ABSTRACT
As an English farmer once said to me: “The problem with water is that there is either too much of it or too little of it. Either way we’re screwed.” The irony is that these words were spoken in 2004 and were meant as hyperbole, not prophesy. At that time the UK was experiencing a prolonged drought that was only really broken by the catastrophic floods of June and July 2007; floods that triggered the largest peacetime mobilisation of civil defence activities in UK history. Somewhat counter-intuitively (given recent weather!), the UK government is now suggesting that climate change means that we in the UK will have to learn how to get by with less water – as low as 120 litres/person/day (approx 32 gallons/person/day) according to the 2008 report Future Water: the government’s water strategy for England. To put this into perspective – the World Health Organisation argues that the public health-related floor on water consumption is somewhere around 50 litres person/day, even the most parsimonious European country has consumption rates around 120 litres/person/day and – at the other end of the consumptive spectrum – US water consumption is closer to 400 litres/person/day (even in the desert southwest!). Still, whilst reservoirs in northwestern Europe are currently full, other parts of Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean Basin, are nearly tapped out (EEA, 2009).
