In this video, we're fortunate to have with us Professor Clive Agnew. Clive is our Vice President of Teaching, Learning and Students here at the University of Manchester and is also a Professor of Physical Geography. He was formerly head of the School of Environment and Development and the head of Geography. His research is around applied climatology. So welcome, thanks for joining us Clive. So Clive, could you tell us a little bit bout the research you do here at the University of Manchester. >> I started off working on areas of water shortages and drought particular in areas of sub Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but more recently I've been working on impacts of climatic change in the uplands of England, but also looking at how we can manage water resources in urban areas in developing countries. >> So Clive, I'd like to ask you first what are the main threats from climatic change to the UK? >> Primarily these are presented in terms of precipitation changes, mainly wetter winters and drier summers, and associated changes in temperatures. But in actual fact, the impacts of those in the hydrological cycle can be presented in terms of increased flooding events and increased drought. There is also associated changes in terms of water degradation as well. >> So the threads first in the UK, are this the same that we see in other parts of the world. >> I think in terms of extreme events, not the same presentation, but I think what you need to remember is that in the U.K., 6% of of consumption is through household consumption. In the rest of the world, we look to agriculture where 7-8% of the water consumption is through agriculture. So in actual fact, the impacts are going to be very different in different parts of the world. >> And that's because of the different ways that people are using water there? >> Exactly. And also there are many opportunitive recycling in terms of household water use. In, agricultural use, quite often, the water is exported as virtual water, so it leaves the immediate environment. >> Clyde, what I read about your research, one of the main challenges that will face U.K. policy makers in dealing with climate change in the water sector, will be the issue of uncertainty. Is that true? >> It is true there is a reasonable consensus around predictions of climate change in the U.K. There is still problems with temporal uncertainty going to the future, making predictions about what will happen in the future. And also around spatial, i.e. the actual scale of those predictions. But the more fundamental problem is that we have a focus on temperature. For water resources, we really need to focus on precipitation and evaporation. And it's evaporation, which is probably the most challenging of these where it's actually found, we found it quite difficult in fact to predict what will happen in the future. >> So there is uncertainty around the evaporation part of the predictions. >> Yes, and it's absolutely critical because the way in which heat stress can be mitigated is related to green structures, and therefore evaporation. But also if you start dealing with the effects on vegetation and crops, again, evaporation is the key factor that can be mitigated by irrigation, but without irrigation, one can expect to be have high heat stress. >> So what policy approaches do we have in the U.K. at the moment, and are they the same as in other parts of the world? >> Well across the world, there are a number of policies which are emerging which are fairly common. Clearly infrastructure improvement plays a large role. A greater emphasis upon integrated water resource management pollution control, water conservation and recycling and sometimes even moving from a non traditional resources to desalination. And we can all of these manifest in different ways in the U.K.. The challenge in the U.K. is that in fact since privatization in 1989, we have a, a variety of different institutions that have a role to play within climate change responses and certainly the 2 terms of adaptation and mitigation are to the fore. And it may be interesting to discuss further what the roles of adaptation are within the U.K. context. >> Mm-hm. Because there is work. I mean, there's various policy from the government body such as the Department for the Environment and so on and on litigation. But adaptation is a, is a more diffuse issue. But, isn't it. It does involve more stakeholders in making it work. >> Well the thing is you're right, I think the issue about stakeholder engagement is actually at the forefront of that discussion. Quite often, we are looking for tools which can help us change behavior. And they can range from economic tools through to tools through social learning and other mechanisms. But this move if you like from environmental sustainability and environmental engineering through to stake of engagement really embraces the whole realm of adaptation. >> Mm-hm. Is there anyway, is the U.K. doing it well or is anywhere else in the world doing stake holder engagement well around this issue? >> [LAUGH] That's not, interesting. I've come across a number of different examples. >> Okay. >> Most recently, South Africa has been very challenged in terms of having stakeholder engagement, it's enshrined in their water policies. But in practice, what they are sort of finding is the asymmetries of power make it very difficult for all stakeholders to be treated equally. But I have seen examples from New Zealand, from Bangladesh where in fact state held engagement seems to be very much to the fore. One of the ancient developments in this is, removes us from what might be called the, the public education model, where the science, the experts pass down the ideas and, and the strategies, through towards a co-production model, where stake holders will engage to the forefront of the developing the strategies. And those are quite 2 extremes, which the UK's trying to develop, but I think it's still being quite a challenge. >> Mm-hm. So Clive, the issues you've just mentioned there, a lot of those are kind of supply side tools, as it were, what about the demand side of things? >> Well, that's right. Additionally, we have emphasized tackling problems of water shortage problems through enhancing supply. I think increased in the last couple of decades, there are a variety of tools around the area of demand management and these include both economic tools, also human behavioral tools, but also technology as well can actually help in reducing consumption and reducing demand. In the U.K., one of the obstacles is that by and large, we don't have a meter population. We don't have water meters. So we actually are charged on water use by the size and value of our property which is very good for revenue collection, but actually makes it much more difficult to use pricing to control the demand. >> Yeah. I'll say a little bit of that in the next week videos when I took about the history of the U.K. and it's developing past, and the link to property tax and so on. But it is quite challenging when you're not linking to, you know, water usage or number of people in the household. I mean, how, how much control do you have over demand management with, in the absence of, of the metering and the link to volumetric knowledge really? >> There is a debate about the use of economic tools to control demand and there are questions about the elasticity of demand for water, which I'm sure we'll cover in other parts in this course. Therefore, there has to be other approaches as well than simply using pricing tools. In addition, the problem in the U.K. is because of the lack of metering. We have a system whereby it's very effective for revenue generation, but it's very difficult then to translate people's consumption to people's behavior. >> And I understand that there are national plans from recent legislation on this issue. Is that right? >> That's right. If I recall, the, the Collective Change Act of 2008 created national action plans where there's an emphasis upon, an emphasis upon efficiency gains, also on stakeholder engagements and disseminating information and providing advice alongside the Committee on Climatic Change. It's interesting to note that the water utilities are currently going through a pricing regulation discussion with Ofwat, the regulator for 2014 to 15 which in theory, could actually include cost to combat climate change. But in looking at the current debates, although it's in the background, it's much more about environmental enhancement rather than I can find specifically and tackling climatic change per se. >> And is that since the privatization in England and Wales in 1989, has that always been the case that sort of, I mean I guess climate change has only emerged more recently as an issue. But you know, was it dealt with previously and is, is now on the back burner, or is it just, you know, has it been a kind of in the background the whole time? >> What I would say is that the necessary improvements in the environment, in the environment and in, in the use of the water environment hasn't been embedded since 1989. What we've seen is the imperative climatic change coming for, sometimes manifest more in terms of mitigation and energy costs than, than actually water resource consumption of water we go stress. But that, its there in the back on it seems to be, but I couldn't actually find it being carefully and very overtly stated. >> And so, what is the role of the U.K. water utility in all of this. Well, I think it's, it's worth remembering, that of course, the pressures on the utilities are, are not coming solely from climatic change. We are having increased demand for water through household composition changes, also increasing amount of households being constructed and of course, utilities have to respond to those demands of both supplying water and dealing with this annotation. So climactic change in the sense puts challenges on top of what is already happening in terms of changes in the amounts of water supply and management of the water environment. >> So are there parts of the world where the [INAUDIBLE] the water system is integrated into the planning for all the, you know, demographic changes, housing changes and so on? >> The objective is to have integrated water management in many parts of the world. Whether that's truly achieved is questionable and the reason I'd suggest it is a challenge is quite often, the idea of integrated water management tends to be couched in either environmental and sometimes economic terms. Really what needs to happen is involve both communities and social objectives alongside the economical and environmental and very rarely, do you get that full integration across the full watershed. >> So it's coming back to the, the issues around stakeholder engagement that we talked about as well. >> I think the challenges with climatic change and water resource management today are as much about environment as about the stakehold in community engagement. And I think where we are learning slowly how to deal with this is much more how we get that engagement with people in communities. >> And so what is the public perception about climate change in the U.K. at the moment, would you say? >> The inter-political panel on climate change has been quite clear. In 2013, that the evidence of greenhouse warming and effect on climate and then on water resources, in equivocal. But still, I think, there is a polarization of views, where some people do not fully believe that this is the case even though the signs I would say, is quite clear. So its much more about the impacts and whether we need to take the impact seriously, whether in fact water resource problems through climatic changes are the most pressing problems facing the U.K. and to some extent, whether the people are actually willing therefore to pay for the solutions that are being promoted. >> And so is water pricing then a tool that we can use to address climate change adaptation or mitigation issues? I am not totally convinced it is for a couple of reasons. I think first of all, we don't have the infrastructure in place. But let's assume we did have the infrastructure it's still basically you want to change people's behavior. And the evidence is there's only certain groups of the population that are likely to change the behavior. The very poor with few assets are unable to and others are probably likely to be as pass the cost on to as well. So we're actually looking at a particular group, the middle classes if you like, where this is going to have a impact. And whether that will have a significant impact on the sustained period of time, is again questionable. So, I think the jury's out as to whether water truly has an elasticity of demand for that population. >> Mm-hm, and so, and we, we've heard a little bit about this week as well about an American experiment on this,. >> Mm-hm. >> On a, on a social treatment. Is there anywhere in the world where water price you know, is a good way to address climate change issues? >> I think one of the examples coming out of the Mediterranean, was where people were very opposed to water pricing as a matter of principle, when asked how much they were paying for water, couldn't actually articulate that. So I think people are against water pricing. But I think the, the real challenge is explaining where the money is going to and, and without hypothecation, the fear is of course this money is going into either the exchequer or into the privatized company and it's not actually benefiting those who are actually contributing and to the, to the cost. >> Mm-hm, and in the U.K. of course, we've, we've had that kind of, since privatization in 1989, we've had a, a history of price rises above inflation anyway, to address previous under investment and the environmental obligations that you talked about. So you know, it's not as if people are facing perhaps price increase for climate change against a flat level, it's a continuation of a trend,and they may question you know why is the water bills constantly going up. >> And I think, I think that is a good question and a good challenge to make, but I think also to be balanced, we can see vast improvements in the environment in the U.K. well even in Wales since privatization in 1989 in terms of water quality in particular. So there have definitely been benefits it seems to me in terms of that investment but of course, the question always is who pays and at what appropriate level. >> Yeah, whether the benefits will be sustainable with you know, climate changes and additional factor as well perhaps. >> My, my, my personal view is that we need to be able to adapt to extremes and that can be down through technology and through investments which will cost but I think there are also opportunities to increase people's resilience annotation through other mechanisms. And I'd like to see to a balanced approached which actually emphasized the way in which communities can work to combat climate change, as along side the more technological engineering approaches. I think it's interesting that London is building desalination plant along with other large cities around the world such as Barcelona and Sydney. And I'm not saying they're doing that for climatic change purposes, but it's basically in response to an increasing demand, and climate change does forecast an increased demand through weather extremes. >> So we've mentioned a few times about water shortages as part of the climate change issue. What about flooding as well? We've had that recently in the UK, and we've had, you know, seen quite severe floods around the world in recent years. What do we do to deal with flooding? >> Well, this is interesting that in 2012, in fact, in the U.K., the media was, was focusing upon drought. In 2014, the media is focusing upon flooding. And you're quite right, that both extremes of climate change need to be taken into account. The curiosity about this year, 2014 is that, I always said that the focus has changed much more from pluvial flooding, which is flooding coming from the channel itself, and, and basically water arriving too quickly to much more overwhelming urban drainage. And so we get into this idea of what's called pluvial flooding. And pluvial flooding is really quite a challenge because it can occur anywhere, but it is more likely to occur where there is underinvestment in urban areas and particularly in the poorer areas. What happened this year is we just had so much water. So in one sense, [LAUGH] we moved the debate away from this idea of pluvial and stand alone drainage issues to what's good old fashioned too much water arriving in large volumes which is what we've experiencedthis year. >> So Clive, we have a very U.K. and very climate change focused discussion, what do you think beyond the U.K. .and beyond climate change are other main issues for the water fundamental. >> I think if we look beyond the U.K. issues one of the issues that one has to grapple with is the growth in agricultural demand, particularly for meat products and the higher water requirements through livestock production which is still stimulating the growth in irrigation and, and associated with that dam construction, but also the growth of mega cities. What we can see basically is that the growth, growth of cities particularly in developing countries is some much more rapid than appeared 100 years ago. So the rate of increase is greater and within that the inequalities and the urban poverty is also greater. And so I think alongside the impacts of climate change, we're having to deal with the megacity demand for water and the growing irrigation and agriculture demand for water. >> Clive, you mentioned several times a community and stakeholders engagement. What are the chances around doing that well. >> I think, the issues really perhaps asymmetries of power, that stakeholder groups don't all have the same knowledge base nor the same resources and tend to operate either through what one might call a co-production model, where they're working with NGOs and other institutions, or they might be working through collective action through engagement with other similar groups in the community. And really what you need to do is have both groups working effective together but then also, they have to be welcomed and engaged with, by the institutions who are managing water. So it's not simply a case of engaging in a consultation. I think they actually have to be there in the decision making, and it's the latter which is the most difficult to actually accept because we still basically manage water through a top down expert driven model. I think not everybody is really prepared, for co-production. [BLANK_AUDIO]
