In about a decade, the total demand for global water will exceed the available supply. This will be a challenging issue for Sir James Bevan, CEO of Environment England. London, as well as many other major cities in the world, will be severely affected. It is not enough to emphasize reducing consumer demand. This is a lesson we learned from the major drought in Cape Town in 2018. A new supply source must be found along with the demand management solution. In terms of supply, the Inter-Bassin Transfer (IBT) program has received less attention from the academic and industry. The construction of IBT requires a lot of investment and may also have a negative impact on the watershed that must be studied.
Accordingly, a team of researchers from the UK (HR Wallingford, Newcastle University and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) provided a framework for the IBT planning and design phase. This framework can be used for feasibility studies regardless of the type, location, layout and means of the IBT.
They used the framework to assess the initial climate impact of the hypothetical IBT program, which would transport water from the Keilder reservoir in northeast England to London in southeastern. They said: “Kielder is the largest reservoir in the UK and is located in one of its most unpopular areas, because of this fact that it is informed.”
The proposed framework uses climate projection to calculate the spatial and temporal distribution of water flows and stored water flows for precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (UK Climate Projection 2018; UKCP18). This data is then modeled as a rainfall running model to calculate future inflow time series to determine storage capacity and flow temperature. The proposed framework produces 100 future climate scenarios for the driest members of the UK Metropolitan Office of the Donor Basin.
Dr. Khadem and colleagues evaluated hypothetical ecological and hydrological impacts. The effect of this hypothetical IBT was evaluated in three transfer cases. In the “Notransfer” scheme, there is no need for water from London IBT, while the water from Keilder Reservoir is used within its resource areas. In the case of “Allyeartransfer”, there is a constant demand for water in London IBT every year. In the “Winter Transfer” scenario, London IBT operates only in the winter (i.e., October to March), while providing London’s annual water deficit.
Hydrological effects are assessed by evaluating whether IBT causes drought in export basins. In the case of “Alyeartransfer”, the hydrological risk of potential drought in Kild catchment is higher. In this case, such IBT will work hard to meet demand and will lead to drought in the Kild Water Resources Area. However, the transfer under “winter transfer” shows that there is no adverse hydrological impact due to the high flow rate of the donor basin. Ecological impacts are assessed by evaluating whether changes in flow and storage will alter stream temperatures and destroy freshwater habitats. In all three cases, low flow temperatures were predicted, with no negative impact on the ecological impact of the Kield Basin.
The team’s findings successfully demonstrate that ambitious North-South IBT can reap water from Keilder Reserve to transfer large amounts of water in winter, even in the driest UKCP18 climate forecasts, to meet London’s deficits by transferring large amounts of water. . This is not the only option available to policy makers, but this study shows that it is a viable and viable option, perhaps the starting point for further analysis. “Current water management plans include a combination of reduced leakage, reduced demand, new groundwater and reuse programs, and regional transfers. However, if population growth is high, reduced demand will not return the necessary benefits, or impose national infrastructure With the higher standards of drought elasticity required by the committee, long-distance IBT may be essential to maintaining water supply in London,” said Dr. Khadem, the author of the leadership.
Journal Reference and Image Credit:
Khadem, Majed, Richard J. Dawson, and Claire L. Walsh. “The feasibility of water transfer between Basin to manage climate risks in England.” Climate Risk Management (2021): 100322. DOI:
