Climate change and hydrological stability: A look at long‐term trends in south‐eastern Britain

Abstract

The birth of a new millennium was understandably accompanied by considerable speculation regarding the future climatic conditions likely to characterise the UK. Many connections have been made between currently favoured climate change scenarios and the volatility of weather patterns over the last decade of the twentieth century. In the media, a series of extrapolations - often very selectively based on scientific evidence - focused on how climate change will impact destructively on the UK’s water resources and cause widespread damage to our aquatic environment. The cluster of dry summers (and several extreme flood events) experienced during the 1990s were presented as the precursors of substantial hydrological stress in the twenty-first century - southeastern Britain being seen as especially vulnerable (see Fig. 1 for location map). Such concerns are certainly not groundless, but neither are they new. Following a succession of dry years at the close of the nineteenth century, plans were reviewed before Parliament to accommodate the projected increase in London’s water demand by an aqueduct and tunnel link to the headwaters of the Rivers Towy and Wye in central Wales (Priestley 1899). Unlike a number of earlier regional transfer schemes which, for instance, saw ManChester supplied from the abundant resources