One evening in early August, farmer Daniel Sizer's phone buzzed with a message. It was from his local water board and it read: "River levels are low but have recovered enough to allow one night of irrigation tonight." Like much of the lower half of England, Daniel's fourth-generation farm had seen barely any rain in nearly three months. He shows us what is left of the peas and wheat crop at his 300-hectare site in Suffolk.
"There's no water in the river so half my crop is completely and utterly ruined." With river levels falling so low that taking any more water out of them risked endangering wildlife, in July the Environment Agency (EA) temporarily stopped Daniel and thousands of other farmers from watering their crops from the river. England has long been used to hosepipe bans over the summer. But what Daniel has experienced points to something newer and more worrying.
The kind of increasingly frequent heatwaves and greatly reduced rainfall that we have seen over successive summers, plus a projected increase in demand for water, have raised the prospect that England could at some point run out of water. The result could be that by 2055 England will face a shortfall of five billion litres in public water supply a day, almost enough to fill Wembley Stadium four and a half times daily. A mixture of low rainfall, high temperatures and demand put pressure on water supply in England more so than elsewhere in the UK.
It is all a far cry from when, in 1818, John Keats wrote: "It is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches… Rain! Rain!" But what is really to blame for England finding its water supply so under threat? And are there ways of securing its future?
Back in the 1980s, people in England and Denmark were using water at a similar rate. Residents in Denmark now consume 97 litres of water per person per day, according to Danva, the country's water and wastewater industry body. The daily consumption per person in England is 136.5 litres.
"We've actually doubled the amount of water we use per person, on average, in the last 50, 60 years," points out Nicci Russell, who runs Waterwise, a water efficiency campaign organisation. She points to changing habits over generations - from a family having a shared bath once a week to having multiple showers a week, sometimes a day. Households are responsible for nearly 60% of water use in England and Wales.
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