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Record sunshine in Britain offers a glimpse into a dry future.
May was the U.K’s driest month in 124 years, and this spring was its sunniest on record. That came as welcome relief to millions of people locked down at home to slow the spread of Covid-19. It also helped create new records for the amount of renewable energy in the British electricity mix. But as a sign of what the future might hold, it’s not great.
“We can’t say whether a particular event is caused by climate change, but since global temperatures have already risen by 1.1 °C since pre-industrial times then all events are now affected by global warming,” said Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University. “So conditions at the moment are reflective of what climate models tell us future summers will be like.”
These hotter and drier conditions spell trouble—and not just in the U.K. “Even when it does rain, sometimes it’s only falling heavily and for short periods,” said Joaquin Muñoz Sabater, a scientist at the Copernicus Climate Change Service who studies soil moisture across Europe. “So even if it looks wet, the soil isn’t always able to regenerate because temperatures after the rainfall remain high.”
That’s bad news for farmers. In the past two months, farmers in France, Czech Republic, Poland and Romania have all become victims of drought. And when the Rhine starts to dry out, even industrial goods can’t make it to their destination on time. All this after Europe endured its hottest year on record in 2019.
The long-term solution is to cut emissions and slow down warming. But there’s a lot we can do now. “We should look after our water, which we’re definitely, definitely not doing,” said Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading. “It’s going to cascade into something worse if we don’t take care of our water.”
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Illustration: Met Office
Illustration: Met Office
Unlike many countries in the world, the U.K. is blessed with plenty of water. As someone who grew up with the intense but time-limited monsoon in India, when I first moved to the U.K. 12 years ago I was quickly fed up that it drizzled all year round and for long stretches.
Heavy rains during the last winter are likely to ensure that the country has enough water this summer, according to the U.K.’s Environment Agency. But that won’t be the case every year. “We just take it for granted,” said Cloke. “We have no understanding what it might be like to not have access to safe drinking water.”
Growing up in India meant developing a reflex to never waste water—or risk getting told off. One of my mother’s superpowers is to hear a leaking tap from anywhere in the house.
It wasn’t much different for Alex Whitebrook in the water-starved state of Western Australia. “I didn’t realize it when I was younger, but little things, such as not running the tap when brushing your teeth, or using a timer to keep your shower under four minutes long, were not normal for many people in the world’s richest and most water-abundant countries,” said Whitebrook, who now works as a consultant for water projects in the U.K.
In India, I remember going weeks where we got water only every other day, forcing us to fill up buckets and barrels for when the taps ran dry. The U.K. is not India. Lack of water shows up in the form of hosepipe bans and impacts on the supply chains of industries. “But it will only take couple of years of very bad drought to get to a place where we have to put very serious measures in place,” said Cloke.
That is why the U.K. can—and must—make itself more water-resilient, said Cloke, by building catchments for rainwater, fixing leaks in water infrastructure, and stopping watering lawns with drinking water. “Our water management has parallels—possibly—with the reaction to the pandemic,” she said. “We haven’t had a pandemic here and everybody was a bit complacent about it. We weren’t prepared and resilient.”