The dry conditions started in late February this year in Andover, Hampshire.
It continued for days, then weeks, then months until it became a drought – an increasingly common feature of British weather.
By July, with river levels dangerously low, the charity WildFish complained to Southern Water about it draining the River Test to meet water demand, citing “devastating effect on the river and its ecology”.
The river in question is one of 200 remaining chalk streams in the world – unique natural ecosystems fed by underground chalk aquifers and springs, flowing across flinty gravel beds, providing the perfect conditions for wildlife. These rivers should be teeming with life and yet the majority are in dangerously poor condition – polluted, drained and under increasing stress of climate change; the Environment Agency found that a mere 14% are in a healthy condition.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Over the past few months Andover residents noticed large water tankers coming into the area, filling up from standpipes and driving away.They were filling up continuously, around 30 a day, morning, noon and night; extracting around a million litres of water from a county who’d banned residents from using garden hoses. Some of the residents followed the tankers and discovered the water was being transported eight miles away to Conholt Park – a country estate recently acquired by Stephen Schwarzman – to fill a lake.
Schwarzman, the US-based founder of Blackstone Investment, sat at the right hand of the Prime Minister at the recent Windsor Castle banquet for Donald Trump, has a net worth of around $30bn and is spending around £80m developing a shooting estate. Clearly, he values the aesthetic value of water, as well as the habitat and fresh water source necessary for ducks, geese, and other birds to thrive – right up to the point where they’re shot out of the sky.
News reports were dampened down because extracting millions of litres a day from a drought area, draining an ecologically significant chalk stream on life support, is apparently… perfectly legal. As Blackstone put out in their legal ‘warning shot’ letter: “water has been sourced through licensed providers responsible for the lawful and proper extraction and delivery. “Any suggestion the owners violated local water regulations would be false and misleading.”
So there you have it: perfectly legal.
I would be putting myself in personal peril to say otherwise. But can I say that it’s egregiously immoral, outrageously unjust, and heinously iniquitous?
Despite the fact that it has now been banned (for the time being) by Southern Water, the real issue at stake is: how on earth could this ever be construed to be lawful? Can private payments to water companies be justified if they threaten water security for the public? And given the inevitable increasing stresses on water (whether too much, too little, or just in the wrong places) why aren’t we fundamentally rewriting the laws?
While there are many ecological and technological solutions for climate adaptation (see previous EDP columns by Rupert Read for more on what’s needed) we should be talking more about the social and legal interventions to prevent anyone acting at the expense of everyone else. If this is how those exploiting power commandeer resources when they want a shooting estate lake, how do you think it will look when they are responding to real climate stress? The floods in Florida paint a picture of maladaptation, with owners of gated mansion residences building walls higher to divert the floodwaters into low-lying, less affluent neighbourhoods, causing storm drains to overflow with effluent literally in the streets.
Without legal changes, we are not immune to the draining of the recovering chalk streams of East Anglia; perhaps one of the tech giants might turn the Norfolk Broads into the Norfolk Narrows to provide the water for a mega-datacentre. And as climate-induced extreme weather events grow in severity and frequency, we may see powerful forces increasingly using legal means to protect themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Beyond technical solutions, we need to talk about the principles of justice in climate adaptation. Many of the laws, rules and regulations we have today were not drafted for climate-stressed conditions – how could they have been? We’ve not experienced these conditions or challenges before in human history, so we need to talk about what needs to change.
Otherwise, we might wake up to find that when our taps run dry, we won’t have a legal leg to stand on.
*Water tanker image from Rye News
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