Climate change adaptation

It is anticipated that climate change will result in generally wetter winters and drier summers in north west England, with extreme weather events becoming more frequent and severe.

These changes will impact on our water source yields, with average estimates showing a reduction in availability of over 31 million litres a day by 2035 in our region (current daily water supply is just under 2000 million litres a day). Our draft water resources management plan sets out how we will manage water supply and demand to respond to the challenges of climate change. Reducing the amount of water we need to treat and put into supply contributes to our plans to reduce carbon emissions through lowering energy needs. It also helps make our water supplies more resilient to these wider variations in weather patterns.

Being flexible in the way we can move water around our region will also make our supply systems more robust in the event of climate change. We are constructing a new and substantial water pipeline, known as the West-East link, between Merseyside and North Manchester,  to improve this flexibility. This will be operational in 2012.

Climate change impacts are likely to increase the number and intensity of flooding occurrences. We have been heavily involved with the government’s Pitt Review team and other bodies working on assessing and reporting on the flooding from summer 2007. This work, and our completion of one of Defra's Integrated Urban Drainage Pilot projects, has enabled us to define a proposal to Defra on how to fundamentally reform the way in which surface water is managed in this country. This proposal has been the basis of our response to their consultation on improving surface water drainage.

This has all been supported by major steps forward in the way we model surface water flows and our ability to develop maps that identify and quantify flood risk across the entire region. We have also identified the river flood risk to our main assets and are developing plans to resolve and manage this risk. We aim to address areas of highest priority in our next investment cycle starting in 2010.

We are in the process of drafting our policy on 'adapting wastewater assets to the impacts of climate change', as set out in our 25-year strategic direction statement. This will outline our approach to how, when and if we adapt our assets as well as encouraging others to play their full part.