The Groundwater Drought Initiative (GDI)

Groundwater provides a significant proportion of water supplies in the UK and the majority of our domestic water in many parts of southern, south-eastern and eastern England. It is an important source for agricultural irrigation and for industry in the UK. It supports flow in many of the UKs most iconic rivers, such as the Chalk streams of the Chilterns and the North and South Downs, maintaining healthy ecosystems, and providing amenity value and supporting livelihoods associated with those groundwater-dependent rivers. When managed appropriately, it is a dependable, resilient source of water. However, due to natural year-on-year variations in rainfall, it is susceptible to major droughts. For example, during the last major groundwater drought in the UK in 2010-12 seven water companies in south and east England had to impose temporary use bans (colloquially known as 'hosepipe bans') on about 20 million people in spring of 2012 with the environment and farming sectors also significantly adversely affected by restrictions on their use of water. Consequently, there is a need for a much better understanding of groundwater droughts and their impacts to support improvement in planning for and managing groundwater droughts in the UK.

Groundwater droughts are defined as below normal levels of groundwater and have a number of unwelcome effects, such as reduced production of groundwater from boreholes, and the drying up of groundwater-dependent rivers with resulting implications for wildlife and livelihoods. The Natural Environment Research Council is currently funding the 'UK Droughts and Water Scarcity Programme' providing strategically important research to improve characterisation and prediction of episodes of drought in the UK. However, major episodes of drought take time to develop and affect large areas. For example, when there is a long groundwater drought in the UK, e.g. 2010-12, that same drought also affects large parts of continental Europe. As a result, there is significant benefit to be gained for the UK by understanding the development and impacts of major droughts at the European scale. However, there is currently no co-ordination of relevant groundwater information or groundwater drought research across Europe, and currently groundwater drought status cannot be monitored or its impacts assessed at the continental scale. This project, the Groundwater Drought Initiative (GDI), aims to address these shortcomings leading to significant improvements in groundwater drought characterization and impact assessment for the UK and continental Europe.

The GDI will build on and add value to two existing NERC-funded projects (the Historic Droughts and IMPETUS projects) in the current NERC UK Droughts and Water Scarcity Programme and will work with partners from BOKU, Austria; University of Rouen, France; University of Freiburg, Germany; University of Oslo, Norway; Wageningen University, Netherlands; Comenius University, Slovakia; and, CISC, Spain as well as other researchers across Europe. The GDI will produce and publish the first pan-European assessment of groundwater drought status (from 1960 to present), and will analyse the most recent European groundwater droughts. The GDI will investigate what groundwater droughts mean for people - for the first time systematically investigating the impacts of recent groundwater droughts by comparing the results of the new European-scale groundwater drought status assessments with information about impacts of previous recent droughts held in an existing on-line database (the European Drought Impact Report Inventory, EDII). Central to all the activities of the GDI will be the establishment of a new network to co-ordinate the work of groundwater drought specialists and related data and information across Europe, ensuring the dissemination, use and maintenance of the common resources to enable future impactful research into groundwater droughts.

For the Groundwater Drought Initiative (GDI) to fully realise its potential it is essential that it is responsive to and works with a range of non-academic partners. To achieve the most beneficial impacts, the GDI will extend work with existing partners in the UK water sector, including environmental regulators and water utilities, and will foster new links with similar agencies and organisations across Europe. In addition, the GDI will seek to work with a range of international institutions to enable the work and findings of the GDI to have global exposure and impact.

The GDI team are already working with partners in the Environment Agency and water companies, such as Thames Water Utilities and Affinity Water, as part of 'ENDOWS', the final work package of the NERC-funded 'UK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme' designed to maximise the impacts of the Programme for a diverse range of stakeholders. The GDI will enable the work of ENDOWS, for example the development of standardised stress tests for water resources and drought planning at company to national scales and new drought indicators and early warning systems, to be far more impactful for existing partners through inclusion of the extended drought status and impacts datasets produced by the GDI (see Letter of Support from the Environment Agency).

Hydrogeologists in the British Geological Survey produce monthly Groundwater Situation Reports and contribute to the UK Hydrological Outlooks service (in collaboration with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the Environment Agency and the Met. Office). The latter being a forward look out to three months of surface water and groundwater status in the UK. These reports and services are used extensively by water resource managers, the agricultural sector and industry to inform management and operational decisions, as well as by the public in the UK. If used to inform these reports and services during episodes of drought, the outputs from the GDI would mark a significant advance in groundwater drought status reporting in the UK and would add significant value to the users of these reports and services.

To realise the impacts of the GDI within Europe, the GDI will work closely with the European Drought Centre (EDC) to publish and disseminate the work of the GDI (see Letters of Support from the EDC) through their website. The EDC website is accessed and used by a wide range of water resource professionals as well as the public who would for the first time have access to European-scale groundwater drought status information. In addition, to reach the widest possible user community across Europe, information about the work of and outputs from the GDI will be provided through the European Inventory of Groundwater Research (EIGR) on the KINDRA website (KINDRA is a new EC-funded Horizon 2020 project synthesising a European-wide assessment of groundwater-related practical and scientific knowledge).

IGRAC, the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre, is the UNESCO Global Groundwater Centre, with a mission is to contribute to world-wide availability of relevant information and knowledge on the groundwater resources of the world, with particular emphasis on developing countries, in order to support sustainable use and management of the groundwater resources. IGRAC initiated the Global Groundwater Monitoring Network (GGMN) to improve quality and accessibility of groundwater monitoring information and knowledge on the state of groundwater resources and it is supported by many global and regional partners. The GDI will work closely with IGRAC to make sure that synergies between the GDI and the GGMN related to groundwater data analysis and reporting are maximised (see Letter of Support) and to enable the impacts of the GDI for researchers and water resource managers to be realised beyond Europe.