‘The era of treating fresh water as an unlimited resource is over. Long-term water security will require us to incentivise efficiency, discourage waste, and build transparent water markets that reflect the true value of our most critical natural resource.’
Mohith Agadi, Author, Digital Strategist, and Climate Activist
Apart from a burst of rainfall in June, southern England has seen its most prolonged-ever drought, since a wet start to the year in January and February. There’s been 140.9 mm of rainfall compared to a long-term average of 260.6 mm during the five months from March to July; and that doesn’t include our currently dry August.
With average reservoir levels now at 69% (12% lower than expected at this time of year), it's not surprising to read the Guardian report that Thames Water is restarting its desalination plant. This was built fifteen years ago in Beckton in order to provide London with more fresh water. However, following an investment of over £1/4 billion in its 2011 construction, the plant has been viewed as a ‘white elephant’; Chris Weston, Thames Water’s chief executive, told MPs last year, ‘The desalination plant is a big problem for us; I wonder why it was built in the first place. It is not a good story, it was not a good investment, and there are no excuses about it.’
But as the author of our quotation, Mohith Agadi, says, we need more focus on fresh water, the most precious of our resources. It's not that the world is short of water generally — the oceans are full of it — but humanity is forcing huge changes in sea water’s natural conversion to fresh water.
Climate change is not just responsible for prolonged drought, but it’s also forcing major changes in the glacial storage of fresh water across the world. Try visiting the BBC weather website and inserting place names in Greenland such as Tasiilaq (on the eastern coast, just opposite Iceland) and Qaanaaq (on the western coast, north of Baffin Bay). You’ll find their daytime temperatures well above freezing, as the ice sheet between them melts.
In 2011, a Cambridge University study into the Greenland ice sheet estimated its annual mass loss at 200 gigatons, or about thirty million tons of ice every hour. If — and when — the entire ice sheet melts, global sea levels will rise by about 7.4 metres (that’s 24 feet); and of course, there would be additional inundation caused by Antarctic melting as well. Scientists need to keep a close watch on this increasing rate of ice sheet loss.
So, there's plenty of water — but it's increasingly staying in the oceans, rather than being desalinated by the weather.
There are, of course, many parts of the world which rely on desalination to provide their fresh water: the Middle East, in particular. The process of reverse osmosis is also widely used in marine activities, and there are companies such as Schenker and Hatenboer-Water which specialise in these fresh-water generators.
A typical such facility is Schenker’s Smart 100, which produces 100 litres of fresh water per hour (that's about 600 gallons per day) on an energy usage of 400 watts. Powered by solar panels, this may be a helpful alternative for coastal towns in future; however, moving huge quantities of sea water inland is quite another proposition. No doubt that's why Thames Water chose Beckton for locating their desalination plant in London, close by the Thames estuary.
It may also explain why the Netherlands, where Hatenboer-Water is based, makes good use of desalination for agricultural purposes.
There are other ways of conserving fresh-water usage, such as equipping houses to recycle dirty bath water — or ‘grey water’ to use the technical term — for flushing toilets. Flushing toilets accounts for about 22% of average household water usage; an article in The Sunday Times on 16th August describes this approach, which is mandatory in some parts of Belgium.
Of course, rainwater collection can also help and is widely used for gardens; but the prospect of future lengthy periods of drought will make this less effective also.
The United Kingdom has been blessed with so much rainfall in the past that we have come to take it for granted. Most of the water-based political criticism has been focused on privatised companies’ exploitation and inefficiencies over recent decades, rather than on the need to plan ahead for reservoir construction. However, the Government does need to think afresh about our approach towards water: it’s worth repeating Mohith Agadi’s opening quotation, ‘The era of treating fresh water as an unlimited resource is over. Long-term water security will require us to incentivise efficiency, discourage waste, and build transparent water markets that reflect the true value of our most critical natural resource.’
Meanwhile, we should not forget that it is our addiction to fossil fuel -based energy which has created the problem in the first place. ‘Drill baby drill’ just provides still more problems for generations to come, who will not thank us for leaving such a ruined heritage.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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