About Drought Handbook: Outputs & Impacts

A snapshot of the work arising
from the MaRIUS project
Dr Helen Gavin, Project Manager for MaRIUS
A Water Resource System Model for England and
Wales
For the first time, the UK can simulate the effect of
drought and water scarcity on the nation’s water
resources, using a model of the nation’s drinking water
infrastructure.
The water resource system model of England and Wales
is a key output of MaRIUS’ research, built from scratch
in collaboration with the water industry to represent
the drinking water distribution network in the UK.
Dr Helen Gavin, project manager of MaRIUS, says: “It
is the first such model created in the UK and possibly
the world. It is massively significant that the UK can
now assess the impacts to its water resource using a
simulation model in a systematic way. Until now there
has been no joined-up way to test the effects of water
scarcity on adjacent areas, or the effect of droughts
covering large areas of the country.
“A great strength is that it has been produced with
the water industry; they gave us the data, have seen
the ouputs, have given feedback and have been actively
interested in how it will be used. Because it has been
through that shared process, it is a much more robust
model and the results are much more critical in terms of
how our water supply is managed in the future.
“We are training members of the Environment Agency
on how to use the model and we will hand it over to
them to help manage our water resources.”
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Future Droughts
The climate datasets, generated from the Citizen
Science platform Weather@Home, have been a
common thread that has run through much of MaRIUS’s
analyses: they comprise meteorological datasets of many
different potential futures, at different timescales, from
now into the far future. The MARIUS researchers have
used these “drought event datasets” to show the effects
and impact of droughts in a systematic way: the robust
meteorological datasets have been fed into hydrological,
ecological, water resource and agricultural models to
give a coherent, coordinated potential future of drought
and the potential impacts.
“IT IS MASSIVELY SIGNIFICANT THAT
THE UK CAN NOW MANAGE ITS
WATER RESOURCE IN THIS JOINED
UP WAY. UNTIL NOW THERE HAS
BEEN NO WAY TO TEST WHAT THE
REGIONAL IMPACT OF A DROUGHT
WOULD BE AND WHAT ITS IMPACT
ON NEIGHBOURING REGIONS
WOULD BE.”
Economic Research
A startling discovery has come from the work examining
agricultural aspects of drought and water scarcity: the
analysis suggests that the total net benefits of irrigation
in a dry year are around £665 million at the farm level,