Environment Agency To Redefine 'Drought' After Unhelpful Record Rainfall

Environment Agency To Redefine 'Drought' After Unhelpful Record Rainfall

To anyone in the UK who has looked out of the window at some point in the last six weeks, the fact many of us are still in 'drought' has been more than a little baffling.

After the wettest April on record and another very damp month in May, many residents around the UK were forced to evacuate their homes due to flooding - but yet still remained in drought.

Now the Environment Agency has a new solution: semantics.

Officials now say that 'drought' may have to be described differently for the public to understand how record levels of rain sometimes don't help.

The reason that we're still in drought, experts say, is that after two dry winters most of the water which fell in April either ran off hard ground, or was soaked up by spring plants.

The result was little of the rain actually reached reservoirs.

On Monday the Environment Agency told reporters it will now be reconsidering its terminology.

The aim is to be more specific, telling people when conditions mean insufficient rainfall for crops, low groundwater levels or a shortage of water for the general public.

The agency will distinguish between a "meteorological drought", meaning a long dry spell, a "hydrological drought" meaning low reservoir levels, and an "agricultural drought" which affects crops.

Trevor Bishop, head of water resources at the Environment Agency, told the Telegraph: "Drought is a really blunt word, and they have had exactly the same problem in the US and in Australia where they have used that single term to represent a real plethora of situations."

"We need to show the gradation from something that is less serious to situations where farmers and economics are impacted."

The agency has also altered its official drought maps to show which areas are in full drought, and which are just below average.

But Justin Taberham, director of policy at the Chartered Instituted of Water and Environmental Management, said that redefining 'drought' was only helpful if funding was also direction to education about water use.

A focus on "technobabble" and not true education could even hinder progress, he said.

"If we committed significant funding to ensuring that the general public understood where their water came from," he told the Huffington Post UK. "And the complexity in its management, as well as how we should be sustainably managing water in an integrated way, we wouldn’t need to cobble together a group of technical terms and ‘hit’ the public with ‘technobabble’ which may end up confusing them more.

"The answer here is public education measures at a far higher level than at present."

"Parts of East Anglia and South East England remain in drought, with water company restrictions in place on public water use," the agency says.

"South West England, the Midlands and parts of Yorkshire are no longer in drought due to the recent rainfall. It is unlikely that water companies will now impose hosepipe bans in these areas over the summer."

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