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In the papers collected in Man's Impact on the Hydrological Cycle in the United Kingdom Hollis gives us a fascinating view of the concerns and approaches of practising hydrologists in the late 1970s. Hollis, a physical geographer from University College London, spent most of his research career considering the way that humans acted to change their surroundings, looking first at the impact of urbanisation on flooding and later at the management of wetlands. The papers in this book cover a wide range of subjects, from the impact of forestry to the effects of house building on channel morphology and function. Many provide valuable reviews and insights into contemporary thinking on the effect of humans on the UK environment, and the modern reader will discover much of value in the ideas and approaches described in this book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the implications of climate change for the water environment and its management in England. There is a large literature, but most studies have looked at flow volumes or nutrients and none have considered explicitly the implications of climate change for the delivery of water management objectives. Studies have been undertaken in a small number of locations. Studies have used observations from the past to infer future changes, and have used numerical simulation models with climate change scenarios. The literature indicates that climate change poses risks to the delivery of water management objectives, but that these risks depend on local catchment and water body conditions. Climate change affects the status of water bodies, and it affects the effectiveness of measures to manage the water environment and meet policy objectives. The future impact of climate change on the water environment and its management is uncertain. Impacts are dependent on changes in the duration of dry spells and frequency of ‘flushing’ events, which are highly uncertain and not included in current climate scenarios. There is a good qualitative understanding of ways in which systems may change, but interactions between components of the water environment are poorly understood. Predictive models are only available for some components, and model parametric and structural uncertainty has not been evaluated. The impacts of climate change depend on other pressures on the water environment in a catchment, and also on the management interventions that are undertaken to achieve water management objectives. The paper has also developed a series of consistent conceptual models describing the implications of climate change for pressures on the water environment, based around the source-pathway-receptor concept. They provide a framework for a systematic assessment across catchments and pressures of the implications of climate change for the water environment and its management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is expected to modify rainfall, temperature and catchment hydrological responses across the world, and adapting to these water-related changes is a pressing challenge. This paper reviews the impact of anthropogenic climate change on water in the UK and looks at projections of future change. The natural variability of the UK climate makes change hard to detect; only historical increases in air temperature can be attributed to anthropogenic climate forcing, but over the last 50 years more winter rainfall has been falling in intense events. Future changes in rainfall and evapotranspiration could lead to changed flow regimes and impacts on water quality, aquatic ecosystems and water availability. Summer flows may decrease on average, but floods may become larger and more frequent. River and lake water quality may decline as a result of higher water temperatures, lower river flows and increased algal blooms in summer, and because of higher flows in the winter. In communicating this important work, researchers should pay particular attention to explaining confidence and uncertainty clearly. Much of the relevant research is either global or highly localized: decision-makers would benefit from more studies that address water and climate change at a spatial and temporal scale appropriate for the decisions they make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a burgeoning international literature on hydro-climatic trend detection, motivated by the need to detect and interpret any emerging changes in river flows associated with anthropogenic climate change. The UK has a particularly strong evidence base in this area thanks to a well-developed monitoring programme and a wealth of studies published over the last 20 years. This paper reviews this research, with a view to assessing the evidence for climate change influences on UK river flow, including floods and droughts. This assessment is of international relevance given the scale of the research effort in the UK, a densely monitored and data-rich environment, but one with significant human disturbances to river flow regimes, as in many parts of the world. The review finds that changes can be detected in river flow regimes, some of which agree with future change projections, while others are in apparent contradiction. Observed changes generally cannot be attributed to climate change, largely due to the fact that river flow records are limited in length and the identification of short-term trends is confounded by natural variability. A UK ‘Benchmark’ network of near-natural catchments is an internationally significant example of an initiative to enable climate variability to be discerned from direct human disturbances (e.g. abstractions, dam construction). Generally, however, the problem of attribution has been tackled rather indirectly in the UK, as elsewhere, and more efforts are required to attribute change in a more rigorous manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

River basins in Great Britain and Ireland have been characterized by periods of hillslope and valley floor instability during the Holocene, reflecting sensitivity to both climate change and anthropogenic disturbance. In contrast to climatic controls, which have been relatively well documented, human impacts on and interactions with river basins remain unclear. There is now, however, a growing impetus to elucidate more fully the impact of anthropogenic activity on sediment supply and runoff, given that land-use change is thought to have exacerbated recent flooding in the UK (eg, the 'Millennium' floods of 2000). The aim of this paper is to critically review the significance of Holocene land use on hillslope and valley floor stability in Great Britain and Ireland. The most widely reported impacts of land-use change on geomorphic activity include hillslope erosion and gully development, valley floor alluviation, river channel incision and elevated water tables. In the majority of cases, however, causal relationships are difficult to establish, due primarily to inadequate dating control. Even where geomorphic instability can be linked to land-use change, it is apparent that eroded material is often stored as colluvium, which together with evidence of diachronus hillslope and valley floor instability, raises important questions and identifies uncertainties regarding the dynamics and extent of sediment transfer within river basins. Such uncertainty has important implications for understanding how river basins will behave in response to future environmental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the views of Ronald Peel on the nature of desert geomorphology in Great Britain. Explanation about the questions of the climatic history of the present arid zone; Evidences for more humid conditions; Difficulty in quantifying the degree of climate change.

We examine the evidence for climate-change impacts on groundwater levels provided by studies of the historical observational record, and future climate-change impact modelling. To date no evidence has been found for systematic changes in groundwater drought frequency or intensity in the UK, but some evidence of multi-annual to decadal coherence of groundwater levels and large-scale climate indices has been found, which should be considered when trying to identify any trends. We analyse trends in long groundwater level time-series monitored in seven observation boreholes in the Chalk aquifer, and identify statistically significant declines at four of these sites, but do not attempt to attribute these to a change in a stimulus. The evidence for the impacts of future climate change on UK groundwater recharge and levels is limited. The number of studies that have been undertaken is small and different approaches have been adopted to quantify impacts. Furthermore, these studies have generally focused on relatively small regions and reported local findings. Consequently, it has been difficult to compare them between locations. We undertake some additional analysis of the probabilistic outputs of the one recent impact study that has produced coherent multi-site projections of changes in groundwater levels. These results suggest reductions in annual and average summer levels, and increases in average winter levels, by the 2050s under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, at most of the sites modelled, when expressed by the median of the ensemble of simulations. It is concluded, however, that local hydrogeological conditions can be an important control on the simulated response to a future climate projection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science journalists in the UK face a number of significant challenges, some shared by journalists in general and some specific to the reporting of science. The world of journalism is changing rapidly as online media grow, squeezing resources and putting pressure on journalists to produce maximum output on minimum resources. The effect is to threaten to shift the role of science news production away from science journalists to public relations (PR) professionals, and to reduce the essential democratic role of the journalist holding the spenders of public money to account. Evidence for this is offered from recent research into the state of science journalism in the UK, and from a BBC-commissioned report into the impartiality of new science coverage in the UK by the state broadcaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]