drought in the uk case study

Major review of UK drought research and impacts published 

UK scientists have produced a comprehensive review of the latest research into drought including its impacts on people and the environment  

The Environment Agency worked with more than 40 experts from 13 different universities, consultancies and research institutes including the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) to produce the report. 

Predicting and managing droughts is vital to protect the environment, lives and livelihoods, food production, property and infrastructure. However, the report says that, to date, droughts have been poorly understood because they are complex events that vary in duration, time of year, location, severity. Their infrequency means there is limited data and experience of them, which limits society’s ability to predict, prepare and respond.

The report consolidates the latest knowledge on drought and identified knowledge gaps to help inform priority research and management efforts in future.

It focuses on three themes: the physical processes that drive droughts, the impacts of droughts, and the management of droughts.

Each theme is further divided into specialist topics, each providing an expert review of a specialist area. UKCEH scientists led the reviews on: •    past river flow drought trends  •    future river flow projections  •    impacts of drought on water quality   •    impacts of drought on vegetation   

UKCEH also contributed to the review of drought impacts on soils.  

Jamie Hannaford, Principal Hydrologist at UKCEH, who led the review of past trends, explains: “While the UK is thought of as a wet country, recent droughts like 2018 and 2022 have underlined our vulnerability to prolonged periods of dry weather and shown the range of impacts that can occur across ecosystems and different economic sectors. We must re-evaluate our understanding of drought, and how risks may change in future due to climate change.”  

There are large uncertainties over predictions about future drought events, and how hydrological conditions may vary between regions. However, UKCEH analysis using up-to-date climate projections to model future river flows and groundwater levels up to 2080, shows the UK will see significant increases in the severity of droughts over the coming century.”

The national Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure (FDRI) programme, led by UKCEH and funded by UKRI, will produce extensive new measurements across several catchments across the country.

This will enable researchers to improve computer models to predict when and where floods and droughts will happen, and their severity. It will comprise a combination of fixed instruments and mobile equipment, such as drones to monitor river flows, which can be deployed to different areas at times of floods and droughts. 

The Review of the Research and Scientific Understanding of Drought is available on the gov.uk website  and the Environment Agency's Chief Scientist, Dr Robert Bradburne, provided a summary in a blog .

Some 20 UKCEH scientists contributed to the report, covering a range of disciplines including hydrological and climate modelling, hydrology, ecology, soils science and Earth observation contributed to the report.

They were: Jamie Hannaford , Lucy Barker, Steve Turner , Maliko Tanguy , Amulya Chevuturi , Rosanna Lane , Alison Kay , Mike Bowes , Alex O’Brien, Michael Hutchins , Cedric Laize , Jill Thompson, France Gerard , Douglas Kelley , Rebecca Oliver , Amy Pickard , Maud van Soest , David Robinson , Sabine Reinsch ,  Aidan Keith . 

What are the effects of drought?

From pollinators to profits, food to fires, here's what Cambridge experts say about the impacts of water scarcity – and what it signals about our changing climate.

By Louise Walsh 16 August 2022

Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash

After successive heatwaves and the driest summer in 50 years, the Environment Agency confirmed on 12 August that eight of 14 areas across England are now in drought conditions.

Essential water supplies are safe, but water companies have stepped up actions to manage the impacts of the drought. substantial rain is needed to avoid water restrictions being tightened further., what does the drought mean for the uk and elsewhere is this the future where do we go from here six cambridge experts give their views..

Food security

Economic growth

“have you noticed there aren’t many insects around this year”, dr lynn dicks, department of zoology.

Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

Zoologis t Dr Lynn Dicks is wo rried that our insect fauna will be unable to change fast enough to avoid serious declines in some species in the coming decades.

“Have you noticed there aren’t many insects around this year? Where are the moths flying to light at night? On the other hand, it could be an excellent year for some species. Long-tailed blue butterflies from the Mediterranean have been arriving in decent numbers in the south – a wonderful sight for British butterfly enthusiasts.

Insects are extremely sensitive to weather conditions. So would you be, if you were only a centimetre long or less. Drought and extreme heatwaves are likely to be dangerous for some insects.

Bees can easily overheat, especially bumblebees, which are large, black and relatively cold-adapted. Many bee species have critical temperature thresholds not far above 44°C – hotter than this and they collapse if they can’t escape the heat. We’re not there yet, in the UK, but parts of France reached 45° in 2019.

Water is a crucial resource for insects. Honey bees and wasps use it to actively cool down their colonies during hot spells.

Thousands of species of insect rely on nectar in flowers as their main source of energy, so if drought affects the amount of available nectar, this could have serious impacts.

Our recent work has shown that it can. Dr Coline Jaworski, of Cambridge's Agroecology group, used an artificial drought experiment in southern France to look closely at responses of three plant species – thyme, rosemary and rock rose. One of the species, thyme, had a dramatic (75%) reduction in the amount of nectar sugar under drought conditions. The other two did not, perhaps because they have deeper roots.

At the moment, research on the impacts of heat waves and drought on insects is way behind the pace of global climate change. We know almost nothing about how nectar resources might change across the main important forage plant species in the UK, for example.

If hot dry summers like 2022 are going to become a regular feature, our insect fauna will need to rapidly change, with cold adapted species moving north and a new, more Mediterranean community moving in. This is already happening, but it seems unlikely to happen fast enough to avoid serious declines in some species in the coming decades.”

Dr Lynn Dicks (credit: Philippe Besnard/POLLINIS)

“ The forecast for this heatwave is showing exceptional fire severity across large parts of England ”

D r alison ming, department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

Photo by Joanne Francis on Unsplash

Expert on atmospheric dynamics Dr Alison Ming says the way to stop extreme weather events becoming more frequent is to cut carbon dioxide emissions and reach Net Zero.

“Climate change is happening here and now. Human influence has warmed the globe at a rate that is unprecedented over the last 2000 years. This warming has a range of impacts on all parts of the climate system. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report tells us that heatwaves have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s. Some recent hot extremes would have been virtually impossible without anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide.

The warming has also increased the chance of compound extreme events happening. We have been seeing more concurrent heatwaves and droughts all over the globe. In the UK, we recently broke yet another temperature record this year and we are now seeing widespread drought conditions.  In fact, all of the UK’s ten warmest years on record have occurred since 2002 and a drought has just officially been declared in the UK.

Wildfires are also becoming more common. The Met Office fire severity index, which runs on a scale of 1 to 5, assesses how severe a fire could become if started. The forecast for this heatwave is showing exceptional fire severity (index of 5) across large parts of England.”

Weather and climate models allow us to better understand the climate threat in the different regions of the globe but the only way to stop these extreme events becoming more frequent is to cut carbon dioxide emissions and reach Net Zero.

Dr Alison Ming (credit: Nick Saffell)

“ A changing landscape at the Botanic Garden is inevitable ”

Professor beverley glover, director of cambridge university botanic garden.

Plants growing in the Dry Garden are thriving in the hot weather (credit: Cambridge University Botanic Garden)

Professor Beverley Glover, Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden , describes how the horticulturists are giving their vitally important plants the best chances of surviving – now and in the future.

Professor Beverley Glover

“Protecting our 40-acre living plant collection is vital during the excessive temperatures we’re currently experiencing. Our collection contains 8,000 species from around the world, ranging from high altitude alpines to tropical plants, so it is a constant challenge to ensure that we can grow and maintain them in our Garden and Glasshouses.  

Due to our local conditions of low rainfall, well-drained soils and mild winters, some plants in our collection – such as lavender, cistus and phlomis, for example – are thriving in the hot weather, along with plants growing in our Dry Garden.

However, at the other end of the scale, species preferring wetter conditions are struggling and it’s important we prioritise these when it comes to our watering policy. These will take preference over, for example, our lawns and more natural habitats, which we are allowing to brown off, as they will bounce back with cooler, wetter weather later in the year.  

Practically, we are aiming to water overnight as much as possible, to minimise the amount of water lost through evaporation. Although we normally try to adopt best watering practices, we have recently resorted to watering during the day, using water from our borehole, to ensure that we can give our collection the best possible chance of surviving. We try to ensure that plants and plantings have a good dowsing, rather than applying little and often, which is far less effective.   

Strategically, the hot weather trends mean we are looking closely at our species selection criteria. Due to the nature of a living collection, a changing landscape at the Botanic Garden is inevitable. Our goal is to steward all the plants in our collection and ensure plants of high conservation and research value are practically prioritised.

The Garden’s plant collection supports leading scientific research towards meeting many of the world’s greatest challenges such as food security and climate change.

Looking ahead, we aim to make informed decisions on plant acquisitions, which will involve understanding how our climate is projected to change, observing how plants in our current collection are responding to extreme weather events, and building resilience into our collection by acquiring plants that are best suited to our climate now and in the future. This will also mean collaboration with and input from other botanic gardens, the scientific community, the local community, and our horticulture and curation staff.    

Through accurate record keeping and adaptive horticultural approaches, our aim is to effectively curate change that safeguards the world’s plant diversity and drives the pursuit of excellence in all areas of research and teaching which aims to meet the current global challenges.”

Heatwaves and climate change

Professor emily shuckburgh, director of cambridge zero , and professor beverley glover give their views on the uk's recent record-breaking temperatures. read article., “ climate extremes are major challenges facing food security in the uk, in addition to rising costs of energy and fertilisers ”, professor howard griffiths, department of plant sciences.

Photo by Tomasz Filipek on Unsplash

Professor Howard Griffiths, co-chair of Cambridge's Global Food Security Interdisciplinary Research Centre , tells us how drought has brought an added burden to the challenges already facing farmers in the UK.

“The country is divided: satellite images reveal the current drought as a browning of the UK, with only the more westerly extremities remaining green. Yet trees in hedgerows, parks and gardens seem mostly green, and so there are both immediate and long term implications for such serious water deficits on carbon sequestration, crop production and water supplies.

Mature trees routinely require 200–400 litres of water every day to maintain water status, and so shallow rooted species such as beech and some shrubs may be in danger of reaching the wilting point each day. As in 1976, the impact of the drought on tree mortality may occur later, over the next year or so. In the summer drought of 2003, most of continental Europe’s forests turned from carbon sinks to carbon sources, thereby negating our reliance on forests for global carbon sequestration.

The early season drought will have affected many of our crops. Those that can overwinter will have reached maturity earlier and have now been harvested, albeit at potentially reduced yields.

Other horticultural crops are requiring extensive irrigation, at a cost to both diminishing water supplies during licensed abstraction from rivers, and in competition with those water companies also reliant on surface waters for sustaining our daily water use.

Overall, the climate extremes associated with climate change have led in recent years to two successive autumns in which it was too wet to sow many of our overwintering crops, whilst more extensive summer droughts further constrain the growing seasons. Climate extremes are major challenges facing food security in the UK, in addition to rising costs of energy and fertilisers.”

Professor Howard Griffiths (credit: Clare College)

“Freight can’t navigate, meaning critical supplies such as coal and oil can’t be shipped, further exacerbating the energy crisis”

Dr matthew agarwala, bennett institute for public policy.

Photo by John Simmons on Unsplash

Dr Matthew Agarwala, an environmental economist at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy , explains that trade will be among the impacts of the drought, resulting in longer term effects on the economy .

Dr Matthew Agarwala

“There are short-term local effects on consumer behaviour and sectoral impacts on the production side. Eventually, these aggregate up to economy-wide pressures.

In the short run, there can be competing economic effects. ‘Great weather’ makes people feel good, they celebrate, go shopping, late evenings in the pub, and of course, garden parties and BBQs. All of these tend to increase spending a bit and therefore GDP. However, when the mercury really spikes, people retreat to their bunkers. Curtains drawn, locked inside, too hot to shop, and labour productivity takes a hit. Who among us hasn’t felt drowsy and lethargic in these sweltering heatwaves?

Then there are the sectoral impacts: clearly agriculture takes a major hit. Crops wither and die, and the outdoor workforce in particular becomes less productive. Transport suffers: we’ve seen trains cancelled because the tracks buckle, and even airports have reported disruption due to melting runways. The more general effects build up from these.

If transport suffers, so too do all the industries that depend on it, including those that lose out because employees can’t commute.

There’s additional pressure on the NHS as extreme heat exacerbates existing conditions and creates its own: heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Labour productivity across the board suffers – especially for outdoor work, but the data shows impacts even for indoor workers.

Finally, there are international effects. Low water levels in Norway threaten electricity exports (that we depend on) as the government prioritises domestic consumers. The water levels in the Rhine are so low that freight can’t navigate, meaning critical supplies such as coal and oil can’t be shipped, further exacerbating the energy crisis.

If droughts hit simultaneously around the key crop growing regions (which is currently the case) it becomes harder and more expensive to import food to replace dead crops from the UK.

Normally, some of this could be alleviated through trade, but the fact that droughts and heatwaves are hitting simultaneously across our key trading partners means there’s little reprieve.

In the medium to long term, there’s much we could do to adapt: changing work patterns, infrastructure, and building design. But these take time and tremendous capital investment alongside pervasive social and behavioural change.

But it’s not just heatwaves and droughts. Climate change brings intense swings in weather. The 2010-2012 drought in England and Wales was immediately followed by record breaking rainfall (wettest April for 230 years) and significant flooding, costing up to £600 million. Whilst one in four days in 2012 were officially in drought, with 20 million people facing hosepipe bans, one in five days in 2012 saw flood conditions, with over 7,000 homes and properties affected.

We can adapt to a hotter, drier climate. We can adapt to a wetter climate. It is hard to adapt to both.”

“ Fighting climate change will help economic growth ”

Dr kamiar mohaddes cambridge judge business school.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Dr Kamiar Mohaddes, from the Cambridge Judge Business School , says that virtually all countries will suffer economically if the current trajectory of carbon emissions is maintained.

Dr Kamiar Mohaddes

“The UK recently had its hottest day on record. Train tracks buckled, airport runways and roads melted, and thousands were stranded because it was out of the norm. Such events take an economic toll, and will only become more frequent and severe without policies to address the threats of climate change.

Without mitigation and adaptation policies, many countries are likely to experience sustained temperature increases relative to historical norms and suffer major income losses as a result. This holds for both rich and poor countries as well as hot and cold regions .

We are often told that climate change will only have negative economic effects in “poor” and developing countries, but that advanced economies such as the UK and the United States will not be affected by climate change (mainly because our economies have adapted to climate change and are resilient).

The idea that rich, temperate nations are economically immune to climate change, or could even double and triple their wealth as a result, is implausible.

The economics of climate change stretch far beyond the impact on growing crops. Heavy rainfall prevents mountain access for mining and affects commodity prices. Cold snaps raise heating bills and high street spending drops. Heatwaves and droughts cause transport networks to shut down, interrupt supply chains, delay construction projects, and lead to costly production volatility with adverse effects on labour productivity. All these things add up.

The scientific consensus suggests that adapting to climate change takes an average of 30 years, as everything from infrastructure to cultural practice slowly adjusts.

At that speed, 7% of global GDP will disappear by 2100, but even if this adjustment speeds up to just 20 years, 4.5% of global GDP will be lost by 2100 as a result of business-as-usual carbon emissions.

Note that these are conservative estimates. For instance, if you allow temperature shocks to increase over time (in line with the temperature increases), the income losses for the world economy would almost double and be more than 13% by year 2100 and under RCP 8.5.

Economies will adapt to changing climates, but our modelling work shows adaptation alone will not be enough. Further measures are needed and the evidence suggests that adaptation efforts should be complemented with mitigation policies to minimise the adverse effects of climate change .

For instance, green innovation can deliver economic growth that is equal to – or greater than – the impact of non-green innovation . ‘Greenovating’ can bring huge opportunities in terms of economic growth and productivity, and ultimately for businesses.

But prospects for achieving Paris targets and a Net Zero world hinge on governments: actively encouraging green innovation, facilitating regulations, and increasing investments. This will drive real economic growth, create opportunities for businesses and reduce carbon emissions for generations to come.”

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As global temperatures rise, there is a risk drought will become more frequent in the UK. Data available here .

Winters across the UK are projected to get wetter, while summers are expected to become drier. However, it is the distribution of this rainfall that will determine future UK drought risk.

Future projections using high resolution models have suggested that during summer the number of dry days will increase, with heavier rain in between. This may mean changing how water is collected and stored to prevent adverse effects on households and agriculture.

Global Observations

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) looked at different types of drought and the likelihood of human influence on them.

There is at least medium confidence that less precipitation has been observed across significant parts of Africa and South America.

Across each continent there is evidence much of Africa, western North America, the Mediterranean and central western Europe, southern Australia, and eastern Brazil are observing more agricultural and ecological droughts. More hydrological droughts have been observed in the Mediterranean (high confidence) and Western Africa, East Asia, and Southern Australia (medium confidence).

There is still low confidence that human influence has affected trends in meteorological droughts in most regions. However, there is medium confidence human influence has contributed to the severity of certain events with more detailed studies . There is also medium confidence that human-induced climate change has contributed to increasing trends in the probability or intensity of recent agricultural and ecological droughts.

It is more difficult to separate influences for hydrological drought because water use and land changes also affect water levels.

Global Projections

The IPCC AR6 has reported that the areas affected by drought will increase in size with higher global temperatures. Even if warming is stabilised at 1.5–2.0 °C several regions are expected to experience more frequent and severe droughts.

Regions that are already suffering from a lack of rainfall are expected to further worsen. Under a high emissions scenario, regions affected by meteorological, agricultural and ecological drought could expand as far as Central America and the Caribbean, most of South America, most of Africa, the Mediterranean and central eastern Europe, and southern and eastern Australia. Only a small number of regions are expected to experience a reduction in meteorological drought.

Hydrological drought is most likely to affect regions that rely on snowmelt or are downstream of melting glaciers. However, due to large amounts of uncertainty it is difficult to predict with confidence how river flows will change.

Related pages

Attributing extreme weather to climate change

UK and Global extreme events – Cold

UK and Global extreme events – Heatwaves

UK and Global extreme events – Heavy rainfall and floods

UK and Global extreme events – Wind storms

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Original research article, representation of drought events in the united kingdom: contrasting 200 years of news texts and rainfall records.

• 1 ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
• 2 UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), Wallingford, United Kingdom
• 3 Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS), Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland
• 4 Changjiang chair at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

This paper combines evidence from the analyses of large sets of newspaper material and long-term rainfall records to gain insights into representations of drought events in the United Kingdom, between 1800 and 2014. More specifically, we bring together two different, though complementary, approaches to trace longitudinal patterns in the ways drought events have been measured and perceived, focusing specifically on the duration, spatial extent, and intensity of each event. The power of the combined approach is demonstrated through three case studies (1911–1913, 1940–1945, and 1947–1949), in which we explore the available evidence in more detail and explore the impacts of the droughts upon the British population. Using corpus linguistics methods, we examined four sets of newspaper material: 1) the British Library 19th century newspaper corpus, 2) The Times 20th century corpus (both i and ii with over five billion words), 3) 4,986 texts from British broadsheet papers (3.8 million words) and 4) 2,384 texts from tabloids (1.1 million words). An independent analysis of meteorological drought was undertaken using three sources: 1) the England and Wales Precipitation (EWP) series (back to 1800), 2) a statistically reconstructed version of the EWP which is more reliable in the early record (pre-1870), and 3) a high resolution gridded dataset (back to 1862) which is aggregated to NUTS1 regional scales. Meteorological droughts were assessed using the Standardised Precipitation Index, which allowed us to appraise drought intensity, severity and duration. We found an overwhelming agreement between the corpus data and meteorological records. For the very few cases of disparity between the corpus and rainfall data, there were in most cases plausible explanations. All in all, the present study demonstrates the power of the combined approach, presenting evidence on a scale that would not otherwise be possible, thus contributing to a better understanding of how drought is perceived, in addition to how it is traditionally “measured”.

1 Introduction

Historical meteorological and hydrological records are the foundation of drought and water resources management. In the United Kingdom (UK), as elsewhere, water utilities and regulators have for a long time used the worst observed ‘drought of record’ to stress test drought plans and water supply systems ( Environment Agency, 2015 ). Given concerns over climate change impacts on water availability, the “duty of resilience” ( Water Act, 2014 ) now requires water utilities to test their resilience to events more extreme than those observed in past records (such as 1 in 200 or 1 in 500 years drought; Water Act, 2014 ). Risk estimation for such rare drought events, outside the envelope of past variability, requires simulation methods (typically stochastic simulations based on Weather Generators, e.g., Serinaldi and Kilsby, 2012 )—but ultimately the credibility of these methods rests on a proper understanding of historical drought occurrence. Historical records are also an essential baseline of past hydroclimatic variability, against which changes due to anthropogenic warming can be identified and projected into the future.

The United Kingdom has a relative abundance of long-term meteorological records, and these have been used in drought assessments for many decades, as far back as Wright and Jones (1982) . The seminal study of Marsh et al. (2007) identified major droughts in England and Wales back to the late 18th century, using selected rainfall records and other hydrometric datasets. These authors identified many 18th and 19th century droughts that were more severe than recent droughts. Jones and Lister (1998) ; Jones et al (2006) used long rainfall series to reconstruct streamflows back to the 1850s in 15 catchments in England and Wales and found broadly similar patterns. Barker et al. (2019) identified similar droughts with a comprehensive dataset of over 107 streamflow reconstructions across the United Kingdom. Other authors have adopted a more regional focus, often focusing on individual rain gauges but going back over very long periods. For example: Todd et al. (2013) for southeast England back to 1,697; Spraggs et al. (2015) for East Anglia back to 1798; Lennard et al. (2016) back to the 1880s in the Midlands; Harvey-Fishenden et al. (2019) for Chatsworth in the Peak District back to 1760.

One of the most important long-term rainfall records in the United Kingdom is the England & Wales precipitation (EWP) series ( Wigley et al., 1984 ), which was used by many of the long-term drought assessments listed above. More recently, Murphy et al. (2020a) challenged the earlier parts of these records using an independent reconstructed approach and developed a reconstructed series for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which were also used to identify “forgotten droughts” such as 1765–1768 and 1834–1836 ( Murphy et al., 2020b ).

While the United Kingdom has a good coverage of long rainfall records compared to many countries, there is still a relative sparsity of gauges in the 19th century and earlier. One of the issues with such long rainfall records is this sparseness coupled with likely biases in the earlier records (as exposed by Murphy et al., 2020a ). There is therefore a significant benefit of evaluating drought histories from these records alongside independent sources of evidence.

Prior to the 20th century it is very difficult to corroborate rainfall or other hydroclimatic series as alternative sources become much more uncertain further back in time. Given the lack of readily available datasets, significant research effort is required to generate appropriate primary sources for comparison. Dendrochronology is beginning to provide a credible alternative (e.g., Loader et al., 2020 ) but has serious limitations (notably it is necessarily only available for the summer half year). For the most part, documentary sources provide one of the best approaches to examine historical droughts and compare them with rainfall datasets. Typically, such approaches have used a selective approach to find appropriate sources from archives, diaries, the news media and so on (e.g., Noone et al., 2017 ; Harvey-Fishenden et al., 2019 ; Murphy et al., 2020b ).

The present study innovates by bringing together two fundamentally different, but complementary, approaches to trace past occurrences of drought events in the United Kingdom. We combined the analysis of long-term meteorological records with a corpus analysis of newspaper material, spanning from 1800 to 2014.

Past studies have typically identified precipitation droughts and then sought documentary evidence to confirm them. While useful, the approach opens up the possibility of confirmation bias. The corpus approach, in which large volumes of textual data (corpora, sg. corpus) is searched and processed to investigate a research question ( McEnery and Hardie, 2012 ), provides a crucial advantage over previous studies. We analyse all the available data by means of corpus linguistics methods, rather than simply seeking corroboration, or otherwise, for one suspected drought. The method allows for large-scale observation, objectivity, consistency of analysis and the possibility to transform the frequency data gained from the corpus using statistical analyses to provide inference about issues such as representation. Importantly for this paper, the availability of substantial corpora covering long periods of time is greatly increasing, with organizations such as the British Library providing access to machine readable text of newspapers from the past. 1

The present analysis builds on corpus analyses of the representation of drought in 19th century British newspapers in McEnery et al. (2019 , 2021) , which contrasted evidence gathered from corpus material against the hydrological evidence provided by Cole and Marsh (2006) and Marsh et al. (2007) . McEnery et al. (2019 , 2021) demonstrate the effectiveness of the corpus linguistic method to identify drought events in the United Kingdom during the 19th century, when rainfall records were sparse and fragmentary. While allowing us access to crucial information about past droughts, these analyses also identified droughts that had not been captured by hydrological approaches. In the present paper, we also take advantage of improved meteorological datasets and more robust statistical assessments of past drought severity than Cole and Marsh (2006) and Marsh et al. (2007) . We use the Standardised Precipitation Index applied to annual (SPI-12) and seasonal (SPI-3) time scales, which roughly captures hydrological/groundwater droughts and agricultural droughts, respectively.

This paper innovates by presenting evidence of the representation of drought in UK newspapers with unprecedented scale and depth. By combining the evidence gathered from the newly-available corpus material with robust drought assessment from long-term meteorological records, we add both further insight and, at times, confidence to previous work on past occurrence of droughts in the United Kingdom, thus contributing to a better understanding of how drought is perceived, in addition to how it is traditionally “measured”. To demonstrate the power of the combined approach, we selected three points in time as case studies (1911–1913, 1940–1945, 1947–1949) and explored the available evidence in more detail, focusing on the duration, spatial extent, intensity, and impacts of each event (see Section 7 for details).

This paper is organised as follows. The first two sections detail the data and methods of analysis used for this study. We then provide an overview of results yielded by each approach (Section 4 and Section 5). Section 6 combines the results and is followed by a discussion of three case studies (Section 7). The paper concludes with a discussion on the strengths and contributions of the combined approach.

2.1 Newspapers

We used four independent corpora to examine the discourse around drought in the UK press. In part this is to allow us access to a dataset with both range (covering a variety of newspapers where possible) and scale. However, our data represents a patchwork quilt. We are limited by the range of available data. To use corpus techniques, we need machine readable versions of the newspapers we wish to study. Digital newspapers are a late 20th century phenomenon—analysis of newspapers prior to that depends on the efforts of others who have undertaken digitization of printed materials by running optical character recognition (OCR) software across newspapers. Digitization efforts now mean that we are able to cover, with a varying range, the period from 1800 to the present.

For the 19th century, we used the British Library 19th Century newspaper collection. With over five billion words of data, the 19th Century Corpus contains a range of national and regional newspaper titles published from 1800 to 1899, although with some gaps in the data. These were caused by 1) not all titles being published throughout the century or 2) poor quality ink or paper rendering reasonably reliable OCR impossible. For most of the 20th century the range is narrower, as we have access only to one newspaper— The Times . The 20th Century Corpus therefore contains articles published by The Times between 1900 and 1999, which total over five billion words in 30,757 texts. From 1990 onwards, digital newspapers are the norm, so we were able to achieve a greater range. We used 4,986 articles (3.8 million words) published by major broadsheet newspapers (The Broadsheet Corpus) and 2,384 articles (1.1 million words) published by contemporary tabloids (The Tabloid Corpus).

Readers interested in a fuller description of the composition of each set and the methods and procedures required in the preparation of the texts should refer to: Baker et al. (2020a) and McEnery et al. (2019 , 2021) for the 19th Century Corpus, Baker et al. (2020b) for the 20th Century Corpus, and ( Dayrell et al., 2020a , 2020b ) for the Broadsheet and Tabloid Corpora. The 19th and the 20th Century Corpora were processed using CQPweb , Lancaster University’s software platform for large-corpus analysis ( Hardie, 2012 ). For the Broadsheet and Tabloid Corpora, we used the software package LancsBox ( Brezina et al., 2015 ).

2.2 Rainfall Records

Several sources of precipitation data were used in this study. To provide a complete long record view of the whole 1800–2014 period, the monthly England & Wales Precipitation series (hereafter: EWP; Wigley et al., 1984 ) 2 was used. In addition, for 1800–2000 we used a statistically reconstructed version of the EWP developed by ( Murphy et al., 2020a ; hereafter: M2020-EWP) which has been advanced as an alternative that is more reliable in the early record (pre-1870) due to significant underestimation of the EWP in this period (see Introduction). To provide a more detailed spatial picture, albeit for a shorter period 1862–2014, the gridded Historic Droughts (hereafter: HD) Standardised Precipitation Index dataset was used ( Tanguy et al., 2017 ).

In this section, we describe the methods used by each approach separately: the corpus linguistic methods used to examine the newspaper material and the rainfall records used to identify meteorological droughts. We then explain the procedures for combining the two approaches.

3.1 Corpus Linguistics Methods

The corpus linguistic analysis started by calculating the relative frequency of the word ‘ drought ’ across each corpus. Small capitals indicate the different forms of the word ( drought , droughts , droughty or drought -*) as well as the archaic form drouth(s) which was used between 1800 and 1950 and gradually died out throughout the 20th century.

The relative frequencies were calculated per year in relation to the overall number of words for the specific year, considering the frequency of drought per one million words for the 19th and 20th century data and per 10,000 words for the Broadsheet and Tabloid Corpora. This means that we have normalised the data to take into account size difference in individual years within each corpus. The different scales were needed because the corpora are of different nature. The 19th and 20th Century Corpora contain all issues published by the selected newspapers in a particular year whereas the Broadsheet and Tabloid Corpora contain only articles that make reference to droughts. As described in Section 3.3, we then transformed and combined these time series to obtain a single long time series covering the full study period, 1800–2014.

The frequency distribution of the word over time gives us a rough indication of the amount of attention that droughts have received in the UK press from 1800 to 2014. If we accept that newsworthiness is closely associated with the occurrence of a drought and that while the drought lasts it will remain newsworthy, we can assume that years in which the word drought was salient are the years when the United Kingdom experienced a drought. While these assumptions have been found to be generally true ( McEnery et al., 2019 , 2021 ), the approach may still produce some false positives, meaning that qualitative analysis is still necessary to confirm or refute the trends indicated by the initial figures. Close reading of the data is therefore needed to confirm whether the reporting was, in fact, about the existence of a drought in the United Kingdom in that specific point in time. We then examined the articles which were highlighted as being concerned with a drought in the United Kingdom to construct the newspaper narrative of a year of drought in terms of its duration, spatial extent, intensity and impacts. These procedures are illustrated more explicitly in the case studies (Section 7).

3.2 Rainfall Records

Here, we use the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) ( McKee et al., 1993 ) to identify meteorological droughts. A key advantage of the SPI is that, by virtue of the standardisation process, it enables comparison between locations and between different times of year. The method transforms the original monthly precipitation data so that the SPI is symmetrically distributed around zero (with standard deviation = 1), with a negative SPI denoting drier than normal conditions and a positive SPI wetter than normal conditions. McKee et al. (1993) denotes 0 > SPI > −1.0 as mild drought, −1.0 ≥ SPI > −1.5 as moderate drought, −1.5 ≥ SPI > −2.0 as severe drought and SPI ≤ −2.0 as extreme drought.

The SPI is flexible in that precipitation can be aggregated across a range of timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6, 12 months), which are relevant for different types of drought impacts. Typically, droughts can be observed in precipitation deficits before soils (agricultural drought), streamflow (hydrological drought) and groundwater. The approach to computing the SPI is described elsewhere (e.g., Svensson et al., 2017 ). The SPI is fitted here using the Gamma distribution, using the SCI package in R ( Gudmundsson and Stagge, 2016 ) and using the 1961–2010 period for estimating the standardisation parameters (1961–2000 for the M2020-EWP data). We focus on the SPI-12 and SPI-3 (i.e., 12- and 3-months aggregations), with the former representing an approximately annual, long duration drought timescale, and the latter an approximately seasonal timescale. SPI aggregations are referred to with the final month in the accumulation. For example, the August 1976 SPI-12 refers to the aggregation from September 1975 to August 1976.

First, for the EWP and M2020-EWP data, the SPI was calculated for the entire monthly precipitation series, resulting in monthly SPI time series. For the HD dataset, the SPI were spatially averaged for each of the twelve UK Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics 1 (NUTS1) regions. NUTS regions (at different levels of spatial aggregation such as the relatively large NUTS1 regions) are defined standard geographical regions in the European Union 3 .

Drought events were then identified and characterised using criteria set out in Barker et al. (2019) , based on event characteristics defined by Noone et al. (2017) . Drought events were defined as three or more consecutive months with negative SPI values, with at least 1 month in the suite of negative values falling below a threshold of −1.5 (equating to “severe” drought; Barker et al., 2016 ). For each extracted event, the following event characteristics were calculated (see Figure 1 ):

– Duration (number of months),

– Accumulated deficit (the absolute value of the sum of SPI values across the event duration),

– Mean deficit (accumulated deficit divided by duration), and

– Maximum intensity (the minimum SPI value during the event).

FIGURE 1 . Conceptual diagram illustrating drought event identification and characteristics (NB x axis ticks represent years, but SPI data are on a monthly time step).

Due to the seasonal focus of the study, events with a duration of less than 3 months (i.e., one or two months) were removed. As the accumulated deficit and mean deficit were derived from the SPI, they represent relative deficits and not absolute precipitation deficits (for example, as millimetres or a volume). The extracted events were ranked by each event characteristic (i.e., duration, accumulated deficit, mean deficit and maximum intensity), separately. The top 10 events for each characteristic and accumulation period were identified for the HD dataset, whilst for the SPI derived from EWP/M2020-EWP the top 15 events were extracted given the substantially longer series. When ranking by duration, tied events were also sorted by the accumulated deficit, so the longest events with the most severe accumulated deficit ranked highest.

3.3 Combining the Two Approaches

We combined the two approaches by 1) carrying out a correlation analysis, 2) extracting extreme events from both types of data and comparing them in a table, and 3) through case studies.

3.3.1 Correlation Analysis

A simple visual comparison of how the corpus and climate datasets corresponded to each other was made by overlaying the two time series in a single plot. These time series were then used to carry out an objective numerical correlation analysis.

It is important to note that the four different corpora are based on different underlying source data, and their scales (frequencies of occurrence of the word drought ) are different. The four datasets were therefore normalised so that they all had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one before they were concatenated into a single corpus series, as described below. There also seems to be a trend in the frequencies with time for the original corpus data ( Figure 2 )—particularly for the 19th Century Corpus—which may affect both the magnitude of the peaks and the background “noise”. The 19th century Corpus data is made up of data from eight different newspaper titles, some of which are regionally focused. This means that coverage of drought may have been driven, or influenced, by the interests of a specific region—for example, an emphasis on the impact of a drought on agricultural yields. What is more, fewer titles were available for the beginning of the century. These inhomogeneities meant that we considered the increasing frequencies to be an artefact of the data, and we de-trended each corpus dataset separately.

FIGURE 2 . Relative frequencies of the word drought and the corresponding standardised corpus index for (A) The 19th Century Corpus, (B) The 20th Century Corpus and (C) The 21st Century Corpus (with the Broadsheet and Tabloid corpora combined).

Once all the datasets followed the same distribution, they were concatenated into a single series from 1800 to 2014, providing a standardised corpus index series. To achieve this, five steps were carried out:

(1) Log-transform the data to make the distribution symmetrical.

(2) De-trend the data to remove, for example, the upward trend with time during the 19th century (see Figure 2 ).

(3) Standardise the data so that the distribution has a mean = 0 and a standard deviation = 1.

(4) Average the Tabloid and Broadsheet data, which have been transformed according to Steps 1–3. This new averaged time series was then re-standardised according to Step 3, as the averaging would have shrunk the variance to be less than one.

(5) Finally, concatenate the 19th, 20th, and 21st century time series into a single long time series, 1800–2014.

Step 1 was carried out because the original corpus data have a positive skewness. That is, there are several very large values (creating a long upper “tail” to the distribution) but no correspondingly extreme small values, as the frequencies have a lower bound at zero. To remove the skewness and create a more symmetric distribution, the data were log-transformed. Before the log-transform was applied, a small number (1.0) was added to all the values to avoid taking the logarithm of zero (which is mathematically undefined). This did not affect the final results however, as in Step 3 we shift the distribution to have a mean = 0.

In Step 2, we removed any linear trend from the data by carrying out a linear regression and replacing the original data values with the residuals from the linear regression. In Step 3, we standardised the residuals by first subtracting their mean and then dividing by their standard deviation. As a result of these steps, each individual corpus series had a normal distribution with mean = 0 and standard deviation = 1, i.e., a N (0,1) distribution.

The SPI time series are by definition normally distributed, but we de-trended them as described in Step 2 above. Using the SPI time series and the single long corpus time series, we explored how these two datasets relate to each other, both visually (in time series plots) and numerically. For the objective numerical analysis, we used the Pearson correlation coefficient, as the data are normally distributed. There was significant autocorrelation in the corpus data for a lag of 1 year (=0.25 at the 5% level for a two-sided test). As such, we used a block permutation method (e.g., Hesterberg et al., 2005 ) to estimate significance levels for the cross-correlations between the corpus and SPI data. A two-year block size and 999 resamples were used for a one-sided significance test.

We used different subsets of the SPI-12 and SPI-3 datasets for the cross-correlation analysis with the corpus data. Using only the time series of December SPI-12, rather than the complete SPI-12 time series, results in a single annual value that is completely concurrent with the annual (January–December) corpus data. We also investigated different lags for the SPI-12 series, as newspaper reporting may lag the developing drought. For example, the annual time series of SPI-12 to November covers the 12-month period that precedes the corpus series by 1 month, the annual time series of SPI-12 to October precedes the corpus series by 2 months, etc. For the SPI-3 data, we extracted the annual minimum SPI-3 from all the twelve SPI-3 values in each year to capture the driest 3-month period within each year, assuming newspapers may find short and sharp droughts equally newsworthy as longer ones. There is a short lag of 2 months implicit in this analysis, as the minima are extracted from the SPI-3 aggregations ending in the calendar months January to December (i.e., start months from November to October).

3.3.2 Comparing Droughts in a Tabular Format

In addition to the correlation analysis, which takes into account the data from all years in the data series, we also analysed how the most extreme years in the corpus and the SPI datasets matched up. Using the original corpus data (i.e., not de-trended and standardised), we listed the years for which the word drought showed the highest frequencies in each corpus: top 15 in each the 19th and the 20th Century Corpora and top five frequencies in each of the Broadsheet and Tabloid Corpora, given the latter corpora cover a shorter period of time. These thresholds were established to keep the analysis manageable while ensuring that we would not overlook events that received reasonable attention in the press. Similarly, we listed all years for which the EWP SPI-12 rainfall records fell below −2 and hence indicated the occurrence of an extreme drought in the United Kingdom.

The next step was to combine the results in a table format. We retrieved the frequency of drought for all years for which the rainfall records indicated the occurrence of a drought, irrespective of its saliency in the corpus. Similarly, we examined the rainfall records for years in which drought peaked in the newspaper data, regardless the severity of the meteorological drought. Here, the goal was to determine 1) whether the peaks in the corpus material corresponded to meteorological droughts in the United Kingdom and 2) whether there were any meteorological droughts not captured by the corpus records. The process was thus iterative, moving from one type of data to another until we had results from both approaches for all selected years and any divergence between results was examined further. This included, for example, further investigating the state of the concurrent seasonal SPI-3 droughts (both severe and extreme). We anticipate that while comprehensive, the method may still have left out events that were not as prominent in either approach.

3.3.3 Case Studies

To demonstrate the power of the combined approach, we carried out three different case studies for the years: 1911–1913, 1940–1945, and 1947–1949. Here, we analysed the discourse through close reading of the corpus material and combined the results with the hydrological evidence gathered from the rainfall records for those specific years.

This section starts by presenting the results of each approach separately. Section 4.1 offers an overview of the references to drought events in UK newspapers and Section 4.2 presents the precipitation records for the period under analysis. We then combine the two approaches in Section 4.3.

4.1 References to Drought in the UK Press

Figure 2 shows how the relative frequency of the word drought fluctuated throughout time. Note that the y -axis scale changes from one figure panel to another. There are several unequivocal peaks throughout the centuries, and a number of other smaller peaks which are less well defined. The specific years of these peaks are listed in Supplementary Appendix S1 . Importantly, the frequency distribution of the word drought is only an initial indication of the reporting of a drought event. As explained in Section 3.1, close reading of the material is needed in order to confirm, or refute, the occurrence of a drought indicated here.

4.2 Rainfall Records

Figure 3 shows the relative severity of precipitation droughts in the regional SPI-12 series for the HD dataset. Across this dataset, the same droughts as identified in previous studies emerge, e.g., 1975–1976, 1933–1934, 1921–1922 and the “Long Drought” period from the late 1880s to about 1910 ( Marsh et al., 2007 ; Barker et al., 2019 ).

FIGURE 3 . Top 10 extracted drought events for the HD SPI-12 series from 1862 to 2014 using a threshold of −1.5, for UK NUTS1 regions which are ordered roughly from north to south on the y -axis. For each region and drought characteristic, the bars are coloured according to the event rank; darker shades represent high-ranking, i.e., more severe, events.

For duration, the most severe events are actually the early 1970s (1973–1974)—rather than the well-known 1975–1976 event, the 1960s, the 1990s for many regions, and periods within the “Long Drought”. The years 1933–1934 also feature prominently. These events also occur in the accumulated deficit series, although this features greater rankings for 1933–1934 and 1921–1922 (in southern England), while 1975–76 is also featured. These three latter events, along with 1995–1997, are also the most prominent for mean deficit and intensity. The corresponding figure for the SPI-3 accumulation is shown in Supplementary Figure A2.1 .

Figure 4 shows the relative severity of precipitation droughts for the EWP and the M2020-EWP dataset according to the four event characteristics. While some of the most severe 20th century droughts shown in HD dataset are also represented (1920s, 1930s, 1976, in Figure 3 ), there are fewer droughts in the post-1976 era. The 19th century sees the major drought of the 1850s which pre-dates HD. This appears as the worst drought according to duration and accumulated deficit, and also features in the rankings of other characteristics. In addition, there are several prominent droughts in the early 1800s.

FIGURE 4 . Top 15 extracted drought events for SPI-12 derived from the 1800–2014 EWP series (A–D) and the 1800–2000 M202020-EWP series (E–H) using a threshold of −1.5. For each of the four drought characteristics, the bars are coloured according to the event rank; darker shades represent high-ranking, i.e., more severe, events.

There are significant differences in the M2020-EWP compared with the EWP. An immediately obvious discrepancy is in the duration of the droughts, which are considerably longer for the original EWP dataset ( Figure 4A ) than for the M2020-EWP reconstruction ( Figure 4E ). Taking all the identified droughts into consideration (not just the top-ranking 15), the average duration of the SPI-12 EWP droughts is 25.2 months compared with 16.8 months for the M2020-EWP droughts. For the SPI-3 accumulation, the average durations are 6.9 and 6.3 months, respectively.

For example, a drought around 1850 is present in the EWP, but not in the M2020-EWP. Further, Murphy et al. (2020a) identified the 1830s as experiencing a very severe drought in terms of intensity (the most severe on record) but that does not feature in the EWP. This is also apparent in the corresponding analysis of the shorter, and often sharper, droughts of the SPI-3 series ( Supplementary Figure A2.2 ). However, the droughts of the early 1800s do not feature at all in M2020-EWP, and instead much higher rankings are attained by more recent droughts—notably those of the 1970s and 1990s.

4.3 Cross-Correlation Analysis of the Corpus and SPI Time Series

Figure 5 shows the concatenated, de-trended and standardised corpus time series (January-December) and the lagged time series of August SPI-12 (i.e., covering the 12-month period from September-August). It can therefore potentially capture a dry winter with no recharge to reservoirs or groundwater, followed by a dry summer. This would be very newsworthy as many major droughts (in the English lowlands especially) are associated with dry winters, even if the impacts typically become manifest in the following summer. For the EWP data, the cross-correlation is strongest for this four-month lag (r = −0.29, significant at the 0.001 level), whereas for the reconstructed M2020-EWP data the correlation is marginally stronger for the SPI-12 series to September (but still rounding to r = −0.26, significant at the 0.002 level). The lag may also reflect a delay in the newspaper reporting until the droughts are properly underway, as discussed later in this section.

FIGURE 5 . Time series of standardised annual corpus linguistics data and of August SPI-12, i.e., the 12-month period preceding the January—December corpus data by 4 months. The SPI-12 is calculated from the EWP data, and from the M2020-EWP data. Note that the scale for the SPI-12 (right-hand side) is reversed in order to overlay the corpus data as well as possible. To reflect this in positive correlations, the SPI-12 data were multiplied by -1.

Figure 6 shows the corpus time series versus the annual minimum SPI-3, which captures precipitation droughts of a shorter duration than SPI-12. Here, the cross-correlation with the corpus series is stronger for the reconstructed M2020-EWP series (r = −0.30) than for the original EWP (r = −0.28). Particularly, the M2020-EWP series reconstruction is in better agreement with the newspaper coverage of droughts in the early 19th century. Murphy et al. (2020a) identified this period in the original EWP series as having too low winter precipitation due to gauge under-catch of snowfall and a high incidence of snow (pre-1870), and as having too high summer precipitation totals (pre-1820) probably due to a low station network density and less certain data at key stations. However, there is a prolonged period in the 1840s where the M2020-EWP differs from both the corpus data and the original EWP ( Figures 5 , 6 ).

FIGURE 6 . Time series of standardised annual corpus linguistics data and of annual minimum SPI-3. The SPI-3 is calculated from the EWP data, and from the M2020-EWP data. Note that the scale for the SPI-3 (right-hand side) is reversed in order to overlay the corpus data as well as possible. To reflect this in positive correlations, the SPI-3 data were multiplied by −1.

In Supplementary Appendix S1 , we list all years for which at least one approach indicated the occurrence of a drought event in the United Kingdom between 1800 and 2014, providing the relative frequency of the word drought in the corpus and the rainfall record for each year.

5 Discussion

Overall, we found a general agreement between the corpus data and the rainfall records. In the vast majority of cases, there is supporting evidence of drought in the precipitation records when the frequency of the word drought increases in the newspaper corpora. For example, for the 1933–1935 period, precipitation records indicate that a severe drought started to affect most of the United Kingdom towards the end of 1933, persisted throughout 1934 and continued in some parts of England in 1935. The relative frequency of the word drought doubled between 1932 and 1933 (from 2.3 to 5.5 occurrences per one million words), peaked high in 1934 (14.1 occurrences), and dropped to the previous level in 1935 (6.0 occurrences).

However, it is important to note that the frequency of drought does not always reflect the intensity and/or spatial extent of an event. For example, the precipitation records indicate a severe drought across most of the United Kingdom for the first half of 1956, but the frequency of drought did not spike in that specific year (3.1 instances per a million words ) . Although evidence was not substantial, the corpus data confirms that a severe drought affected many parts of the United Kingdom in 1956. There was a report on a drought in the southwest due to a dry and sunny March ( The Times , 02.04.1956), and another on an absolute drought in East Anglia and shortage of water supplies in Glasgow in early May ( The Times , 08.05.1956). Also, despite the low relative frequency of drought in 1964 (2.4 instances), The Times did mention a severe winter drought in February (Extract 1) and again in November.

1) Weekly instead of daily baths were urged on Nottingham’s population today to avoid water rationing in Britain’s driest winter drought for 35 years. (The Times, 17.02.1964)

A plausible explanation for these cases is the measure of newsworthiness. Mentions in a newspaper may be related to the competing news values operating at a given time since, as Bednarek and Caple (2017 : 35) observe, news values influence selection, drive coverage and dominance practice. There is also likely a lag between the precipitation deficit being observed and the drought impacts reported. Firstly, because it takes some time for soil-, surface- and groundwater stores to be depleted, typically several months before river flows in southeast Britain are affected ( Barker et al., 2016 ). Secondly, drought impacts may go unreported during the early stages of a drought, but once it is established the reporting may be more complete ( Bachmair et al., 2016 ). The year of 1912 is a clear example. Despite the salient frequency of drought , references are mostly attributed to discussions of the impacts of the 1911 drought.

For three occasions (1803, 1805, 1827), there were long-lasting extreme droughts in the EWP dataset that did not seem to have been reported in the press. This may be because, before 1870, the EWP dataset likely under-estimates the amount of winter precipitation falling ( Murphy et al., 2020a ). The potential gauge under-catch of snowfall, and higher incidence of snowfall, during this period are accounted for in the M2020-EWP reconstructions, which show a closer similarity to the corpus data ( Figure 5B and Figure 6B ). But the apparent under-reporting in the newspapers may be also related to gaps in the 19th century data (see McEnery et al., 2019 , 2021 ). For these specific years, the corpus contains texts from the Ipswich Journal and Hampshire Chronicle only and there was hardly any occurrences of drought in them.

There were also five cases (1846, 1903, 1912, 2013, and 2014) for which the word drought peaked in the corpus data but the precipitation metric used in this study did not indicate the occurrence of a drought. With the exception of 1903, all other 4 years are false positives, that is, there was hardly any evidence in the corpus material that the United Kingdom experienced a drought in those years. In 1912, 2013, and 2014, many references to drought were attributed to discussions around the impacts of a drought in previous years (1911 and 2012, respectively). In 1846 as well as in 2013 and 2014, the word drought was frequently mentioned in contexts other than a meteorological drought, such as in relation to drought-resistant plants or extreme weather events due to climate change. Although scanty, there is evidence in the corpus data that the whole of Scotland, north England and parts of Wales were affected by a drought in 1903 (Extract 2).

2) Scotland, even more that than Wales, was afflicted by drought and cold in the spring and early summer of the present year (The Times, 10.08.1903)

It is also important to note that McEnery et al. (2019 , 2021) has indicated four other droughts during the 19th century which were not captured by the precipitation-based classification of major droughts of Marsh et al. (2007) . These droughts occurred: 1) in Scotland in 1821, spreading to other parts of the country in 1822; 2) in Southern England in 1834; 3) in Scotland in 1850, developing to southern England in 1851 and on to northern England in 1852; 4) across England, Scotland and perhaps parts of Wales in 1880, persisting in southeast England in the summer of 1881. They are not shown in Supplementary Table A1.1 because the frequency of drought fell below the frequency threshold used in this study (i.e. top 15, see Section 3.3), and there was no extreme drought (SPI < 2) in the EWP SPI-12 time series.

However, there are severe, and even extreme, droughts in the SPI-3 time series in either or both of the original EWP and the reconstructed M2020-EWP datasets for all of these four time periods (and in the HD dataset for the latter). Neither of the datasets covers Scotland in the early part of the 19th century, but the M2020-EWP dataset confirm that there is a moderate to extreme SPI-3 drought from March to June 1822. Both the original EWP and the M2019-EWP SPI-3 series show two to three consecutive months of severe or extreme drought bookending the period April 1834 to January 1835, and this was highlighted by Murphy et al. (2020b) as a “forgotten drought” alongside various documentary/newspaper sources of impacts. The original EWP series show severe drought for a single SPI-3 accumulation in March 1850 and for November to December 1851, and both the EWP and M2019-EWP series show extreme drought for the SPI-3 accumulations ending in April and May 1852. The regional HD dataset show extreme drought in the SPI-3 records for all of the United Kingdom in December 1879 and January 1880, and severe to extreme SPI-12 drought in northern and western parts from August to October 1880. However, there is only moderate SPI-3 drought in southern England in summer 1881.

6 Case Studies

We now explore three periods of time in more detail. Given that many other drought events such as the 1920s and 1930s are well covered in previous literature, these specific periods were chosen mainly for the lack of information about them. At the same time, they illustrate the richness of the corpus approach, especially when combined with the meteorological observations, by providing significant detail on regional differences and fine-scale temporal evolution of the droughts. They are:

(1) The years of 1911 and 1913: While the frequency of the word drought peaked in 1911 (third highest frequency in the 20th century) and figured on the 15th place rankings in 1913, the meteorological data suggest that shorter regional droughts occurred during these years, rather than extreme and long-lasting drought (except in Northern Ireland in 1911).

(2) The period between 1940 and 1945: The frequency of drought between 1940 and 1945 was among the lowest in the 20th century corpus (see Figure 2 ). This is perhaps not surprising, given that the country was at war. Competition for the available space in the press would have been fierce. However, the meteorological data suggest some rather long-lasting droughts did occur (e.g., Figures 3 , 4 ).

(3) The years of 1947 and 1949: These are years in which the two approaches coincide. The frequency of drought ranked 13th and 6th places in the 20th century respectively and the rainfall records indicate meteorological droughts occurred.

In the following descriptions the meteorological droughts are assessed based on the complete monthly time series of SPI-3 and SPI-12 from the regional HD dataset. Heatmaps of the HD dataset for the 3 and 12-months accumulations are shown in Figure 7 for the period from 1910 to 1950.

FIGURE 7 . Heat maps of the HD dataset from 1910 to 1950, showing continuous monthly time series of SPI accumulations of 3 (A) and 12 (B) months for UK NUTS1 regions which are ordered roughly from north to south on the y -axis. Darker shades indicate lower SPI values, i.e., more extreme precipitation deficits.

6.1 The years of 1911 and 1913

Based on the HD SPI-3 records, two relatively short droughts occurred in 1911 and 1913, the first affecting mainly the south of England and the Midlands, and the second mainly the north and the west of the United Kingdom ( Figure 7A ). These regional records suggest that normal to moderately dry conditions (∼0 > SPI-3 > −1) occurred across most of the United Kingdom from February to October 1911 (i.e., in the 3-month periods ending in these months). However, severe drought (SPI-3 < −1.5) spread from the west Midlands, where it occurred intermittently from May to September, to cover all of the Midlands and southern England in September. Northern Ireland experienced severe drought in the 3-month period to October, but more importantly, the SPI-12 records show that the prolonged period of moderately dry conditions had accumulated into extreme drought in the SPI-12 accumulations ending in August to October 1911 ( Figure 7B ). This was followed by a wet period from November 1911 to June 1913, when the regional SPI-3s were largely positive across the United Kingdom. However, mild to moderate drought conditions then again developed swiftly across most of the country for the SPI-3 accumulation to July 1913, reaching severe or extreme levels in parts of the north and west (including southwest England) from August to October. By November 1913 the SPI-3 conditions were again more normal.

In the corpus data, references to drought indicated that a drought began in the 1911 spring and continued into summer, affecting mostly southern Britain. The Times first reported that the country was suffering from drought on 27 April 1911; by June, the situation had become more serious (Extract 3). A different article from the same day stated that the worst hit counties were Cambridgeshire, Worcestershire, and Cheshire, where it was feared that both the hay and the corn crops would be short.

3) In many English districts less than half an inch of rain has fallen during the past four weeks, and in some places less than a quarter of an inch . (The Times, 05.06.1911)

By July, the drought had affected the prices of Hampshire and Dorset Down ewes ( The Times , 17.07.1911) and the south of England was reported to have experienced a severe drought which resulted in deficiency of grass, thus endangering the milk supply ( The Times , 24.07.1911). The effect on crops, meanwhile, was described as being more varied (Extract 4).

4) The corn has ripened rapidly and the binders are hard at work, and on account of the continued hot weather carting will be practicable a few days after cutting. Mangel wurzel have done very well, but swedes and kale have practically failed on account of the drought. There are fair supplies of cabbage and rape for the sheep, but the former have not hearted well for want of rain . (The Times, 31.07.1911).

The droughty weather had continued to affect parts of southern England throughout August, when it reached Scottish pastures and crops ( The Times , 07.08.1911). By mid-September, it was reported as having reached northern Britain, causing shortage of water supplies ( The Times , 12.09.1911). Although this drought is not visible in the SPI-3 records of the HD dataset, the SPI-12 records to August 1911 suggest that moderate to severe drought affected Scotland and northern England over the previous 12 months ( Figure 7 ). Even moderate rainfall deficits over such an extended period would eventually result in low reservoir levels and lead to problems with water supply. The long-term drought was worst in Northern Ireland, where the SPI-12 shows severe to extreme drought for the 12-months accumulations ending in July to November 1911 ( Figure 7B ). We found only two articles reporting this drought ( The Times , 10.07.1911 and 18.09.1911).

The corpus data suggests that at the end of September, Britain experienced heavy rain showers but they were not evenly spread throughout the country. A retrospective report of November 1911 suggested that the south of England had been most severely affected by the drought but it had also affected Northern England and Scotland.

Several references to drought in 1913 reflected back to the impacts of the 1911 drought and short drought periods in 1912. Reference to a drought in 1913 first appeared on 17 June, when The Times mentioned a tournament took place in Roehampton although the grounds had been suffering from continued drought. Further evidence came in early July, with a report that the drought had been especially severe in Dorset ( The Times , 07.07.1913). It gradually spread to other parts of England and the impacts on crops were still felt throughout August, particularly regarding corn yields ( The Times , 09.07.1913, 02.08.1913, 04.08.1913, 12.08.1913).

In agreement with the meteorological data, the corpus data suggests that by mid-August the drought had reached Scotland and the west and southwest of the United Kingdom. Shortage of water supplies was reported in the Vale of Glamorgan and various parts of Scotland ( The Times , 12.08.1913, 13.08.1913, 21.08.1913). Drought conditions persisted across most of Great Britain until late August, with Scotland hit the hardest ( The Times , 22.08.1913). There was serious shortage of water in Glasgow ( The Times , 21.08.1913), the Lochaber Loch and the Caledonian Canal reached unusually low levels ( The Times , 21.08.1913, 25.08.1913, 27.08.1913), and fishing in the River Tay was seriously affected ( The Times , 19.11.1913). The drought was officially broken all over the country on 25 August 1913, with heavy rain and thunderstorms in the following week ( The Times , 01.09.1913). There were signs that the drought continued in northern England into September, but evidence was not substantial. However, the effect of the summer drought was still felt in the following months, especially in relation to agricultural yields across England ( The Times , 10.09.1913, 06.10.1913, 11.10.1913, 14.10.1913).

6.2 1940 to 1945

Three episodes of long-lasting SPI-12 droughts occurred during the period 1940–1945, starting in the northwest and finishing in the southeast. The HD SPI-12 accumulations ending in February to August 1940 show moderate to severe droughts in Scotland and northwest England, and were made up of two incidences of shorter droughts ( Figure 7B ). The HD SPI-3 records reveal severe droughts in the wider northwest of the United Kingdom for the 3-month periods ending in October 1939 and June 1940 ( Figure 7A ).

The second SPI-12 drought affected northern Britain, Wales and Southwest England, with moderate to severe magnitudes for the 12-months accumulations ending in November 1941 to September 1942. In this case the worst SPI-3 droughts reached severe magnitude and affected northern England and Northern Ireland in the 3-month periods ending in June and July 1941, and Southwest England bookending the period November 1941 to April 1942 ( Figure 7 ).

The last SPI-12 drought in this period reached extreme magnitudes in the southeast corner of England, while severe drought affected the wider south and central England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the 12-month periods ending January to October 1944 ( Figure 7B ). This long and widespread drought started with a single extreme SPI-3 accumulation to April 1943, affecting eastern and southern England. It ended with three consecutive extreme SPI-3 accumulations ending in March to May 1944 for southern England, West Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland, although most of the United Kingdom was affected by drought to some degree ( Figure 7A ).

References to drought in the corpus material in the years of 1940–1942 related mostly to the reporting on the impacts of the drought in southern England in the late 1930s (1937–39). Apart from scanty mentions of drought conditions in specific locations, there was no evidence in the corpus data of a severe drought in the United Kingdom until the summer of 1942, when The Times reported various droughty periods across southern England between April and June. Reference to a drought in other parts of the country was only seen once, in an article on 7 September 1942 which mentioned a drought earlier in the year had affected oat yields and potato crops in East Lothian. This sole report is the only corpus evidence of a drought that in the meteorological record mainly affected the north and west of the United Kingdom. The short durations of the reported droughts in southern England, lasting only a few weeks and being interspersed by significant amounts of rainfall, may account for these droughts not showing up in the HD SPI-3 records.

From spring 1943 to the end of 1945, the newspaper reports largely agree with the droughts observed in the meteorological HD dataset. On 13 April 1943, The Times reported a 31 days’ drought in the Thames catchment. Another article mentioned that London suffered from a drought between 19 June and 6 July that year, which ended with a heavy rainfall ( The Times , 17.07.1943). By August 1943, the drought conditions spread to other areas and started to affect the farming industry across Suffolk, Hampshire, Cornwall ( The Times , 09.08.1943), East Anglia, Suffolk and Norfolk ( The Times , 13.09.1943).

A retrospective report in early 1944 ( The Times , 11.01.1944) highlighted that the flow of the Thames was much below the average as winter rainfall in the last three months of 1943 was not sufficient. The article also mentioned the impact on crops, exacerbated in times of war when the country was dependent on its own crops. Another article on 15 February 1944 mentioned deficiency in rainfall in England and Wales in the summer of 1943 which caused shortage of water supplies, while Scotland and Northern Ireland experienced substantial excesses of rainfall.

From April to August 1944, there were various reports of widespread drought conditions across the United Kingdom between March and July, with southeast England and east Midlands hit the hardest. A report on 12 April 1944 framed it as one of the driest March in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. The drought affected the whole of England – and the south, southeast and east in particular – threatening milk supplies. The flow of the Thames was at its lowest level on record for that time of the year and Londoners were asked to keep consumption of water to a minimum ( The Times , 06.05.1944). By June, restrictions on the use of water in the London area were introduced (Extract 5) and remained in place until October ( The Times , 12.10.1944).

5) “ The Metropolitan Water Board decided yesterday to suspend until further notice authority to consumers to use hoses, outside taps, or sprinklers for watering gardens, allotments, or sports grounds, for washing vehicles or streets, or for any ornamental fountain .” (The Times, 17.06.1944)

From the end of June to mid-October, The Times focused on impacts of the drought on farming. The drought affected milk supplies ( The Times , 28.06.1944) as well as wheat, corn and potato crops in southern England, especially in Norfolk, Suffolk and Hertfordshire ( The Times , 10.07.1944). Fruit stocks were scarce ( The Times , 26.08.1944), and sugar beet and potato crops in southwest counties were below average ( The Times , 09.10.1944).

References to drought were scanty in 1945 and revolved mainly around the impacts of the 1944 drought. On 9 May 1945, The Times reported that although reservoirs had not been fully replenished, there was little chance that the country would face water problems in 1945.

6.3 The years of 1947 and 1949

The SPI-3 records from the HD dataset show severe to extreme meteorological drought throughout the United Kingdom in the 3-month periods ending in September to December 1947, with October being extreme in all regions except Scotland where it was severe. For the longer-duration SPI-12 this translated into severe drought in the 12-month periods ending in March and April 1948, for southeast England and east Midlands ( Figure 7 ).

In 1949 the SPI-3 accumulation to March was severe to extreme in all areas except the northwest where the drought varied from mild to moderate. In northeast England, SPI-3 droughts remained severe until June 1949, and scattered values of moderate to severe SPI-3 droughts occurred in Wales and southern England until September ( Figure 7A ). The generally dry conditions in 1949 resulted in all areas except Scotland, Northern Ireland and east Midlands experiencing at least one severe or extreme SPI-12 accumulation ending between June and November 1949. The most spatially widespread extreme drought occurred for the SPI-12 accumulation to September ( Figure 7B ).

In the corpus data, the first reference to a drought in the United Kingdom in 1947 appeared in late June, when The Times reported on potato shortage due to a drought in the main producing areas of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk ( The Times , 26.06.1947). A report some days later ( The Times , 07.07.1947) alerted that hard winter followed by a drought had brought poor harvest prospects for farmers throughout the country, especially for wheat, barley, oat, potatoes and sugar beet crops.

An absolute drought was reported in central and northeast Scotland in August and there were record hours of unbroken sunshine in several towns across the country ( The Times , 13.08.1947). A week later, the drought had spread southwards, with hardly any rain recorded in most parts of Britain ( The Times , 19.08.1947), reducing water levels in reservoirs ( The Times , 20.08.1947). At the end of August, the United Kingdom experienced scorching temperatures and a severe widespread drought, which persisted through the first week of September ( The Times , 25.08.1947, 29.08.1947, 02.09.1947). A retrospective report on 1 September 1947 described the previous month as the sunniest and driest August on record.

The drought started to break down in most of Scotland and Northern Ireland on 4 September 1947 and the rain gradually moved down towards northwest England and Wales, reaching southwest and southeast England a couple of days later ( The Times , 04 to 08.09.1947). The rain remained negligible in other parts of the country, where the drought was only broken in mid-September ( The Times , 18.09.1947, 19.09.1947). A month later, The Times reported that drought conditions had started to develop again in parts of southeast England and East Anglia ( The Times , 11.10.1947, 20.10.1947). It was referred to as the third drought in the country in 1947.

The impacts of the 1947 drought were widely reported. It had a marked effect on the milk production from July onwards, with acute shortage in Lincoln, Northampton and the Midlands ( The Times , 23.08.1947). There were reports of an increasing number of farmland fires in Derbyshire and rejection of milk supplies as farmers had no water for cooling ( The Times , 26.08.1947). By mid-September, pastures were still bare and scorched in most of the country, except in Wales and southwest England. Milk supplies became short ( The Times , 11.09.1947, 15.09.1947, 16.09.1947) and only regained force in December ( The Times 27.10.1947, 15.12.1945, 29.12.1947).

The drought also affected salmon production in estuaries in northern Scotland ( The Times , 06.09.1947) and the farming industry in East Anglia, Nottinghamshire and northern Scotland where the yields of sugar beet, turnips, and swedes were below average, and kale and cabbage were substantially damaged ( The Times , 11.09.1947, 15.09.1947, 16.09.1947). Later that year, there were reports of poor wheat yields, especially in Devon and Dorset ( The Times , 06.10.1947, 20.11.1947).

A retrospective article on 31 December 1947 stated that the British Isles had had the warmest and driest August since 1881, especially in east Kent and east Suffolk; Scotland had the driest August since 1869. The dry weather persisted until autumn, with absolute drought over most of Britain. It was the driest October on record for most of England and Wales, causing the flow of the Thames to reach very low levels.

The first indication of drought conditions in 1949 appeared on 8 June, when The Times reported that rainfall had prevented the drought from damaging cherry crops in Kent. In mid-June, large parts of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the western England experienced absolute drought and high temperatures ( The Times , 18.06.1949). By the end of the month, dry weather and high temperatures prevailed across the entire country, with absolute droughts covering the whole of England, Wales and great part of Scotland ( The Times , 27.06.1949, 28.06.1949).

The drought started to break on 29 June 1949, when heavy rain fell in Yorkshire, later spreading to much of northeast England, north Lancashire and the Lake district ( The Times , 29.06.1949, 30.06.1949). The dry weather and high temperatures persisted in other parts of England and Wales ( The Times , 04.07.1949). On the 5 July, thunderstorms were reported in eastern Scotland and steady rain across various parts of the country, but droughty conditions persisted in Devon, Cornwall, south and west Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Channel Islands ( The Times , 06.07.1949). By mid-July, the drought had been confined to southeast England ( The Times , 15.07.1949).

The effects of the drought on water supplies were felt throughout the country from late June 1949, with campaigns to persuade people to reduce water consumption in north Yorkshire and south Durham ( The Times , 27.06.1949), Kent and parts of Sussex ( The Times , 29.06.1949), and London ( The Times , 01.07.1949). Restrictions on water use were introduced in London early July and south Wales late that month ( The Times , 04.07.1949, 06.07.1949, 26.07.1949).

Milk yields in Somerset, Lincolnshire and Cumberland shrank and there was an increased number of heath and plantation fires across Berkshire and Dorset ( The Times , 06.07.1949 and 11.07.1949). Overall, agricultural production remained stable, despite some disappointing yields of potato and sugar beet crops in Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire and Surrey ( The Times , 11.07.1949, 08.08.1949, 12.08.1949, 12.09.1949), and vegetable crops were scarce ( The Times , 20.09.1949).

Rainfall was deficient again in most parts of Britain in mid-September 1949, except west-Scotland and some parts of the Midlands; with an absolute drought in Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk ( The Times , 13.09.1949). Water supplies in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Derbyshire were at risk ( The Times , 15.09.1949, 16.09.1949). Hosepipe bans were introduced in London ( The Times , 17.09.1949 and 19.09.1949) and a drought order was granted to the Metropolitan Water Board for additional abstraction from the Thames ( The Times , 20.09.1949). By mid-October, rainfall and the flow of the Thames had increased but not yet sufficient for restrictions to be lifted ( The Times , 12.10.1949). Despite the strain on water supplies, the 1949 drought was not ranked as the most severe drought in Thames records as the average flow was higher than in the same period in the years of 1921, 1934 and 1944 ( The Times , 11.10.1949).

7 Conclusion

The present study demonstrated how corpus linguistics in combination with precipitation metrics can be used to examine the representation of drought in the United Kingdom, presenting evidence going back as far as 1800, with unprecedented scale and depth. On balance, our conclusion is that the combined approach was mutually informative. Bringing together two entirely different, but highly complementary, approaches allowed a more confident assertion of conclusions.

We found an overwhelming agreement between the corpus data and meteorological records in relation to when a drought event occurred in the United Kingdom. With very few exceptions, there are plausible explanations for the few cases in which the corpus and rainfall data diverged in relation to the existence of a drought in the United Kingdom (see Section 6 and Section 7). The analysis demonstrates that newspapers tend to talk about dry weather conditions more frequently during periods in which the meteorological records indicated the existence of a drought in the United Kingdom. This is important because, while serving as a rich source of information, newspapers pose the challenge of working with a narrative driven by news values and the interests of a publishing house. In addition to the level of attention paid to drought relative to other concerns, the reality presented in the press may be only partial or even distorted and skewed. By cross-examining the newspaper material with long-term meteorological data, we were able to check our corpus observations against reality. Conversely, the newspaper material complemented the meteorological data by indicating droughts which had not been captured by precipitation metrics, especially in the 19th century when rainfall records were sparse and uncertain (see Section 6), as well as adding significant richness to our understanding of drought development, severity and impacts. Crucially, in a departure from past studies, the corpus approach provides a longitudinal rather than event-based approach, and an objective rather than selective assessment of evidence from the news media, with which to benchmark the meteorological drought analysis.

Through the case studies, it becomes evident that, despite the consistency of results, subtle differences emerged when we cross-examined the characteristics of each event from the two perspectives taken. The newspaper narrative does not always coincide with the meteorological data in all aspects regarding the intensity and/or spatial extent of the analysed events, perhaps due to the interests and remit of The Times in the selected years. For example, while the meteorological data indicated that the 1911 drought hit Northern Ireland the hardest, The Times focused mainly on the impacts of the drought in southern England, devoting little attention to other parts of the country.

The analysis has also highlighted differences between the two approaches in relation to the duration of events. Long-lasting drought events do not appear to elicit as much newspaper coverage as intense, but shorter droughts. As illustrated by the case studies, newspapers often describe droughts as lasting only a few weeks, or even days, which is too short for our shortest meteorological measure, the SPI-3, to capture. This may be explained by the media attention cycle as the issue becomes most relevant when its impacts are felt more evidently by the population. This aspect was especially evident in the 19th century data, when dry weather conditions were a matter for concern due to its impacts on agriculture and cattle farming ( McEnery et al., 2019 , 2021 ). Interestingly, the reconstructed M2020-EWP series better reflects the corpus data in the early part of the 19th century, than the original EWP series does. Also, the duration of the extracted droughts is considerably shorter for the M2020-EWP dataset than for the original EWP dataset. Both these issues are probably at least partly due to the wetter winters found by Murphy et al. (2020a) in the M2020-EWP compared with the EWP dataset for the period pre-1870.

Regarding impacts of droughts, the corpus analysis allowed us to delve into the narrative around the effects and scope of the selected events, as the case studies demonstrate. However, it is important to stress that while the corpus data offers perspectives on the droughts as they were perceived at the time, some caution is warranted as it was our only source of impact information. Additional benefits could be achieved by contrasting and complementing the newspaper narrative with other sources, such as journals, diaries or other archives (as done in Noone et al. (2017) and Harvey-Fishenden et al. (2019) ).

Future studies could also explore the context of droughts in specific regions using the combined approached presented here. This could have the additional advantage of using local newspapers, which may bring new information about localised impacts and responses to droughts. Also, it goes without saying that the analysis would gain in quality if other events were explored in more detail. Finally, a worthwhile future avenue would be application of corpus methods to pre-1800 sources, to complement existing work on multi-centennial drought assessment from documentary sources (e.g., droughts from southeast England from 1,200–1700; Pribyl, 2020 ).

On balance, this paper demonstrates the power of combining corpus linguistics with meteorological metrics on a scale that would not otherwise be possible, thus contributing to a better understanding of how drought is perceived, in addition to how it is traditionally “measured”.

Data Availability Statement

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. The datasets are not made available in the article or supplements, but most are open datasets available from the links below, or if not open, contact details are provided. The newspaper datasets are made available for registered users of CQPWeb, Lancaster’s software platform for large-corpus analysis. Instances of the word “drought” in the newspaper corpora are available from the Historic Droughts project pages on the UK Data Service. See https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/datasets datasets. Specifically: 1) https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/853195/ , 2) https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/853196/ , 3) https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/853399/ 4) https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/853403/ . The precipitation data is available from: 1) Historic Droughts Rainfall: https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/af1db516-3411-416f-9c51-5ab99d912f8a , 2) England and Wales Precipitation: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/ , 3) Murphy et al. (2020a) dataset was secured from the authors of the paper. Interested parties should contact the lead authors of the article, https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.6208 .

Author Contributions

CD, JH, and TM conceived and designed the study. CD led on the 20th and 21st C corpus analyses, HB on the 19th C analysis. CS, LB, and MT conducted analysis of the rainfall data. CS and CD conducted the integrated analysis. CD, CS, and JH wrote the manuscript, with contributions from all authors.

This research was conducted as part of the Historic Droughts project within the UK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme which was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/L01061X/1. Financial support for JH, LB, CS, and MT was also provided by NERC/UKCEH National Capability funding through UKSCAPE (NE/R016429/1).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

We thank Conor Murphy (Maynooth University) for providing the revised England and Wales Precipitation (EWP) series ( Murphy et al., 2020a ).

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.760147/full#supplementary-material

1 See https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/british-newspaper-archive.

2 https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/download.html.

3 https://data.gov.uk/dataset/4977ad50-f78e-49be-9cf7-fa0adec4b9f8/nuts-level-1-january-2018-full-extent-boundaries-in-the-united-kingdom.

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Keywords: drought, water scarcity, historic droughts, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, precipitation, standardised precipitation index (SPI), long-term meteorological records

Citation: Dayrell C, Svensson C, Hannaford J, McEnery T, Barker LJ, Baker H and Tanguy M (2022) Representation of Drought Events in the United Kingdom: Contrasting 200 years of News Texts and Rainfall Records. Front. Environ. Sci. 10:760147. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2022.760147

Received: 17 August 2021; Accepted: 08 February 2022; Published: 18 March 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Dayrell, Svensson, Hannaford, McEnery, Barker, Baker and Tanguy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Carmen Dayrell, [email protected]

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Weather extremes are the biggest challenge for supply chains worldwide, with food supply chains particularly exposed due to agriculture’s sensitivity to weather conditions. Whilst attention has been paid to farm-level impacts from, and adaptation to, weather extremes, there remains a need to better understand how different actors along the supply chain suffer, react and adapt to these natural hazards and how their resilience-building strategies affect other actors’ and the whole system’s resilience. Taking the UK potato supply chain as a case study, this paper analyses the synergies and trade-offs in drought resilience in a multi-level food supply chain. Data from an online survey (87) and interviews with key informants (27) representing potato supply-chain actors (growers, packers, processors, retailers) were used to analyse drought risk perceptions, impacts and coping strategies, long-term resilience measures and further actions to build system resilience. Results suggest that the potato supply chain has increased its resilience to weather extremes due to retailers and packers having a wider geographical spread of supply, an increasing reliance on forward contracts and favouring growers with water security. However, a conceptual framework of resilience-building strategies adopted by supply chain actors shows that these measures are largely designed to reduce their own risk without considering implications for other parts of the chain and the system as a whole. A more integrated approach to promote drought resilience in complex food supply chains that enables improved vertical collaboration and trust between actors is therefore needed.

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Introduction

Supply chains can suffer disruptions due to a variety of shocks, with adverse weather conditions being the most widespread incident affecting businesses across the world (Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty AG 2012 ). Extreme weather, including droughts and heatwaves, has caused significant damages globally (Gallic and Vermandel 2020 ) and affected agricultural production worldwide, leading to financial losses, food supply and food security threats (Gbegbelegbe et al. 2014 ), increases in global food prices (Brown and Kshirsagar 2015 ; Malesios et al. 2020 ) and impacts on producers’ and consumers’ welfare. Given agricultural production’s dependence on weather conditions (Nelson et al. 2014 ), the projected future increases in the incidence and severity of extreme weather due to climate change (IPCC 2012 ; EEA 2017 ; Ault 2020 ) are likely to increase the challenges for food systems (Gregory et al. 2005 ; Allouche 2011 ; Godde et al. 2021 ). These will be compounded by increasing global population pressures and the increasing scarcity of the natural resources required for producing food (Bates et al. 2008 ; Hanjra and Qureshi 2010 ; FAO 2017 ).

Existing studies on extreme weather and food supply chains mostly focus on present and future impacts on production (e.g. Alidoost et al. 2019 ), food security (e.g. Gbegbelegbe et al. 2014 ), prices (e.g. Brown and Kshirsagar 2015 ; Countryman et al. 2016 ) and nutrition (e.g. Park et al. 2019 ). Consideration of actors in the supply chain has largely focused on the ends of the chains, i.e. primary producers (e.g. farms and farmers: Rey et al. 2017 ) and retailers (e.g. MacFadyen et al. 2015 ). There is less frequent consideration of intermediary actors within the supply chains such as processors and distributors (de Sá et al. 2019 ). According to the review on food supply chain resilience to environmental shocks by Davis et al. ( 2021 ), around two-thirds of the supply chain coping strategies focus on the production level, disregarding the multiple points where different actors can act to reduce the negative impacts.

Resilience is considered as the ‘capacity to maintain this desired state of food security when exposed to stresses and shocks’ (Ingram 2017 ) and is conferred by ‘the capacity to anticipate, respond, adapt, or transform’ in response to the stress or shock (Biggs et al. 2021 ). These capacities may be employed to enhance robustness to the shock (i.e. to maintain the desired state), to recover rapidly after a shock or to reorientate the system to accept alternative outcomes (Zurek et al. 2022 ).

In their study of the responses of the UK food supply chain to drought, Holman et al. ( 2021 ) found that (a) most drought responses were on-farm, although a diverse range of strategies were implemented through the supply chain; and (b) drought responses were dominated by short- and medium-term actions to cope with the drought, with little contribution to future resilience. Pressures from the highly competitive financial environment in which growers operate and uncertainty related to the regulatory and political environment force them to focus on near-term efficiency, preventing many growers from building resilience to water shortages over the longer term (Sutcliffe et al. 2021 ; Hess et al. 2020 ; Rey et al. 2017 ).

The existing literature also tends to focus on individual businesses and organisations within the supply chain rather than considering their position in the chain as a system (Tendall et al. 2015 ; Hecht et al. 2019 ; Davis et al. 2021 ). Due to the large amount of intermediaries in food supply chains, collaboration and coordination is difficult (Yadav et al. 2022 ). In the UK, Zurek et al ( 2020 ) analysed the resilience of fruit and vegetables systems to water related-risks. They found that resilience at an individual actor level does not necessarily result in whole-system resilience. Some of the individual resilience strategies overlap and reinforce each other leading to improved system resilience, but in many cases, there is no coordination between them, as each actor in the supply chain will have their own desired outcomes from the food system, leading to trade-offs and reduced system resilience. For individual growers, resilience may be the ability to produce and sell their crop; for packers and processors, to have consistency in the quality and size of the crop; for retailers, it may be the ability to make a profit from that product. These differences will impact actors’ risk perception and influence their resilience-building decisions (Zurek et al. 2020 ).

There is therefore a lack of a true supply chain perspective (from production, processing, distribution, marketing through to consumption) in understanding drought resilience and consequently an urgent need to look at the resilience of the whole chain (Macfadyen et al. 2015 ; Hecht et al. 2019 ; Meyer 2020 ) — how actors interact during a shock, how the risks and costs are spread across the supply chain, how they cope and adapt to it. The UKs agri-food sector represents 9.4% of the gross value added (£121.0 billion) (DEFRA 2021 ), but more than 90% is concentrated downstream of the agricultural sector in manufacturing, retailing and catering, emphasising the need to build resilience to weather extremes in the entire chain and not just primary production.

This paper aims to analyse and evaluate how synergies and trade-offs in individual drought resilience actions affect the system resilience of complex food supply chains, taking the UK potato supply chain as a case study. Through the analysis of the results from an online survey and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders through the supply chain (from primary production to retail), this paper analyses how supply chain actors cope with droughts and adapt to them in the long term, and how their decisions affect the resilience of other actors and the supply chain. The outcomes, together with a conceptual framework derived from the findings, help to fill the above-mentioned gap in the literature on food supply chains, weather extremes and pathways towards resilience, and will support a systems approach that enables stakeholders across food supply chains to work in cohort to increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

Materials and methods

The uk potato supply chain.

Potatoes are the most important staple in the UK in terms of production, accounting for ~ 123,000 hectares and annual domestic production of 4–6 million tonnes over the last 3 years (AHDB 2019b ; DAERA 2021 ) with 36.6% going to the pre-pack retail market (AHDB 2019a ). The area of potatoes grown for the retail market is the largest, followed by potatoes grown for processing. More than half of the area growing potatoes in Great Britain has irrigation capability (AHDB 2019b ), helping to maintain the consistent soil moisture required throughout the growing season to produce high yields and high quality (AHDB 2018 ). Water abstraction for irrigation requires a licence which can be subject to restriction during dry periods to protect the public water supply and river ecology (Salmoral et al. 2019 ). Fresh potatoes sales were around £1Bn in 2019, with the value of the potato market (including processed potatoes) being over 50% of the total value of the carbohydrate market (AHDB 2019b ). National potato consumption exceeds total production and over a quarter of the UK potato supply is imported (mostly processed potatoes). A small proportion of domestic production is exported (c10%) (Knox and Hess 2018 ).

The associated enhanced financial capacity needed by growers has seen a transition to bigger and more specialised farms growing potatoes, with a 74% increase in farm size between 2005 and 2019 (AHDB 2019b ). The number of registered growers in the UK has also decreased from around 44,400 in 1973 to less than 3000 in 2012, with a 46% reduction between 2005 and 2019 (AHDB 2019b ). The supply chain has moved from relying on the open market to having most of the production contracted (81% in 2019) to provide security in potato supply (both in terms of quantity and quality) for packers and retailers for the following season (AHDB 2019a ). For growers, such forward contracts provide certainty that they will have a buyer for their product and a known price. However, this contractually obliges them to meet fixed volumes, delivery times and quality specifications, thereby re-enforcing the importance of irrigation and irrigation water security to provide robustness to potential shocks and thereby increasing costs. Crop insurance is not common in the UK (Vyas et al. 2021 ) with no government-subsidised crop insurance programme (Soil Association 2017 ). This work focuses on growers, processors, packers and retailers in the UK potato supply chain (excluding wholesaler market, food service and consumers; Fig.  1 ), and how they are affected by and react to drought risk. Growers are the farmers growing potatoes and selling them to other actors in the chain. Processors are the businesses buying potatoes for processing and selling them mainly to supermarkets (i.e. retailers). Packers buy bulk potatoes and sell them fresh to wholesale, restaurant and food service market or pre-pack to retailers.

Schematic representation of key actors in the UK potato supply chain. Shaded boxes represent the actors included in this study

UK agriculture has been affected by several drought episodes in the last five decades, affecting crop yields, crop quality, farmers’ income, prices and imports (Holman et al. 2021 ). The spring of 2011 was one of driest on record in England and Wales, creating challenging conditions for many potato growers who struggled to cope with the water demand of the crop and had to use between a quarter to a third of their total licenced water allocation before the end of May (Knox et al. 2012 ). Climate change increases the likelihood of these kinds of challenging conditions arising for growers but also represents a potential opportunity for the UK potato industry due to increased potato yields under non-limited water and nutrient conditions, if the food supply chain adapts to meet future irrigation demands (Knox et al. 2011 ).

Data collection and analysis

To understand how droughts have affected the UK potato supply chain and how the different actors within the supply chain react and build resilience to this risk, two data collection activities were conducted between November 2017 and April 2018:

Semi-structured interviews: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 27 key actors either by phone or face-to-face between November 2017 and April 2018. Although 2018 turned out to be a dry summer (Holman et al. 2021 ), the drought had not developed by the time of the survey. The 27 participants represented all the actor groups along the supply chain: growers (17, all of them irrigators), processors (2), packers (2), processor-packer (1), packer-retailer (1) and retailers (4). Participants were coded by these terms and a letter (where needed) to anonymise yet retain traceability. Participants were selected using a purposive sampling approach (Robinson 2014 ) that identified key businesses and personnel in each level of the potato supply chain. Some interviewees were also suggested by participants. The retailers included in the sample represented 59% of the market share in Great Britain at the time of the data collection. We interviewed the major packers and processors that supply fresh and processed potatoes to those big retailers. Potato growers participating in the interviews farmed between 220 and 4500 ha. The combined land area of all participants equalled around 20,000 ha. The semi-structured interviews questionnaire contained open-ended questions to explore the participants’ views on (a) the impacts of low yield and quality on supply chain actors (from farmers to retailers) and coping strategies; (b) the relationship between actors during crisis and (c) long-term resilience strategies, future challenges and ways to increase resilience. The interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis — transcripts are available via the Data Availability Statement. The data was qualitatively analysed by applying a thematic coding approach (Braun and Clarke 2021 ) in NVivo 12 (Gibbs 2002 ), with initial codes related to key themes identified from the literature by the research team, and others emerging from the data collected during the interviews as is conventional within grounded theory literature (Mills et al. 2006 ). The analysis is both reflexive and iterative ensuring that the qualitative insights were drawn from the data and guided by the literature.

Online survey: Irrigators in the UK were invited to participate in an online survey on growers’ water risk perception, irrigation practices and commercial arrangements between January and April 2018. From the total sample ( n  = 118), 87 were potato growers and thus included in this study. Survey questions and responses are available via the Data Availability Statement. Descriptive summary statistics were used to summarise relevant results from the survey to complement the qualitative analysis of the interviews.

Both the online survey and the questionnaire were submitted to the University Research Ethics System for approval (CURES/3651/2017 and CURES/1049/2016).

Drought risk perception

The growth in irrigation capacity within the potato supply chain has moved perceptions of drought risk away from meteorological and agricultural droughts, which largely impact rainfed potato production, towards concerns regarding hydrological and water resources droughts, which affect the ability of growers to fully irrigate their crops. Water shortages were the top water-related risk for nearly 60% (51) of grower survey participants, with 15 of them reporting drought as being their main concern, and 33 water shortages imposed by the abstraction licencing system. Equally, when discussing water-related risks with growers during the interviews, abstraction licences were also a common concern, both during a drought (when the regulator can mandatorily restrict the water, they can abstract) and in the long term (regarding the reform of the water abstraction licencing system which may lead to reduced licenced volumes or the loss of licences [permits]). For the latter, growers fear losing their spare volumetric capacity (i.e. licence headroom) that helps them cope with dry periods.

During the interviews, a small number of stakeholders mentioned floods as being more severe for their businesses than droughts (5/27) and 3/27 stated it does not matter whether it is a drought or a flood as the consequences are essentially the same — low yields and/or quality issues that will impact actors along the supply chain.

To ensure that we have continuity of supply of the right volume and the right quality of potatoes in a given situation, whether it is a drought or a flood it doesn’t really matter. I suppose potentially a drought is more widespread than a flooding event, but both cause more impact on individual growers. (Processor C) Over the past 10 years, floods and wet weather are far more of a risk than droughts. We can manage droughts with irrigation, but we don’t have enough drainage capacity to get rid of the excess. (Packer-processor)

Whilst droughts have a direct impact on growers due to the effects on crops, the drought risk perception of other actors down the supply chain diminishes as they are less directly exposed to drought risk. This is because they have a wider range of alternatives coping strategies to deal with drought-related supply shortage (e.g. geographical spread, imports, purchasing product on the open market).

Drought is obviously always on our agenda, but most of our growers have irrigation so…85% of our growers use irrigation and most of them have good licences and they can withdraw from their own reservoir. So, they are fairly well covered. (Packer-retailer).

Drought impacts and interaction between supply chain actors during a drought

Growers are the first sector in the supply chain to be impacted by the drought, with dry conditions potentially affecting both potato yield (especially for rainfed farms) and quality if there is a lack of water during crucial crop development stages — ‘My assumption would be that farmers are more exposed to the risk. Ultimately if there is a drought in the UK and it affects quality, we are not going to be the only ones affected (or it is unlikely)’ (Retailer A). Increased incidence of common scab (affecting the visual quality of the tuber skin), greening of the potatoes due to exposure to light and high dry matter percentage are typical issues associated to dry weather as reported by respondents. A reduction in yield means growers have less volume to sell and this will inevitably have financial consequences for them. When quality is affected such that retailers will not accept the product, growers can potentially sell them for processing, but at a lower price.

When forward contracts are in place, growers need to forewarn their clients if they cannot deliver the agreed production quantity or meet the quality specifications. Growers always leave a small percentage of their expected production out of the contract as a safety net in case they are short or to sell it to the open market. Despite this, 42 out of the 87 growers participating in the survey admitted that they had been unable to fully deliver on a contract because production was affected by a water-related issue. According to participants, many contracts specify penalties for growers in this situation (22 out of 42 responses, Table 1 ), but whether or not they are actually applied is variable. The survey results revealed that penalties have been seldom applied as stated by 8 of the non-grower participants, whilst 14 out of the 22 growers who responded to this question reported being affected by penalties. This is somewhat contradicted by the responses from growers participating in the interviews as only 3 of them reported that this happens but it is not normal — ‘Some companies did [impose penalties] and some companies didn’t…’ (Grower M) — and a good relationship and trust seem to be key to avoid those penalties — ‘It is the relationship, the trust between us. I have been in the business for many, many years and I cannot remember having many problems with supply that cannot be worked through’ (Processor B). Ultimately, failing to supply against the contract could mean growers losing their client for the future. Similar conditions and penalties are also applied to other suppliers in the supply chain.

All actors agree on the importance of having a good relationship with their suppliers and customers to facilitate communication and collaboration in difficult years and minimise contractual difficulties. Many packers/processors/retailers have an agronomist team that is in close contact with their grower base and will identify any problems in the field early in the season. This is crucial for them to find alternative product sources if needed. In this case, they either purchase more products from their current UK growers, if there is any, or go overseas. During past dry episodes, all the non-grower participants relied heavily on imports, mainly from Europe and Mediterranean countries, to compensate for the lack of domestic supply. In addition, a grower representing a big agricultural business reported leaning on the European farms within the business to procure extra production when their UK farm was short — ‘The majority of our supply comes via large, trusted suppliers who work with farms in a broad spread of locations, both UK and internationally. As a result the risk of them being impacted by drought is minimised’ (Retailer A).

When discussing who within the supply chain bears the short-term costs related to drought impacts, different actors in the chain have different opinions. Most of them consider growers as the ones being more affected by drought impacts — ‘The growers stand the costs because they spend more money on irrigation. And the yield will be lower so the cost per tonne will be higher. And in a fully contracted supply chain the grower takes the pain. In a non-fully contracted supply chain then the prices tend to go up and spread evenly across the supply chain’ (Packer B) — The increased costs for growers will to some extent be transmitted along the supply chain, although there were differing opinions between growers (‘I don’t think the consumers carry any of the cost at all, and I don’t think really the retailer carries much cost either. The packer will carry some cost. The grower carries the majority of the cost’ [Grower Q].) and retailers (‘The growers are disadvantaged because they would have less stuff to sell. The suppliers will be disadvantaged because they would have less volume. And the supermarkets are disadvantaged because they would be struggling to meet their customers’ needs and we would have to do other things that will cost us money. It is very unlikely that…nobody is going to be fined, nobody is going to be nasty. It is just they will all take a hit in a different way and usually the end customers will normally have to have a price increase that they don’t like because that will impact their buying so…Everybody takes the hit’ [Retailer B]) regarding the extent to which retailers and consumers are affected.

Drought impacts will ultimately affect consumers, although retailers are very reluctant to increase consumer prices due to very strong price competition between them and the discount supermarkets. The general perception among participants is that consumers do not care how much water is needed to produce the food they buy, and that their choices are mostly price driven. The priority for retailers is to ensure there are potatoes available to customers, and relaxing quality specifications in low supply years has helped keep the shelves full. Consequently, some retailers have invested in promotional campaigns to convince consumers to buy less ‘good looking’ vegetables (e.g. ‘wonky veg’, ‘perfectly imperfect’) in years when visual appearance was affected (NFU 2018 ).

Long-term adaptation — building resilience for the future

Interview participants were asked about the main challenges for the sector looking into the future. Whilst climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of weather extremes, regulatory uncertainty related to the water abstraction licencing system hinders the ability of growers to plan and invest in long-term adaptation strategies. Abstraction reform was mentioned by both growers and other supply chain actors as an important challenge for the sector. This is because of the increasing importance of both secure access to irrigation water and maintaining licenced headroom to buffer the impacts of a dry year in order to ensure good yields and excellent quality product in the face of increasing climate variability.

Although there were fewer reported examples of longer-term resilience building actions in comparison with coping strategies, and most of them related to on-farm measures, most interview participants think the potato supply chain is more resilient to weather extremes now than in the past. The main adaptation strategies adopted by potato supply chain actors (beyond primary production) as reported during the interviews can be classified around 3 themes: (i) ensuring geographical spread of supply; (ii) increasing reliance on forward contracts and (iii) requiring suppliers’ water security. Processors, packers and retailers are increasing the spatial variety of their grower pools to secure enough supply in the event of adverse conditions — ‘The way businesses review that is not usually every year, but certainly every two or three years. Most big businesses will do a piece of work about where are the potatoes for my supply chain being grown geographically and what is the capability in those areas with those growers. They would do a risk-reward matrix exercise…They do it in different ways, but they all do that type of work. So they have a spread of risk over the geography of the UK’ (Retailer B). This relates to both UK and international supply. Forward contracts are used to reduce the supply risks for all downstream actors as they have an agreed yield and quality for potatoes that will be delivered to them on an agreed date. Finally, retailers, processors and packers are being more selective in their choice of growers, giving preference to those that have reliable supplies of sufficient irrigation water to deal with a drought episode, in particular through investing in on-farm reservoir storage and efficient irrigation technology.

We actually expanded our base because we buy more potatoes from people that we haven’t bought from previously and we keep them on our books and are possibly doing a few more contracts with them. I think we contract a bit more than we used to and we would like to contract a bit more. It gives us a bit more security to make sure that we are more covered than seeing what the yields are each year. So yes, we have tried to mitigate the risk by securing more with contracts but again with people with irrigation and possibly less fluctuation in their yield. So there is a little bit of change there, but not a lot (Packer-retailer).

Despite the perceived improved supply chain resilience, participants suggested further actions to increase the resilience of the supply chain in the future:

Improved and increased vertical collaboration between actors within the supply chain — This would help in managing water-related risks. Inspired by a successful initiative with dairy farmers, one retailer has recently created a sustainable farming group for potatoes, whereby they have a direct relationship with a small number of potato growers with the hope to build long-term trusted relationships with them.

I think we should be developing a partnership with the processors and suppliers and also the growers, to make sure we really understand risk down to specific locations […] Taking a systematic approach to understand what is the risk of drought and the impact that can have on supply. So that is what I think we should do and it is something I am in the process of working through it actually, still very early days (Retailer A). From the farmers through to ourselves we realize about the importance of early recognition of a difficult situation, early discussions. And the ability to manage things as a team rather than being aggressive. We pride ourselves and we like to think that we have a good relationship with the growers. They trust us. If we look into the future, I think with pressure on resources, with pressure on agricultural land and more mouths to feed, farming is actually going to be under a lot of pressure, there is going to be a lot of competition there. So you need to develop a very good working relationship with our growers to meet the challenges of the future (Processor B).

Further resilience-building strategies applied by different actors — A range of measures were proposed by participants, but they focused on how growers should adapt to drought risk, rather than looking at other supply chain actors. The most common farm-level adaptation strategy suggested by supply chain actors is increased water storage (excluding growers, 10 in total) and promoting varieties that are more resistant to droughts (3/10); as well as erosion mitigation to prevent water leaving the fields (1/10); and increasing the soil organic matter content to increase its water retention capacity (1/10).

Taking a systematic approach to understand what is the risk of drought and the impact that can have on supply. So that is what I think we should do […]. I think we are quite blind to the impacts that could have. I think we just rely on our processors and suppliers either having mitigation programs in place, relying on the farmers they use. We don’t have any understanding of how that could impact us (Retailer A). Within our grower base we are encouraging farms to be self-sufficient on water, so investment in on-farm reservoirs. Something we need to call for more help from the government in terms of tax break, capital release, easier planning… (Packer B)

However, implementing resilience strategies such as those mentioned above has costs implications — ‘Diversifying supply and having contingency always costs most money and the competitive nature of the UK supply chain at the moment doesn’t encourage you to do that’ (Packer B). In a highly competitive and price-sensitive supply chain, such as the potato supply chain, who should pay for this is a controversial issue that has the potential to hinder future increased investment:

‘The retailers should recognize that food isn’t going to cost less when we have got the extra cost of irrigation. Because we have made a huge investment in reservoirs and in irrigation to produce the consistent quality they require’ (Grower Q).

Drought resilience in the UK potato supply chain

Although agriculture is the sector most severely affected by drought, this case study suggests that, despite traditional beliefs, there is burden sharing across the supply chain when it comes to dealing with a shock like a drought event. The risks and the costs associated with this natural hazard affect the supply chain actors in different ways. Supermarkets have increasingly dominated the UK grocery market, with four having a combined market share of over 70% of the sales. Their increased focus on product specification (aesthetic, size and quality standards) can, in many parts of the country, only be achieved with secure and sufficient water availability for supplemental irrigation (Knox and Hess 2018 ). Over time, this has led many growers to transition from direct summer abstraction of river water for irrigation, to investing in on-farm winter storage reservoirs; from rain guns to more efficient irrigation application systems (e.g. centre pivots, solid state sprinklers, drip irrigation); and to more modern pumping systems and scheduling methods (Rey et al. 2017 ; Sutcliffe et al. 2021 ). In this sense, parts of the system have demonstrated a capacity for adaptation in order to enhance the robustness of primary production in response to the risk of drought. This emphasis on robustness over recovery or re-orientation is common in the UK agrifood system (Hess et al. 2020 ).

Helfgott et al. ( 2018 ) encouraged a framing of resilience in terms of resilience ‘of what, to what, from whose perspective and over what time frame’. Both short-term and longer-term drought (‘to what’) management strategies implemented by different actors in the UK potato supply chain are largely designed to reduce their own risk, without considering the implications for other parts of the chain and the system as a whole. Actors were therefore primarily interested in the resilience of the outcomes of their operations (‘of what’) to their business (‘from whose perspective’) and over the short-term (‘over what time frame’). This is consistent with the findings from Peck ( 2006 ), when they analysed the resilience of the food and drink supply chains in England and found that business continuity management was applied by organisations driven by self-interest. Thus, there is a high risk of implementing strategies that do not account for the impacts on other actors, which could lead to failure of the desired outcome (Tendall et al. 2015 ).

Individual resilience vs. system’s resilience — synergies and trade-offs

Actors respond to shocks within the constraints of the policy environment. The extent to which a company is vertically integrated across multiple steps in a food supply chain also determines options available for them (Davis et al. 2021 ), with the Internet-of-Things (Ben-Daya et al. 2019 ) offering the emerging promise of real-time monitoring to support the supply chain in dealing with unpredictable supply variations (Verdouw et al. 2016 ; Maroli et al. 2021 ). Existing literature focuses on individual businesses and organisations and how they can build organisational resilience to shocks, rather than looking at how the synergies and trade-offs derived from individual organisation’s resilience strategies affect other actors and the system. Zurek et al. ( 2020 ) have shown how the resilience of different parts of the supply chain to drought is intertwined and the ability to absorb a shock in one part of the system can enhance resilience in another.

The framework presented in Table 2 aims at filling this gap for drought risk management in food supply chains, based on the outputs from this study. This conceptual framework identifies resilience-building strategies adopted by actors in the supply chain as well as key external factors that influence resilience, and how they can impact other actors or the whole chain. Synergies are defined as changes introduced by one or more actors in the supply chain that promote their resilience and the resilience of other actors in the supply chain. In contrast, trade-offs are those negative externalities derived from strategies implemented by actors, as well as market and policy factors, that adversely affect the resilience of one or more actors, or even the whole chain. The methods and framework presented in this paper could be adapted to enable a more integrated approach to resilience in other complex food systems.

One clear example of how resilience-building strategies applied by one sector could put the resilience of the whole chain at stake is the reliance on imports, especially when they come from water-scarce countries (Zhao et al. 2019 ). In the case of the UK, during low supply years, packers, processors and retailers buy extra potatoes from other countries. During past droughts, potato supply chain actors have been able to switch sources of supply rapidly if required, buying potatoes mainly from Europe. This strategy avoids supermarkets having empty shelves but increases the costs along the supply chain and affects the resilience of the system. The UK relies heavily on food imports from more than 180 countries (DEFRA 2018 ) which represent around 50% of the food that is consumed (Global Food Security 2019 ). High import dependency has increased the exposure of the UK food supply chain to water-related risks (Hess and Sutcliffe 2018 ) and is contributing to deforestation and land use conversion in producer countries (Global Resource Initiative 2020 ).

Supply chain actors view and respond to extreme events in different ways, which can place conflicting pressures on producers, making adaptation difficult. As derived from Table 2 , there are some resilience measures implemented by packers/processors and retailers that could increase pressure on growers and threaten their long-term resilience by: (a) setting high-quality standards that growers need to meet and that require having access to greater volumes of water; (b) forward contracts that prevent farmers from benefiting from price increases during a drought (or other shock that reduces supply) and through which they might be subject to penalties and (c) the need to have on-farm water reservoirs and/or secure access to water to get a contract that could potentially lead to technological lock-in. Also, whilst supermarkets control many aspects of the food supply chain, when it comes to dealing with weather extremes, they necessarily have to rely on growers’ (and processors/packers) resilience.

Systems-thinking approach to resilience

All the above shows the importance of moving from a silo-thinking approach to resilience to an integrated or connected approach that promotes the resilience of the whole chain rather than only the resilience of the individual actors. With this systems-thinking approach to resilience in mind, there is the need to identify synergetic strategies that would increase the resilience of the whole system and find ways to ensure they are adopted by the relevant actors in the chain. In line with the Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers 1975 ), there are several factors that will trigger individuals’ decision to protect themselves against a risk like drought. They are categorised as either threat appraisal (i.e. the perceived severity and probability of occurrence of the risk) and coping appraisal (i.e. the perceived self-efficacy to cope with the risk, the response efficacy and the costs). Actors that do not consider droughts as an important risk to their business (threat appraisal) or that do not feel ready to do something about it (coping appraisal) would need different motivation mechanisms to convince them to act upon this risk. Building resilience to weather extremes such as drought carries costs (Holman et al. 2021 ), which could prevent actors from implementing changes to achieve this, as suggested by the results of this research. For instance, the ability of farmers to finance reservoirs is dependent on the profit margin they can achieve from fixed price forward contracts.

The great complexity of supply chains, plus uncertainties related to climate change and policy suggest that the private sector might struggle to take the appropriate actions (Committee on Climate Change 2019 ). The multi-level drought management framework of Holman et al. ( 2021 ) highlights the importance of non-market institutional arrangements and, in particular, the improved collaboration and engagement across spatial, governance and supply-chain scales that develop human (knowledge) and social (trust) capital in transitioning to longer-term adaptation strategies. There is little understanding of how key actors’ dominant position provides more or less resilience to other actors and to the overall system (Merkle et al. 2021 ). Political ecology is defined as ‘empirical, research-based explorations to explain linkages in the condition and change of social/environmental systems, with explicit consideration of relations of power’ (Robbins 2012 ). It explores multi-level connections between global and local phenomena in decision-making and hierarchies of power (Adger et al. 2001 ). Several authors have already proposed the integration of political ecology and resilience (e.g. Quandt 2016 ; Beckwith 2022 ). This approach could help in understanding this conflict between individual and system resilience, as it helps to identify winners and losers, hidden costs, distributional effects and power relationships in social and environmental outcomes (Robbins 2012 ; Quandt 2016 ). Governments could play a role in promoting adaptive behaviour through grants, subsidies or tax exemptions for capital investment; or by legislative enablers that promote adaptation and build general resilience (Hess et al. 2020 ). Public Private Partnerships have been proposed in food systems to solve issues related to public health and food safety (Rouvière and Royer 2017 ; Fanzo et al. 2020 ). They could also be implemented to achieving food chain resilience to weather extremes or other disruptions. Adaptation by individual businesses could also be enhanced by other actors in the supply chain, as suggested by Macfadyen et al. ( 2015 ) in relation to the fundamental role that retailers can play in promoting the implementation of resilience-prone practices across the food supply chain. Given the concentration of power of the retailers, they might be seen as the critical pivot around which to frame resilience actions (or a key barrier). Increasing the resilience of food supply chains should not be done by producers or policymakers alone (Macfadyen et al. 2015 ) — all stakeholders, including consumers, have a key role to play.

Research approach and limitations

This research takes a constructivist approach, where the aim was to understand how different food system stakeholders each construct their own interpretation of the supply chain which then determines their actions in response to drought. The results are based on the thematic coding of their interviews so that the results and discussion reflect the key topics that arose from the interviews and which were then integrated into the framework presented in Table 2 . As such, the goal of the research is not to assert an overarching generalisable truth but to understand how and why actors behave differently, and identify the implications of this.

The data collection was done through an online survey and semi-structured interviews with key informants representing different sectors in the UK potato supply chain as described in the ‘ Data collection and analysis ’ section. Many of these approaches are more usually applied in research of a more positivist/experimental/quantitative nature, rather than our primarily qualitative approach. However, triangulation was achieved by talking to actors at different points in the supply chain and comparing their statements about key topics (e.g. how risk was distributed). Regarding external validity, interviews were undertaken with a large proportion of the ‘population’ of interest — i.e. representatives of all or nearly all the major supermarkets, and the interviewed farmers’ combined landholdings covered a significant portion of the landholdings used for potato production in Eastern and Southern UK.

A more comprehensive data collection, including different actors across the supply chain and ensuring all sectors and products are represented (some actors were not included in our analysis as shown in Fig.  1 ), could provide a more detailed overview of the synergies and trade-offs to resilience. Also, the combination of this framework with a more quantitative approach could help in assessing the magnitude of those positive or negative impacts on individual and whole system’s resilience.

Conclusions

According to the World Economic Forum ( 2019 ), weather extremes are the current biggest risk for the global economy in terms of impact and livelihood. Weather extremes have caused major disruptions in food supply chains, and this will continue in the future with more severe and frequent episodes. The UK potato supply chain is no exception, having been impacted by drought on several occasions in recent decades. The research has shown that actors along the supply chain, from growers to retailers, have each adopted reactive strategies to limit the impact of the drought on the potato supply to consumers whilst it is happening. These actors are also seeking to implement long-term measures aimed at increasing the resilience of their businesses. However, by analysing the synergies and trade-offs in drought resilience in this case study, this paper highlights how individual resilience strategies can impact other actors in the supply chain and the system’s overall resilience. Most of the measures proposed by participants to further enhance drought resilience of the whole system are focused on growers, but who should pay for the costs associated with these measures remains a contentious issue. Governments and retailers could play a key role in promoting resilience building strategies and supporting their adoption by the different actors in the supply chain. The results highlight that a more integrated approach, involving collaboration and coordination between supply chain actors and between supply and non-supply chain actors, is needed to understand the synergies and trade-offs between individual and systemic resilience building measures in order to promote drought resilience in this and other complex food supply chains.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Cranfield Online Research Data at: https://doi.org/10.17862/cranfield.rd.14753820.v1 (for survey results); https://doi.org/10.17862/cranfield.rd.12033651 (for growers interviews); https://doi.org/10.17862/cranfield.rd.14761881 (for packers/processors/retailers interviews).

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support from participants in the online survey and interviews.

This research was funded by the UK Droughts & Water Scarcity (D&WS) programme, a Natural Environment Research Council programme in collaboration with other UK Research Councils (Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council), grant number NE/L010070/1; and through the Global Food Security’s ‘Resilience of the UK Food System Programme’, with support from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council and Scottish Government (BB/N020499/1).

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Vicario, D.R., Holman, I., Sutcliffe, C. et al. Synergies and trade-offs in drought resilience within a multi-level UK food supply chain. Reg Environ Change 23 , 55 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02046-x

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GAD supported a project to develop a standardised approach to estimating the poverty and nutritional impacts of droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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• All about drought: The future of drought in the UK

These resources combine a range of teaching approaches and embed a series of critical thinking techniques in order to further develop students’ understanding of the subject matter.

Cross-curricular links are made to literacy, numeracy and ICT enabling the students to transfer their skills across the spectrum of subjects. The lessons offer opportunities for students to conduct further research, explore the numerous websites and use a range of resources such as choropleth maps to conduct their own investigation into previous drought events and begin to predict future ones from the trends. Each lesson is accompanied by an editable PowerPoint presentation and relevant worksheets.

In this lesson, students are encouraged to acknowledge that the future of drought in the UK is increasing but uncertain, and draw links through climate change to offer explanation for this.

Learning objective

• To investigate the future of drought in the UK and how it could affect the students.

Students are encouraged to acknowledge that the future of drought in the UK is increasing but uncertain, and draw links through climate change to offer explanation for this.

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The future of drought in the UK PowerPoint presentation

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Is drought a global phenomenon?

A case study of UK drought 2010-2012: considering the cause and impacts of the drought

A case study of UK drought 2010-2012: investigating the responses

The 1976 Drought – was it all good?

Changing our thinking about drought

This lesson has been co-written by the GA consultant Gemma Mawdsley and produced in collaboration with the DRY research team, ENDOWS, UWE, and About Drought.

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Extreme Weather in the UK Summer Heatwave 2018.

The summer of 2018 will be remembered for being a scorcher! High temperatures and low rainfall are not the typical weather conditions the U.K. is used to.  Summer 2018 is an example of extreme weather. Extreme weather is when a weather event is significantly different from the average or usual weather pattern.

Britain has experienced its longest heatwave in 42 years; just 47mm of rainfall fell between 1 June to 16 July. It is the driest summer on record since 1961 when modern records started. The Met office assessed the temperature data for the UK as a whole for summer 2018 and the figures are so close that they declared it as the joint hottest on record together with 2006, 2003 and 1976.

Impact of the heatwave

Satellite images illustrate the impact of the extreme weather Britain has experienced during summer 2018. The satellite images below comparing the U.K. in May and July clearly show the impact the heatwave and drought have had. Vegetation that was once green and lush turned a shade of brown.  

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Satellite image showing Britain in May 2018 and July 2018 – Source independent.co.uk

The heatwave has led to falling water levels in reservoirs across the country. At Burrator reservoir in Dartmoor, Devon, a “drowned village” has been revealed having been submerged for more than a century. As the water in Burrator Reservoir dropped to beneath 50 per cent capacity, ruins of a wall were revealed, while a farmhouse and a bridge are thought to be beneath the surface.

Hosepipe Ban

7 million households in the north-west of England are facing the first hosepipe ban in the country since 2012. The ban is due to come into force on 5th August 2018 because reservoir levels are 17% lower than the same period last year. It is ironic that the wettest area in England is facing a hosepipe ban.

A hosepipe ban can reduce water usage by 5-10%, according to UK Water Industry Research, which in the north-west would amount to more than 100m litres a day. However, water leaks within the network typically result in a loss of 20% of our water.  

In Northern Ireland, a hosepipe ban has been in effect since 29 June. An extra 175m litres of water is being pumped into the network in an effort to keep up with demand.  

Moorland Fires

The dry conditions contributed to a series of large fires on the Lancashire moors. This included Winter Hill, near Bolton and Saddleworth Moor, close to Manchester. Up to 100 firefighters from across England tackled the blaze on Winter Hill.

The blaze on Saddleworth moor broke out on 24 June and about 100 soldiers were drafted in to help tackle it at its height. At its peak, the fire covered an area of 7 sq miles (18 sq km) of moorland. People living in the vicinity of the smoke plume were advised to keep their doors and windows shut.

This is the flying science lab that’s testing the smoke from UK wildfires such as the one on Saddleworth Moor #saddleworthmoorfire #saddleworthmoor pic.twitter.com/NfIbzymmyZ — BBC Science News (@BBCScienceNews) July 11, 2018

The army joined firefighters on Saddleworth Moor where the blaze took three weeks to extinguish. It is thought the fires were caused by arson. However, the dry conditions exacerbated the fire.

Lancashire Wildlife Trust said a separate “devastating” fire on Saturday destroyed a large part of a nature reserve in St Anne’s, Lancashire.

More devastating news. On Saturday a fire on our Local Nature Reserve in St Anne’s destroyed approx 20% of the reserve’s habitat. The cause is unknown. Please don’t light bbqs on dry grassland, and dispose of all litter, particularly glass bottles & cigarette butts. pic.twitter.com/34MRCkfQR2 — Lancs Wildlife Trust (@Lancswildlife) July 2, 2018

Nearly 700 more deaths than average were recorded during the 15-day peak of the heatwave in June and July in England and Wales, according to official statistics. Although these deaths cannot be directly linked to the heat wave this is more than a coincidence.

Further issues

June saw 16 consecutive days of temperatures above 28°C. But joyous as it may seem, this unusually hot summer is no cause for celebration. @india_bourke on this summer’s warning signs. https://t.co/umQIsiplzO — New Statesman (@NewStatesman) July 17, 2018

Benefits of the heatwave

The hot, dry weather has brought benefits to the UK tourism industry. Holidaymakers already booked in for a summer break in the UK are the obvious and clear winners.

Last year saw a rise in the number of British people taking domestic holidays with more than 33 million trips taken between January and August – and two-thirds of Britons have planned a UK break for this year, the Association of British Travel Agents said.

The drought has exposed previously undiscovered or long-hidden outlines of various archaeological sites, from ancient fortifications to remnants of the Second World War, across the country.

How the current #heatwave is providing unprecedented opportunities for archaeologists https://t.co/SRRZVeJZwT (via @Independent ) #archaeology — BBC History Magazine (@HistoryExtra) July 12, 2018

Retailers have benefitted from an increased sale of wine during the heatwave. Waitrose told Decanter.com that Champagne sales by volume were up by 49% year-on-year, with sparkling wines up 53% year-on-year.

Cause of the heatwave

The “ beast from the east ” cold of late winter 2018 and the dry heat of the UK’s summer so far, are both caused atmospheric blocking. Large meanders in the jet stream often lead to the development of huge anticyclones – areas of high pressure that can remain in the same place for weeks at a time. This causes cold temperatures during winter and hot, dry conditions during the summer.  

Anthony Bennett

Very useful, informative work. Helped me a lot with my own case study.

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How is the UK at risk of both floods and drought?

Britain’s water woes are tied to how we’ve exploited our natural resources. it’s time to let nature return to doing more of the work..

England just had its wettest 18 months on record. So the fact that the UK is still at risk of water shortages this summer is a damning indictment of how poorly managed the country’s water supplies are.

Jamie Hannaford, a hydrologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, recently told the Guardian that in the case of below-average rainfall and high temperatures, reservoir stocks and river flows can be depleted rapidly — even after wet winters. It’s happened before. At the beginning of 2010, the UK’s water situation appeared healthy after a wet summer and above-average fall and winter. Then a drought followed, which saw reservoir stocks swiftly decline. So a hosepipe ban in some regions can’t be ruled out, though Anglian Water has ruled one out for the east of England this summer.

Also Read | Awareness about air pollution-related terminologies low among urban poor in Delhi-NCR: Study

Even if our groundwater and reservoir levels remain comfortable this year, the problem is only going to get more serious. By 2050, the Environment Agency estimates that England will face a shortfall of nearly 5 billion liters of water per day as we deal with hotter days and longer drought periods at the same time as the population grows and business needs increase.

For some people, the water crisis feels very present. Last June, four schools in East Sussex were forced to close during water shortages, while sections of a river in the Lake District ran dry.

Yet as H20 supply becomes more of an issue, so too will an oversupply of the wet stuff. The number of people in the UK significantly at risk of flooding is projected to increase 61% by 2050 if global temperatures rise by 2C as storms become more severe and sea levels rise.

Also Read | Weather Bee | How strong is the current El Niño cycle?

How is it that the UK can flip-flop so dramatically between surplus and drought?

A large part of the reason is that we’ve altered our land so that water gushes quickly through the landscape and out to sea, rather than being stored in wetlands, rivers and aquifers. Rivers have been straightened and channelized. Vast swathes of wetland have been drained for grazing and agriculture. Absorbent natural environments have been replaced with slick surfaces — car parks, patios, paving stones — that contribute to the fast flow of water into aging sewers. The result is more flooding and less stored water.

Of course, England and Wales’ unique system of privatized water companies doesn’t help matters. These water monopolies have been accused of neglecting much-needed infrastructure investments so that they can pay their shareholders large dividends. The result is that an average of 113 liters of water per property per day is lost to leaks, and Britain is dealing with an epidemic of sewage spills. This is particularly galling as water bills are also being hiked.

The solution will require action from all directions. Water companies and regional water groups are finalizing long-term plans for how they’ll secure future water supplies over the next 25 years and beyond. Those plans include proposals for seven new reservoirs, five new water recycling schemes, four new desalination plants and inter-company transfers to share resources.

We’ll also need to use less water — that means companies fixing leaks at the same time as households and businesses using water more efficiently. Desalination and water recycling in particular will help Britain break free from its reliance on rainfall, but none of these actions will do anything to solve the wet season’s flooding problem.

That’s why the UK should place more emphasis on nature-based solutions for its water woes, many of which can help bolster supply, protect homes from flooding and come with a litany of other benefits including carbon sequestration and enhanced biodiversity.

Take, for example, the reintroduction of beavers to East Anglia. Five years ago, the first pair of these once-native rodents in the region for 400 years were given free reign of a 10-acre woodland stream. The results of the pilot study showed that the beaver family, now numbering 11, reduced the impact of flooding and drought by constructing dams that store an estimated 3 million liters of water in ponds. By building increasingly bigger dams each time it rained, beavers ensure that storm water flows downstream more slowly, sometimes holding it back for several months. Releasing beavers into the wild in suitable areas could bring tremendous benefits — for little human legwork. Anglian Water has provided some funding for larger enclosures on the same East Anglian estate, opening the door for other companies to follow suit in their regions.

In the UK, degraded peat emits more CO2 than all its trees sequester. But rewetting bogs does more than reduce emissions — it can also reduce flooding downstream, make water supplies more resilient and improve water quality.

It seems like this is being embraced by at least some water companies. At the British Water Annual Conference in November, United Utilities announced that it’s planning to increase expenditure on nature-based solutions from £20 million ($25.3 million) for the 2020-2025 period to more than £500 million between 2025 and 2030.

For too long now, the UK water sector has been exploiting our natural resources, rather than working with the ecosystems they rely heavily on. Now is the time to change the narrative through action and investment and help improve our climate resilience. It might also take some the sting out of rising water bills.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.

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Zimbabwean president declares state of disaster due to drought

Emmerson Mnangagwa says country needs $2bn of aid as severe dry spell caused by El Niño afflicts southern Africa

Zimbabwe has declared a national disaster over a drought caused by the climate event known as El Niño and President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said the country needs $2bn in aid to help millions of people who are going hungry.

The severe dry spell is wreaking havoc across southern Africa .

“No Zimbabwean must succumb or die from hunger,” Mnangagwa told a press conference. “To that end, I do hereby declare a nationwide state of disaster, due to the El Niño-induced drought.”

Due to poor rains, more than 2.7 million people will not have enough food to put on the table this year, he warned. This season’s grain harvest was expected to bring in just over half of the cereals needed to feed the nation, he said.

The naturally occurring Niño climate pattern, which emerged in mid-2023, usually increases global temperatures for a year afterwards. It is currently fuelling fires and record heat across the world.

In southern Africa, Zimbabwe is the third country to declare drought a national disaster after Malawi and Zambia. The measure allows the government to access more resources to address the crisis.

The drought has also affected electricity production as Zimbabwe is highly reliant on hydroelectric power.

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the latest El Niño is one of the five strongest on record and its impact will continue by fuelling heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.

El Niño reached a peak in December, but should still result in above-normal temperatures until May over almost all land areas, the WMO said.

Major food growing areas in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe received only 80% of average rainfall during the mid-November-to-February southern hemisphere summer, the Food and Agriculture Organization said, stressing an increased risk of food insecurity.

Rainfall in January and February was the lowest in 40 years, according to the UN.

Zimbabwe’s UN resident coordinator, Edward Kallon, said efforts were under way to mobilise resources and finalise a response plan. “This crisis has far-reaching consequences across various sectors,” Kallon said.

The drought has driven many people to use unsafe water sources, fuelling cholera outbreaks already afflicting several southern African countries, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

El Niño is also forecast to bring heavy rains and flooding in the coming months, heightening the risk of malaria and other diseases.

Meanwhile, unable to source grain from traditional suppliers in Zambia and Malawi, Zimbabwean millers have been importing genetically modified maize from South Africa.

But climate and agriculture expert Tafadzwa Mabhaudhi, of South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the country also had limited surplus to export to its neighbours.

“Importing maize also means food price increases, which will impact the food security of poor people, who were already struggling to afford healthy diets,” he told AFP.

Last month, small-scale Zimbabwean farmers in affected areas told AFP they were already struggling to to feed their families, after their crops failed and food prices skyrocketed.

• El Niño southern oscillation

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