planning for the impacts of climate change next slide
Please so the first deal I’ll I’ll sign post you to today was produced um from the UK climate resilience project program was led by a reading University team in partnership with um CH uh and that’s the uh UKC risk indicators portal which is an Open Access tool that engages with the most
Recent UK climate change projections um and wide ranging indicators including water related indicators now these indicators are often modeled at and therefore data is available down to um 12 kilm grid Square resolution um which allows for application at a at a very local level and it also provides average and extreme
Changes but also seasonal and um annual patterns as well next slide please so what I’ll do is I’ll quickly show the application of this tool um by using three National Nature Reserve Wetlands to get a sense of the atic impact and what we’ll look at is k l um
Nnr up in Dum free shooting borders uh bu Marsh’s nnr which is over in East Anglia and Somerset Wetlands nnr which is obviously down in the southwest next slide please so what’s on screen now is the predicted changes in precipitation um at each of those sites um again this um
Data for this particular um metric is available on a 12x 12 kilometer um grid Square um this is based on a climate change scenario um with a Three Degree increase by um 2,100 which is a fairly pessimistic climate change scenario but the oted time series does display the
Change the degree of change um and uncertainty and obviously the direction and pace of change are marked with all three sites showing a um a reduction in summer precipitation um some by quite um quite a significant degree next slide please um as Jed suggested I’m a physcologist so I’m now unashamedly
Going to quickly Give an example from from that perspective um so what I’ll show is an application of the same tool but using two Fisheries um with different um projections um and I’ll use the UK CRI tool again in the first instance so again next slide
Please so what we have here is the um risk of low river flows at those two locations one on the Medway and Maidstone um and one up in North Yorkshire um and this is the measure of change in the likelihood of experiencing low river flows in a 10-year return
Period um and what’s I think um obvious from this is there’s a much more marked Regional difference with a Chance of low flows in the Southeast being much greater um this is useful because the low flow parameters such as Q95 so that is the um percentage of um the flow that
Is exceeded 95% of the the time are particularly relevant in the context of Water Resource consenting and fish pass design again I’m showing my background interest there really uh next slide really uh please so moving on um away from um the previous tool what I’m going
To look at now is the um enhanced future flows and groundwater portal um again looking at those same Fisheries um but using this really useful tool um again produced by by ch next slide please so what we have here um is a prediction of changes in flow at Q90 in
The near future scenario both on the Medway and on the yorksh doent um and we can see here that the portal indicates a reduction in flow at Q90 of between 10 and 20% in the near future Horizon so that’s up to 2049 but this gets significantly worse
At the far future Horizon which goes up to 2079 and this portal reports um predicted reduction in Q90 flows between 40 and 60% at both locations um we at jba in in the fish pass world at jba use this data um quite a lot now to offer our clients a
Resilience check on all fish pass designs that we do basically saying we can design your fish pass to current hydrology but um we can also look at how the performance of that fish pass might change in future flows um based on um these sort of climate change predictions next slide
Please um moving away from that one um a few other tools um there’s the keeping Rivers cool tool so some EA colleagues on this call might be familiar with this data set um is centered around forested riparian buffers it can be be utilized to identify R riparian Tree cover and
The opportunities for tree planting to increase fut future shading of streams and rivers and this is increasingly important as for context shaded channels um can be one and a half degrees lower on average than open reaches um or two to three degrees in in Peak temperatures so again another useful
Tool for understanding areas at risk and signposting to areas of opportunity next slide please and what this next slide shows again is is just um using the river Medway Maidstone Victory angling Club example on the left hand side um from the riparian shade um portal shows that
Actually there’s quite a bit of shade in that reach at the moment on the right hand side not the example from Yorkshire but from um a a site down in Somerset that gives U or demonstrates um uh how this portal shows graphically areas that um are currently have no shade
Um so again useful to sort of steer River restoration um manages in in the direction of of where there might be greatest opportunity next slide please couple of other um tools the UK Lakes Observatory um again output from the UK climate resilience program and it provides info on water quality for 900
Water bodies in the UK from based on satellite observations um next one really useful one the um oh sorry next bullet sorry not next slide um the uh Met Office climate data portal um really easy to use an open G friendly interface which includes a large array of data sets climate predictions
Observations and new UK shared socioeconomic Pathways data um it’s worth just noting that that SSP can be coupled with other projections to tell us how feasible it would be to achieve different levels of climate change mitigation and what challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation might exist next slide
Please um so if you’re interest interested in some adaptation resources um there are three examples on screen now so catchment Bas based approach biodiversity pack uh was produced to support catchman Partnerships and others in delivery of freshwater and Wetland bi biodiversity projects um next one was the um uh Natural England climate change
Adaptation manual um a few years old now but is a resource to support practical and pragmatic decision making bringing together recent science experience and case studies and is intended as an accessible entry point to a range of available resources and tools um and then a very recently
Published document by sea um will River do the work which presents a framework that combines the assessment of river recovery potential with practicalities of the types of River Management that most likely to be successful at a given location this one’s also Ed from it specifies recovery potential for all
Baseline water river water bodies in Mainland Scotland next slide please nearly there again some three uh more useful Publications um first one the river waterers temperature projections um useful report on how temperatures in chalk stream catchments are to change in the face of climate change um the EA science report what
Will future River ecosystems be like that is a summary of expert opinion on how future ecosystems are likely to look in the context of climate change and finally um the uh updated low flows River restoration guide so that one was um produced by jba a few years ago we’ve
Just updated it again for the agency um and that project is understanding how selected catchment measures can be used to enhance physical habitats during low and high flow conditions but to basically to increase adaptive capacity and resilience to Future droughts and floods next slide please so that’s it really just to
Summarize um you know there there is an increasing number of easily accessible tools and when I do say easily accessible tools I do mean they are are genuinely quite easy to use um these sorts of tools will be beneficial ahead of the fourth um climate change risk in
27 um which put more emphasis on adaptation with less siloed thinking and more of a focus on economics um and practicalities um H thanks all for listening hope you find something useful there um and yeah any questions at the end happy to to feel those thanks s thanks very much
John really interesting talk I’ve certainly got couple of bits I’d like to dive into more we come to come to at the end um first got our third speaker today um this if you want to go on one more slide uh so we’ve got Professor Haley fer joining us from Newcastle University
Where H’s the professor of climate change impacts in the School of Engineering the research focuses on improved physical understanding of changing precipitation extremes and providing better projections for climate adaption so really exactly what we’re talking about today um she’s a fellow of the American geophysical Union and Royal
Society wolson research fellow for her work on understanding climate change impacts on hydrological systems extreme rainfall and flooding she was also a contributing author to the ipcc sixth assessment report and she’s been British hydrological Society president and member of the government’s board for the flood hydrology road map which is still
A big on piece of work for the UK and short advises his government through a roles on the Strategic Advisory Board and on the science expert group so is in a lot of Pi hiy H great to have you with us and I’ll at this point I’ll hand over
To you thanks very much Jed um really nice talk so far um yeah I wanted to talk talk about something a little bit different um over the next few minutes um it’s going to be a bit of a quick tour through a lot of different topics
But I wanted to kind of give a flavor of of what we can expect um what we’re seeing now and what we can expect um moving forwards into a warmer world so next slide please please yeah so it all started in the summer of 2021 and I think we’ll all
Agree that something transformational has happened to The Climate since 2021 um and the last three Summers now including this summer have been quite different from previous years so summer of 2021 we had very serious flooding in Germany um and you can see the sort of severe amounts of precipitation um up in
That top right hand corner there um we’ve seen massive Other Extreme events um again this summer for example in Greece in storm Daniel we had three years of rainfall falling in two days um in Libya there were uh reports of um over 400 millimeters of rainfall falling
In six hours so we’re seeing these really large extreme rainfall events um quite slow moving as well um in the German floods was involved in an attribution study a rapid attribution study for those floods um and we found that global warming had made this heavy summer rainfall between three and 19%
More intense um and one to to nine times more likely but of course this isn’t the other the only type of extreme weather we seeing and I think the really important thing to be thinking about and Joe brought this up in her talk earlier
On is is how do we manage all of these different types of extremes together and we’ve always thought about drought and flood separately but I think now is the time to actually start to think about some of these sequences of events and how they might manifest and how do we
Start to manage some of these things together so next slide um coincidentally just as the German floods hit we’d actually been doing some work looking at um some results from a convection permitting climate model with um Lizzie kendan at the UK met office and this was work led by one of my posts
Abdullah caraman um and we’ we’d been looking at how change how storms might change in the future across the whole of Europe including the UK but all the way to the south of Europe um and really think really looking at how the rainfall from those storms um could change the
Intensification but also the size and movement of storms as well and what we’d found was that these slow moving storms like the one we saw in Germany which was actually a cutof low system um could become 14 times more common over land by the end of the century and of course
This is really important for flooding right and we’ve seen this a few times now um if the storm moves slowly it can dump rainfall over a very small or large catchment area actually um for a long period of time and so it’s not just about the intensification it’s about the
Area of the storm and the um the the movement of the storm as well that provides that risk of flooding next slide so what we found in this study um is there was a a massive increase in the frequency of these very extreme storms and storms in certainly southern Europe
Had very um had unprecedented intensities and became much much more frequent in in Autumn months and we’re starting to see this happening already actually I think as we see this warming signal emerge um and the there was a substantial increase in um very extreme very large storms as well um and a a
Massive slowdown in the movement of Storms and one thing to say here is that although the signal emerges most strongly in southern Europe we actually saw a doubling or tripling of the amount of convective rainfall that would fall in the summer across the UK as well so
You know in our summers in these drier Summers that we’re projected to have in the future and that is a signal that comes out in the UK we also get much more intense storms happening at the same time um next slide yeah so we need to look at um
Rainfall in a different way so at the same time the government got concerned yeah massive slots in Germany could it happen here so they commissioned um a an inquiring by uh The Joint Committee on National Security strategy looking at whether our our national infrastructure is actually ready climate change ready
Now I could have told them that it wasn’t but actually I mean it’s very interesting um interesting conclusion to this um this this study um led by um D Margaret Beckett um and a substantial input from the House of Lords as well and they they really were very strongly
Worded this this report said the government needs to get a grip on climate change impacts there’s overwhelming evidence climate change is already having an impact we’re not climate ready um and and I mean the climate change committee would tell you this about adaptation as well we’re getting further and further away from
Being climate resilient really um but we need to we need to recognize prevention is better than cure and and basically really think about risk management um the ne the rest of this the uh the talk is about this so moving on to the next slide um so what was happening in in
Summer of 2021 and this is a slide from Paul Davies who’s the chief meteorologist at the UK Met Office who I work with quite a lot um so there’s this consistent blocked pattern is is is is forming every summer now and we’ve seen this not just in the summer of 2021
We’ve seen it in the summer of 2022 and again in the summer of 2023 and not only that we’re starting to see this block pattern in in the other Seasons as well you can even see in the winter um and what it does is it it causes these
Systems these highs and these lows to basically stay blocked in place and cause these very persistent weather extremes and when those for example in the summer of 2021 were things like the US Canadian heat Dome the New York floods the floods in Germany there were big floods in China as well all the
Siberian wildfires um these are all connected to this what they call a wave pattern across the world um and this this more wavy jet stream um perhaps caused by Arctic amplification and the reduction in the temperature gradient between the Equator and the poles um weakens the jet stream
Causes these waves to become more fixed in place in these more blocked conditions and if you move on to the next slide you can see that this was July this year we’re seeing the same sort of pattern yeah we’ve seen the same sort of heat waves and the same sort of floods
Um again move to the next slide and in the summer of 2022 in Europe this manifested as a heat Dome over Europe rather than these severe floods we saw Dees in the UK um records were broken in a huge number of locations we’ve seen these records broken again in
2023 so we’re seeing the conjunction of heat waves and extreme floods um as a sequence around the world it’s something we need to be thinking about planning for next slide you can see here this was a recent study um published in nature Communications there’ve been substantially increasing Heatwave Trends
Over the mid latitudes and this is almost certainly because of these more blocked conditions that we’re seeing um that particularly over Europe we’re seeing not just an increase in the frequency of days per decade with with a heat wave and you can see that on the
Top there um but a massive increase in intensity of the heat waves when they happen so you know this is this persistence signal when heat waves last for a long time they become much much hotter because of these land surface feedbacks um and because they’re blocked you know this blocking basically causes
This this persistence and this increase in the intensity of heat waves when they happen also causing flash droughts as well these these sort of very intense drought conditions and wildfires as well so moving on to the next slide um one of my PhD students who’s just finished Kristoff stter had a look
At this using observations um and he actually looked at um a global data set actually but I’m just going to show the results for for Europe mainly in the top right hand corner there um what we found was when we we looked at heat waves and extreme rainfall um we found this compounding
Effect where you after a heat wave you’re much more likely to get extreme rainfall events um in these mid latitude temperate or colder climates um and in some parts of the mid latitudes um 40% of all heat waves are followed by these really intense um extreme rainfalls that
C cause flash floods and so we’re thinking about impacts actually and particularly you can think about impacts on water quality for example where you get much drier soils Then followed by flash floods you get more sediment movement issues with water quality or or for example embankment failures or I
Mean there’s there’s lots of issues where that sequencing matters and this compounding has an effect on impacts next slide um and yeah this is just um just to show you sort of a this is this is what we saw um a few a month ago or so a couple
Of months ago now um you can see storm Daniel over Greece you can see the big om Omega block heat wve over Central Europe and you can see the big storm over Spain of course that storm Daniel went on to become a tropical Cyclone or a medicane in the Mediterranean and then
Hit Libya and caused around 20,000 deaths um when the when the major dams burst um these sort of systems are things we really need to be thinking about um I I think and I do think that we need to be really thinking about how we update our flood risk estimation
Methods um to account for some of these changes that we’re seeing and some of these more persistent um systems and the sequencing of events next slide one of the things we have looked at and this is another of my PhD students who’s now finished Roberto Villalobos Herrera this paper’s about to
Come out in um Journal of flood risk management it was in collaboration with some people at jba as well um we looked at whether the FSR storm profiles are actually adequate um and compared them to to basically a data set we had of the UK for real storms you can see in the
Top right hand corner there that’s storm Desmond um you can also see in the bottom right hand corner what that looks like using the FSR centered approach in blue and what this actual storm looks like in red there you can see they actually look quite different and the
Reason that we get these centered storms in the FSR is just the methodology that’s used so if you go to the next slide if we actually look at real storms and come up with um a set of of real design storms based on the profiles of um different duration storms and
Different storms in different seasons what we find is that um we come out with quite different profiles to what we see in the FSR and in fact short events of less than three hours have um sharp high-intensity front-loaded profiles um quite you know more than 50% of them
Have these profiles um they can easily exceed the FSR 50% some of profiles Peak intensities which is quite concerning for um design long events tend towards flatter centered profiles and what we find as well is that we don’t actually find differences between summer and winter profiles at all um it’s only
Based on the duration of the storm um so I’m going to leave that there move on to the next slide um there’s lots of other things we should be thinking about in terms of flood risk estimation and I mean these include um things like non-stationarity um the intensity and
Climate allowances um that we should be adding for climate change but also I think aerial reduction factors as well um and moving beyond Point methods for flood risk estimation but um just to conclude I think that some of the things we need to be thinking about are more
Than um well we shouldn’t no longer be in silos we shouldn’t be thinking about drought and flood separately we need to be thinking about managing water as a system um because actually we are going to see many more of these Heatwave flash droughts um even longer droughts as well
Connected to um and followed quite quickly by floods so we’ve got to think about managing these different extremes together and these sequences might be really important for some impacts so I think that’s another thing we need to really be thinking about um worryingly Global Climate models actually significantly underestimate the changes
We’re seeing in the real world in terms of these blocks conditions so that’s another thing to think about how do we actually come up with suitable management strategies for climate adaptation if our Global Climate models aren’t telling us what is happening in the real world now um so I think I’m
Going to leave it there but I think there’s there’s lots to do um and there’s some really interesting um interesting work going on in the climate field that’s actually really relevant um for hydrologists um and there’s there’s a definite need to to bring a lot of this new science across into practice
Whether this this is from climate science or from from flood risk um science as well thanks very much great thank you haly and thanks to the other two speakers um we’ve got about to say some questions L if you want to start sharing yes um the other
Speakers if you’d like to come back in the room um what I’ll start with is I mean it’s it’s quite worrying I mean I think the worry was a general theme of all three talks and even someone might like myself who works in the water to let him feel
For all these years I I found quite a lot of those statistics worrying um I think perhaps if you go to John um so I used to manage a chalk stream trout fishery and seeing some of the stats you showed up with the The increased risk for drought and low river flows again
Hug hugely worrying I just wonder what you do you think that’s perhaps the greatest threat to freshwater ecology those those extremes um what should be on that I certainly think um Water Resources um changing Water Resources represents a massively um significant threat to freshwater ecology um again answering the question Through My
Lens of of of sort of interest in in fish and fish ecology I think habitat fragmentation and compromise to sort of longitudinal connectivity is is going to be a really significant thing with a um reduction in in summer flow really um we already know that we as represent significant barriers to longitudinal
Connectivity and there there are literally hundreds of technical fish passes that have been designed and built over over the last um the last 100 years or so um more recently they’ve been designed to work across a particular sort of range of flows and um how is their performance really going to change
In the context of ever incre ever decreasing sort of Summer flows um um in the context of climate change um just Just One Last thread to this as well Jed um we recently supervised an MSE project with Leeds University and we looked at Culvert prevalence across England um we just
Looked at environment agency Network Rail and Canal and River trust data but just um asset data from those three organizations alone suggested that there’s at least 65,000 culverts across across England um managed managed by those three three organizations and we we took a tiny sample of some of those CVS and modeled
The hydraulics in those um and in a future hydrology situation um the ability of fish to pass through those culs decreased quite markedly so we’ve already got wears which we know are stopping fish moving within the catchment how much more significant are we are Culver going to
Be um are they going to are we going to get to a point where flows are altered so much that actually Culver are really going to start to become significant barriers to to longitudinal connectivity thanks John interesting point I’ve worked on deting projects before and it’s surprising the local
Resistance you get to opening up Rivers people don’t people don’t want want their Rivers necessarily open we haven’t even got to the impact on fishering that’s a new one for me as well um Joe or Haley did you want to add anything on that topic John’s John’s race
There oh I only to Remember The Wider impact of low flows on The Wider ecology it’s not just the Aquatic species it’s the species that rely on the river system for their water supply it’s it’s huge it’s huge and scary yeah absolutely um Haley do you know you mentioned about the need to
Update the flood estimation methods do you know are there any plans in place for that to happen is there I I presume they must get updated occasionally anyway but um it seems Seems maybe there’s a bit more urgency about it than Perhaps Perhaps the previously was
Yeah I mean I mean the design storm profiles haven’t been updated since 1975 oh um but you’re right that certain parts have been updated periodically through the flood estimation handbook um but but other bits haven’t been um updated I I don’t know I mean I think that there’s there’s quite a few
Things that could be done I mean I think the other thing is um even in terms of the the models that are used um they could be updated as well so Hydro Dynamic models hydrological models um there’s there’s much better things available now um certainly in Academia
Which could be pushed across and used um it it it I’m hoping that a lot of this will happen as part of the flood um hydrology road map um and those projects um and certainly they they have an initiative within that to review um what’s out there and try and bring this
Through every three or five years years so you know if you can have kind of a a system in place to actually look at look at the sort of latest science if you like or what whatever’s happening in Academia and then try and bring that through a bit quicker into practice
Because because is quite I mean I’m I was born in 1975 so it’s quite a long time ago basically since some of these things have been updated nearly 50 years um it would be it would certainly be good to update things on a slightly faster cycle than that
Yes I mean there’s a challenge there the link between Academia and practice you know it’s one as someone who works with people on both sides getting the two to work together is is Challen is challenging in itself so but it it does need to happen I would certainly agree
With you um Joe I think if I go to you next um so one of the things that struck me from your talk it’s goes back to this of how you how we make the system best adapt to what what we’re doing is the funding system to me is is currently
Upside down and I’m really talking about the flood risk funding which is where most of the money is in our sector is in flood risk so at the moment it goes towards protecting property you know how many houses have you reduced from one flood risk band to another that’s where
You know the billion pounds over five years or whatever it is that’s where it all goes and what it it seems you know I think we probably on the same page of that needs to fundamentally change to focus on the wider benefits of the type
Of work that you describe you know s and schemes that bring a whole range of benefits to both ecology people and everything else I I just wonder what your view is on perhaps what needs to change and how we might how we might go about that as an industry um it’s a big
Question but yeah yeah and and two things about that one is yeah the funding’s tricky and other International models have a storm water utility Levy or a storm water fee that all everybody pays and that creates a storm water management fund that is usually um spent
By a team within the the equivalent of our local authorities and they do all the storm water management the subs maintenance storm water movement storm water that that sort of thing that’s never going to happen here certainly not in the next decade if I say the words
New taxation people wins so that’s not happening so but there are routs so um the water companies have just been given permission to spend 56 billion pounds on storm overflow reductions so a lot of that will be spent on retrofit studs in urban areas um and if schedule three is enacted
Schedule three of the flood and Water Management Act is enacted then that creates a mechanism whereby developers pay local authorities to oversee the delivery of SS on new de new developments that my problem with that that’s good I like both those things they don’t go far enough because they
Don’t deal with the existing networks and the existing infrastructure which is I don’t know how we do that short of new tax High people will know that Highway runoff is my pet um thing and and I don’t know how we pay for that short of
A tax on tires and and fuel but the other thing that that keeps me awake at night as many things do is the speed at which we’re moving it’s way too slow because people are doing research right now on on toxins in in rivers that research will take another three years
To complete and then it’ll have to be peer reviewed and it’ll have to be a viver and then it’ll be published and then we’ll all think about it and um Haley talked about you know updating models and updating legislation and get it all takes literally 10 years potentially I know I’ve worked with
Designers on treatment schemes for Suds devices and it’s taken seven years to do the design work we haven’t got seven 10 15 years and I don’t know how we we’ve got to make a much faster route from research to delivery so we do some research we go oh my God there’s a
Problem how do we fix it let’s fix it now instead of going H there’s a problem let’s write some guidance we’ve got to get quicker and I don’t know how we do that I I’m I’m pleased to see actually I’ve just noticed on my LinkedIn there’s
A lot of young people in the room that’s where this will happen it’s the youngsters who will do this because a lot of us who’ve been in the public sector for a very long time are a bit we’re famili we’ve got we’ve got those boring grinding processes are
Embedded within us we need new slick fast moving people there are for them hope yeah thanks ch um just got a couple of minutes does anyone like to make a final comment before I PO for the day okay well great well I just say thanks again to Haley John and Joe for
Speaking today and uh please do tune in again same time tomorrow and same time on Thursday for another series of really interesting talks so yeah and that we’ll close it today thanks everyone