The combination of climate change with growing population, land-use change and economic development will create greater pressure on water resources in future. At UKCEH, we integrate water resources monitoring, process understanding and modelling to enable the water industry, government departments and public bodies to assess and mitigate the impacts of future droughts. Our research identifies environmentally sustainable solutions that meet the increasing, and often competing, demands of users in different sectors, including public water supply, agriculture and food, commerce and industry, and energy.
Product: Long-term datasets for drought and water resources planning
UKCEH played a leading role in the Drought and Water Scarcity Programme, delivering a wealth of new datasets that can be used to prepare drought plans and water resources management plans.
UKCEH worked with water companies and regulators to deliver these datasets in a way that meets the needs of the sector, including a Drought Libraries web application that directly supports scenario-planning, and the Drought Data Hub that allows users to explore and download these key datasets in user-friendly formats.
We continue to work with the water industry to explore how these outputs can be used alongside other products such as the UKCP18 projections and water companies’ own stochastic simulation approaches.