Creating resilient river systems: Reimagining water resource management in the UK

Highlights:

• Opportunity to undertake applied research with real-world and national policy relevance.
• Access to two research faculties, with links to industry, environmental regulators and consultancies.
• Attend international conferences in Europe, the US and elsewhere.
• Opportunities for career development (academia, internships, industry and beyond) and extensive training.

Rationale:

Global water resources are increasingly being stressed as human demand for water increases, while climate change is expected to intensify the global hydrological cycle, leading to increased risk of flood and droughts and increased water scarcity (Watts et al., 2015).  Within the UK, it is predicted that summer flows will generally decrease in the future, leading to prolonged drought conditions while winter floods will become larger and more frequent (Kay et al., 2021).  Regional differences in water resources are also expected, with western areas of the UK predicted to experience larger, more frequent floods (Lane et al., 2022) and eastern and southern areas experiencing greater and more severe droughts (Parry et al., 2024).  This spatial and temporal variation in future water resources makes it difficult for water managers to plan and adapt to changing water availability as required for the provision of resilient water supplies.

Recently, The UK government and water managers have begun to consider alternative options for reallocating water (Environment Agency, 2020).  Inter-basin transfers, increased offline (reservoir) storage, desalination, water trading and revision of current water licences have all been proposed as potential solutions to addressing increasing water scarcity.  Dramatic re-structuring of water resources as have been proposed provides the unique opportunity to explore whole system or network (e.g. whole or multi catchment) management, rather than site or location (e.g. a single river or reservoir) operation (Opperman et al., 2019).  Application of concepts including ‘designer flows’ (Horne et al., 2017), ‘land sparing vs land sharing’ (Phalan et al., 2011) and multi-objective flow optimisation (Hall et al., 2020) which seek to meet human water needs in tandem with conservation and environmental requirements, provide the ability to explore trade-offs between management objectives in the context of future plans and scenarios, allowing balanced and risk-aware water management options to be investigated.  However application of these tools are dependent upon the accurate estimation of current and future resource availability and effective hydrological modelling.

Figure 1: The project will explore how climate change will impact water resources in the UK and contribute to creating sustainable management and policies for resilient water ecosystems.

Project aims

A key focus of the project will be on modelling water resource availability under current, future and alternative resource allocation scenarios in representative catchments.  Consideration of multi-objective optimisation to account for competing uses (e.g. hydropower and industrial use, public water supply, environmental needs etc) will be explored, to determine optimal management strategies.  The project will also explore the use of spatial statistical network (SSN) methods (Isaak et al., 2014) to assist water managers in identifying priority locations or reaches within a wider network or system which may be of greater or lesser importance (in terms of ecological or management priorities).  This approach would allow management schemes which support or utilise resources according to these priorities to be developed.  Such a fundamental shift in resource management away from site or location-specific objectives to system or network-wide management has the potential to meet the needs for multiple water uses and ensure that the UK is able to design a resilient water management system even with decreasing water availability due to climate change and water demand pressures.

Training

The successful applicant will benefit from being part of two large and vibrant research environments (School of Geography and School of Civil Engineering) as well as water@leeds- one of the largest interdisciplinary centres for water research in any university in the world.  The candidate will develop a range of technical skills, including hydrological and water resource modelling (e.g. SWAT, HBV-light), coding (Python, R, Matlab), GIS and statistical analysis, data presentation, and academic writing skills. While fieldwork is not a core part of this project, it is anticipated that some field work may be useful to help ground-truth the model predictions. The candidate will have access to a generous training and research budget in addition to the numerous training and development course that are run within the YES-DTN and the University of Leeds to support PGR students, including statistics training (e.g. R, SPSS), academic writing skills, grant writing etc. (http://www.emeskillstraining.leeds.ac.uk/). Supervision will involve regular meetings between supervisors and further support of a wider research group.

Student profile

The student should have a keen interest in environmental issues with a strong background in a physical geography, earth sciences, environmental sciences, ecology or related discipline. Strong modelling, GIS/remote sensing/statistical/fieldwork and survey skills are desirable but not essential, as training will be provided during the PhD.  Please get in touch with Megan Klaar (m.j.klaar@leeds.ac.uk) for any informal queries.

 

Relevant publications by the supervisory team:

Hashemi S, Carrivick J, Klaar M. 2024. Hydromorphological response of heavily modified rivers to flood releases from reservoirs: A case study of the Spöl River, Switzerland. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 49: 1028-1046

Klaar MJ, Carver S, Kay P. 2020. Land management in a post-Brexit UK: An opportunity for integrated catchment management to deliver multiple benefits?. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water. 7

Maia AG, Camargo-Valero MA, Trigg MA, Khan A.2024.Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis in Reservoir Modeling: a Monte Carlo Simulation Approach.Water Resources Management 38: 2835-285038

Masafu C, Williams R, Shi X, Yuan Q, Trigg M. 2022. Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle (UAV) image velocimetry for validation of two-dimensional hydraulic model simulations. Journal of Hydrology. 612. Part C

Wang H, Liu J, Klaar M, Chen A, Gudmundsson L, Holden J. 2024. Anthropogenic climate change has influenced global river flow seasonality. Science 383: 1009-1014

 References:

Environment Agency 2020 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/meeting-our-future-water-needs-a-national-framework-for-water-resources

Hall et al., J. 2020. Risk-based water resources planning in practice: a blueprint for the water industry in England.  Water and Environment Journal 34: 441-454

Horne et al, 2017.  Using optimization to develop a “designer” environmental flow regime.  Environmental Modelling & Software 88: 188-199.

Isaak et al., 2014.  Applications of spatial statistical network models to stream data.  WIREs Water doi: 10.1002/wat2.1023

Kay et al., 2021.  Climate change effects on indicators of high and low river flow across Great Britain.  Advances in Water Resources 151: 103909

Hall et al., J. 2020. Risk-based water resources planning in practice: a blueprint for the water industry in England.  Water and Environment Journal 34: 441-454

Lane et al., 2022. A large-sample investigation into uncertain climate change impacts on high flows across Great Britain.  HESS 26: 5535-5554

Opperman et al., 2019.  Securing Environmental Flows Through System Reoperation and Management: Lessons From Case Studies of Implementation.  Frontiers in Environmental Sciences 7: 00104

Parry et al., 2024. Divergent future drought projections in UK river flows and groundwater levels. HESS 28: 417-440

Phalan et al., 2011. Reconciling Food Production and Biodiversity Conservation: Land Sharing and Land Sparing Compared.  Science 33: 6047

Watts et al., 2015.  Climate change and water in the UK – past changes and future prospects.  Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 39.