That is the conclusion of a report published by Water UK (the umbrella organisation representing all the public water companies). The report sets out a number of scenarios up to 50 years into the future and concludes that extensive measures are needed if England and Wales are to avoid dramatic water deficits.
It also provides evidence to show that increasing resilience is likely to be cost beneficial when compared to the costs and impacts of a severe drought.
The report recommended that the most suitable strategy to provide drought resilience in the future is a combination of demand management, appropriate new development and transfers.
The project considered four levels of demand management, from business as usual to a "potentially ambitious" enhanced scenario, which included "significant behaviour change as well as significant future innovation".
Water supply options covered in the report include bulk water transfers between regions via existing waterways and new pipelines, building new reservoirs and de-salination plants, and much more water re-use.
Water transfers and new infrastructure are expensive, but the report says that the cost of inaction is higher in terms of the social and economic consequences of drought. It says that when the most severe level of water restrictions are applied to businesses and organisations there is a loss of approximately £1.3 billion per day to the economy.
However, there remain obstacles to water transfer such as risks to drinking water quality and to the environment.
Water UK suggests that large scale transfers could help to spread risks more broadly between water companies and that more storage will be needed at the receiving end.
In addition, the levels of cost-efficiency and benefits from water transfers would also take a considerable length of time and collaboration between multiple stakeholders.
The report suggests that an incremental approach to resilience, using all the options outlined would increase the cost of supply to bill payers by around £4 a year, which is negligible when compared with the social and economic costs.
The report comes after the government’s national flood resilience review, which acknowledged that water is in increasingly short supply, and the Committee on Climate Change’s Adaptation Sub Committee’s report which showed that the UK remains unprepared for climate change.
Jean Spencer, regulation director at Anglian Water, chaired the project for Water UK. She said the threat of drought is “already with us, were it not for the unprecedented rainfall in the spring of 2012, we might have suffered significant problems with water supply that summer”.
- The full Water UK report is available by clicking on this link.