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Drought and the heterogeneities of local water resource management

Drought and the heterogeneities of local water resource management. Heather Chappells Will Medd Lancaster University. Drought and Demand project. Sociological analysis of the 2006 drought in the south east of England

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Drought and the heterogeneities of local water resource management

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  1. Drought and the heterogeneities of local water resource management Heather Chappells Will Medd Lancaster University

  2. Drought and Demand project • Sociological analysis of the 2006 drought in the south east of England • Co-funded by ESRC, UKWIR, Environment Agency, Ofwat, Defra, Anglian Water, South East Water, Essex and Suffolk Water, Veolia (Three Valleys, Folkestone & Dover)

  3. Defining drought Droughts as natural events caused by: “absence of significant rainfall, groundwater levels, spring discharges and river flows” (Environment Agency, 2002) Droughts as spatially and temporally differentiated: “Some droughts are short and intense – for example, a hot, dry summer – while others are long and take some time to develop. Some droughts affect a large area while others are concentrated in a few place.Every drought is different and each has a different effect on people and the environment” (Environment Agency) Droughts as socially constructed and politically mediated crises…

  4. Historical constructions of drought • 1976 drought • National crisis • Engineering response • Cooperative citizens, civic duty to conserve water • 1995 drought • Privatised water companies, political crisis • Market-environmentalism • Politicised uncooperative consumers • 2006 drought • Environmental regulation, increased ‘headroom’ • Precautionary response, statutory drought plans • Consumers as co-managers

  5. National variations in resource pressures Surface Water Ground Water   Source: Environment Agency

  6. Regional variations in drought responses

  7. Water managers’ perspectives on hosepipe bans “Well the Environment Agency sees hosepipe bans as a precautionary measure…the trouble is, once you put a hosepipe restriction on, its very difficult to take off again. If you put it on as a precautionary basis, it always becomes ‘oh well its rained a bit but it might be dry again next month, perhaps we better keep it on’. So fairly soon you are in a state of permanent hosepipe ban. The only time you take them off is when it’s so wet that everything is flooding. And that’s going to give us problems in terms of our customers” “If you’ve got full reservoirs its so difficult to say to your consumers you know, you can’t use the water and also if we went down hard on customers this year then we’d lose their confidence so they wouldn’t react when we needed them to”

  8. Hosepipe bans & mismatching priorities of regulators and managers Environmental regulators: • Drought as a regional problem • Supported consistent communication campaign and blanket ban • Unified response from all companies to ‘share the pain’ and ‘work for the greater good’ Water managers: • Drought as a problem of localised water availability • Need for ‘softer’ communication message • Inflexible response leading to ‘normalisation’ of drought and diminishing impact

  9. Supply area specificities shaping drought Essex and Suffolk Water supply areas Two geographically separate zones: Suffolk & Essex Different demand and supply properties: PCC, volatility of demand, levels of network integration Source: Essex and Suffolk Water

  10. Infrastructural configurations structuring drought options

  11. Household drought management strategies “I’ve got two water butts and I’m in the process of buying another and shower water will go into that…” (SE Water Consumer) Responses of companies: “It’s just an added cost I think. I mean rainwater harvesting wouldn’t have been used this drought because people haven’t had the rain so they’d be falling back on the mains system, so you’d have to spend the money on the mains system plus the rainwater system so it wouldn’t be economic as a drought measure…if you go to a bigger scale then you’re actually doing what we as a water company do anyway [referring to effluent recycling]”

  12. Droughts as revelatory events • Experiences of drought are highly variable, dependant on localised resource pressure points, the type and timing of demand, and levels of network integration. • Significant disparities in how managers and regulators view the scale of the water crisis and construct an ‘appropriate’ level of response • Embedded infrastructural arrangements can define access to resources and shape responses to drought. • Construction of more ‘resilient’ water systems can mean different things to households and managers.

  13. Further questions: drought, inequality and resilience • How far does making systems more environmentally equitable mean ironing out the heterogeneities of water resource management or working with local specificities? • How might historically defined access rights between neighbouring companies be renegotiated to create more inter-regionally resilient systems? • What does building socio-technical resilience mean at multiple scales – including engaging consumers as co-participants?

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