D-Risk2: Multi-scale management of irrigation abstraction and drought risks in UK

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Droughts highlight the important risks faced by irrigators in not only having access to sufficient volumes of water available through their licence but also to the reliability of their licensed water due to imposition of voluntary and/or mandatory restrictions during droughts. Whilst NE/N017471/1 developed the D-Risk webtool (www.d-risk.eu) to understand the risks of having insufficient licensed water during drought, it did not address an additional important aspect which is the reliability of that access to water for abstraction either due to voluntary or mandatory (Section 57; Hands Off Flow) restrictions. Abstraction reforms being proposed by the government need to be supported by clear evidence-based assessments of the need for water and the reliability of access to water resources, particularly during droughts when the responses to irrigation and environmental risks and economic consequences are highest. However, there are no tools available to support Environment Agency staff and Natural England catchment sensitive farming officers in using a catchment-based approach in dialogues regarding agricultural water needs, and for irrigated farming businesses to objectively assess their abstraction reliability due to restrictions during drought events.This proposal will provide significant added-value to NE/N017471/1 by using newly developed methods for assessing abstraction reliability developed through integration of agricultural and hydrological research within NE/L010186/1 and NE/L010208. In response to an identified need from our national and regional project partners, this project will develop an enhanced version of the D-Risk decision support webtool (D-Risk2) with added functionality to evaluate the joint risks of abstraction restrictions (voluntary and mandatory) and insufficient irrigation volumes during drought events, and provide support to inform longer-term strategic options for reconciling drought risk with water availability at catchment to business scales. The D-Risk2 tool will support decision-making regarding the future opportunities for water trading, licence reductions and the need for and scale of on-farm resource investment (e.g. high flow winter storage reservoirs). This KE proposal therefore sets out to develop a new tool (D-Risk2) which will:- Enable the EA to better understand the national spatio-temporal risks of excessive low flows that trigger voluntary and/or mandatory abstraction restrictions;- Provide the EA and NE staff with a publically-available tool to assess the irrigation supply-need balances and reliability at a local-scale to support Catchment-based Approach (CaBA) discussions with water abstractor groups and irrigators to improve collective management and use of catchment water resources, thereby improving transparency and trust, particularly in water-stressed catchments where irrigation demand is concentrated;- Provide water abstractor groups within a tool to help them identify opportunities for water trading to increase high-value food production and maximise the economic benefits of irrigation, and;- Enable individual farm enterprises to critically evaluate their business plans and irrigation infrastructural investments to achieve acceptable future levels of drought and water resources.The project involves a small but integrated team involving the EA, Natural England, UK Irrigation Association, NFU and ESWAG, a water abstractors group with 80 farm businesses.