‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’

While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach

During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. But, as I discovered, this won’t last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.

Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable. Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply. As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. It’s simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.

Little old England manages to encompass many global water problems – scarcity, overabstraction, pollution, underinvestment, government and regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct – all within the confines of one small country in the far west of Europe.

The UK’s average annual rainfall is about 1,100mm, compared with less than 300mm in Pakistan or double figures in Egypt. However, despite our winter storms, significant parts of the UK are staring down the barrel of empty water butts. Much of that four-figure rainfall average is propped up by the rainy Highlands of Scotland, Wales and northern England. In south-east England, where I live, the average annual rainfall lingers about 600 mm – comparable with Lebanon or Kenya, and drier than Sydney, Australia. This also happens to be the UK’s most populated area, with about 18 million inhabitants packed into just 19,000 sq km, including London’s 1,500 sq km. And it’s drying up, fast. Government figures show that, in England, 28% of groundwater aquifers, the layers of porous sand and rock that hold water underground, and up to 18% of rivers and reservoirs, have more water taken out than is put back in. This is clearly unsustainable.

Not a single one of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health – this includes chalk streams, a delicate habitat almost entirely unique to England. However, much of the public remains oblivious to a problem that we are all, at least in part, responsible for causing. More than half of the freshwater abstracted in the UK is for household use. The average British resident happily uses 153l of water a day, through showers, toilets, dishwashers, washing machines and garden hoses. Yet climate-change projections show that dry summers in England will increase by up to 50%, with the amount of water available reduced by at least 10-15%.

Freshwater shortages, once considered a local issue, are increasingly a global risk. In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.

There’s only ever the same, finite amount of water churning around in our water cycle. Every drop of water on Earth has been here since the beginning of time, constantly recycled. Up to 60% of the adult human body is water (even bone is a surprisingly splashy 31%). When you die and are cremated or buried, that water will be released again, to the atmosphere or the earth. We are as intimately connected to the water cycle as rivers and lakes are.

Yet, from the Yellow River in China to the Colorado River in the United States, many rivers no longer reach the sea. Often artificially straightened and dammed, water is sucked out and channelled off to supply farms, industries and households. Great lakes, from the Aral Sea in central Asia to Lake Urmia in Iran, have nearly disappeared. Groundwater aquifers, from the Ogallala and Central Valley in the US to India’s Upper Ganges and Pakistan’s Lower Indus, are being depleted faster than they can refill. The remaining freshwater is increasingly polluted with sewage and fertilisers, causing algal blooms that smother and choke ecosystems.

According to Torgny Holmgren, executive director at the Stockholm International Water Institute, “If these trends continue, we will need 50% more water in 2050 compared with 20 years ago. And, of course, that is impossible, because water is a finite resource … This will impact all of us.”

Covid brought water issues into sharper focus. “It’s not like Covid woke us up to the need for water for hygiene; we already knew that,” Gary White, CEO of Water.org, told me. “But I certainly think we hadn’t seen the lack of access to water and sanitation as a global crisis before. When somebody [being unable to] wash their hands in one country becomes the critical link to the spread of disease, then suddenly water and hygiene becomes a global risk.” In June 2021, Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, said: “Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic, and there is no vaccine to cure it.”

The good and bad news is that water crises are usually caused by human mismanagement, not climate. But, as climate breakdown bites, precipitation patterns change and climate refugees are forced to move, the timeframe to get our act together is becoming ever shorter. We are currently using up the water sources on which our very existence relies. We can continue doing that until the very last drop. Or we can decide to change our approach before it’s too late. The world isn’t running out of water – people are.

The UK’s Waterwise annual conference in 2019 was a niche water efficiency conference in London, attended by a small cadre of water industry types. But it made national news. Sir James Bevan, then chief executive of the Environment Agency, had heavily altered the prepared speech he had been given. An expected tame welcoming address instead became known as the “Jaws of Death” speech. As his audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats and a handful of trade journalists suddenly woke up, he said: “The jaws of death is the point at which, unless we take action to change things, we will not have enough water to supply our needs … many parts of our country will face significant water deficits by 2050.”

The water-abstraction system his agency oversees was “designed more than 50 years ago, for a world with less environmental protection, less demand for water and no awareness of climate change”. Just as important as new infrastructure was changing human behaviour: “We need water wastage to be as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby.” The industry audience didn’t know whether to whoop or weep.

On 9 July 2020, the public accounts committee countered that all the bodies responsible for the UK’s water supply – the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) and Bevan’s Environment Agency (EA) – had “taken their eye off the ball” and must take urgent action to ensure a reliable water supply. The committee’s chair, Meg Hillier MP, said: “It is very hard to imagine, in this country, turning on the tap and not having enough clean, drinkable water come out – but that is exactly what we now face … Defra has failed to lead and water companies have failed to act.”

Without significant action, the National Audit Office (NAO) forecasts that the total water demand will start to exceed supply in England no later than 2034. However, water companies have already been abstracting (extracting) too much water, leading to environmental degradation and the disappearance of rivers, including the internationally unique chalk streams of the south-east. A reduction of 480m litres a day is needed by 2045 just to lower existing groundwater abstraction to sustainable levels. Something, or someone, has to give, or the UK’s water supply will run out within a decade.

Part of England’s problem goes back to its unique system of private water companies being handed state monopolies. Prior to 1989, water supply was publicly owned, like it is everywhere else in the world. But Margaret Thatcher put a stop to that. In 1989, the 10 water authorities spanning England and Wales had their assets and personnel transferred into limited companies and floated on the London Stock Exchange. Today, almost everyone in England and Wales receives their water and sewerage services from the same 11 water and sewerage companies and six water-only companies (with some specific areas served by small limited companies). Each has its own fiefdom on the map, with no competition, run for private profit; you are obliged to sign up to your regional supplier.

The Water Act 1989 also removed previous restrictions on the statutory financial amounts water companies could borrow or pay as dividends. To protect the interests of customers and the environment, however, privatisation was coupled with regulatory oversight, most notably from the EA, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and Ofwat. Because of the lack of competition, Ofwat sets limits on the price water companies in England and Wales can charge. And, to ensure that those companies don’t just snaffle the cash and let the infrastructure they inherited fall to ruin, every five years the water companies must also submit statutory water-resources management plans setting out their intended investment approach for the next 25 years. Despite this, a fair amount of cash-snaffling still goes on. A 2017 study by the University of Greenwich found that water-company shareholders had received a total of £56bn since privatisation, with some water CEOs on £2m annual salaries.

By 2018, the then leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was calling for the water companies to be renationalised. Even the incumbent secretary of state for Defra, Conservative MP Michael Gove, attacked the water companies for “playing the system for the benefit of wealthy managers and owners, at the expense of consumers and the environment”, and suggested that they had “shielded themselves from scrutiny, hidden behind complex financial structures, avoided paying taxes, have rewarded the already well-off, kept charges higher than they needed to be and allowed leaks, pollution and other failures to persist for far too long”. In cash terms, more than £18.1bn was paid out to shareholders of the nine largest water companies between 2007 and 2016, accounting for 95% of profits.

Australian infrastructure firm Macquarie owned Thames Water between 2007 and 2017, leaving it with £2bn of debt, while paying its investors, according to one analysis, on average between 15.5% and 19% in dividends a year. Instead of making changes to a system that was supporting such poor levels of investment, in August 2021, Ofwat approved a new £1bn equity takeover of Southern Water. The new owner was Macquarie.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

 

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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. The climate crisis hasn’t caused the water crisis we now face, it has simply shone a punishing, unyielding light on it. The answers, from Abingdon to Accra to Amman, lie in holding on to the rain that falls on the land. And nature does this best of all. Now our engineered systems must work with nature, not against it.

 This article was amended on 15 June 2023. An earlier version said km sq instead of sq km.

This is an edited extract from The Last Drop: Solving the World’s Water Crisis, published by Picador

[Top photo: Baitings reservoir in Ripponden, West Yorkshire, in summer 2022, when the total stock of water in England's reservoirs was at its lowest level since 1995. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA​]