Anglian Water sees record demand in East during heatwave
England was under an amber heat health weather warning last week and temperatures widely topped 30C (86F).Suffolk became the first county in the UK to officially enter a heatwave, after temperatures surpassed 27C (81F) for a third consecutive day.Last month Anglian Water confirmed it had "no plans" to enforce a hosepipe ban across the East of England. However, with an increase in demand the company urged people to "use a little less wherever they can, so we can meet the demand and keep taps running for everyone".
The BBC's lead weather presenter, Sarah Keith-Lucas, said with climate change, heatwaves in the UK could become the "new normal"."What would have been a 'hot' day 30 years ago, would now be considered pretty normal," she wrote.The average global temperature has risen by just over 1.1C (34F) since the pre-industrial era, which is enough to drive a large increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves.The Met Office said heatwaves were now 30 times more likely than before the industrial revolution, and were projected to potentially occur every other year by the 2050s.
Follow East of England news on X, Instagram and Facebook: BBC Beds, Herts & Bucks, BBC Cambridgeshire, BBC Essex, BBC Norfolk, BBC Northamptonshire or BBC Suffolk.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News
4 hours ago
- Sky News
Third heatwave within a month could hit parts of UK, Met Office says
A third heatwave could hit parts of the UK by mid-July, the Met Office has said. The second weekend of July could see increasing heat and humidity, and potentially the third heatwave within four weeks after two weekends of hot conditions for much of the country in the final weeks of June, which was the hottest on record across England. "Whilst it is difficult this far ahead to determine exactly how hot things could get next week and weekend, there is the potential that some parts of the country could reach heatwave criteria," Met Office meteorologist Zoe Hutin said. A location has to hit or exceed 25C in the west and north and 28C in London and surrounding counties for three consecutive days to qualify as a heatwave. 2:17 On 9 July, temperatures are expected to reach the high 20s in the south east and potentially the low 30s on 10 July, Ms Hutin said. The hot conditions would likely continue into the weekend due to an area of high pressure building from the west before stretching across the south and drawing in warm air from the Atlantic and Azores. "Most likely it will be the south and east that see prolonged heat and thus could have another heatwave, but it is too soon to say exactly how high temperatures could get," she added. 1:58 The meteorologist said temperatures this weekend and the start of next week will be lower than recent days, with "cloudier skies prevailing and bringing spells of rain at times, especially for western areas". Temperatures are forecast to reach 25C in the south east on Saturday, 24C on Sunday and 23C on Monday. "It will be drier overall in the east, though some drizzly outbreaks are still possible on Saturday, with showers on Sunday," Ms Hutin said. A yellow weather warning for rain issued by the Met Office is in place across parts of Argyll and Bute, in Scotland, the south Highlands, Mull and Skye until Saturday afternoon. These regions could see up to 60mm of rain and more than 100mm in mountain areas. The Environment Agency has issued flood alerts in Cumbria for the rivers Duddon, Crake and Mill Beck, and other watercourses following heavy rain on Friday. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency also issued six flood alerts in Argyll and Bute, Ayrshire and Arran, Easter Ross and Great Glen, Skye and Lochaber, west central Scotland and Wester Ross.
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘A war of the truth': Europe's heatwaves are failing to spur support for climate action
'It's just too much, isn't it?' says Julie, a retiree in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex, about the 42C (107.6F) heat that her brother had seen scorch Spain last week. The former local government worker has felt summers get hotter over her lifetime and says she 'couldn't stand' such high heat herself. But like many who experienced Europe's first heatwave of the summer, Julie does not sound overly alarmed. She worries about climate breakdown for young people, but is not concerned about herself. She thinks more climate action would be nice, but does not know what can be done about it. She does not have much faith in the government. 'It's like everything else,' she says. 'I think it's all too little, too late.' As heatwaves engulfed large swathes of Europe and North America last week – the latest in a stream of deadly extremes made worse by fossil fuel pollution – green groups are frustrated that increasingly violent weather has not spurred the urgent support for climate action they had expected. Governments across the rich world continue to roll back policies to stop the planet from heating, while far-right parties that deny climate science lash out at environment rules even as disasters unfold. Their voters, while rarely climate deniers themselves, seem to tolerate their energetic attacks on environmental policy, if not support them. The views of someone like Julie – who declined to reveal her voting preference – sounded similar to what was seen across the country, said Ed Hodgson, an analyst at the research group More in Common who has run focus groups on climate action. Polls taken over the second-last weekend of June show most people in the UK found the previous week of weather too hot, are worried it will get hotter, and hold the climate crisis at least partly responsible. But the nonprofit also found the share of people concerned about climate change has fallen over the past year, dipping from 68% to 60%. Support for the UK's target to hit net zero emissions by 2050 fell even further, plunging from 62% to 46%. 'The issue is really that there are so many other concerns now,' said Hodgson, citing the organisation's data tracking the top issues that people face each week. 'Three years ago you'd have the cost of living first, then the National Health Service, and then immigration and climate – those two would compete for third place. Now, when we do those polls, climate is near the bottom of the list.' The contradictions are visible in towns such as Stanford-le-Hope, where Julie lives, which is among the few already represented in parliament by the rightwing populist Reform UK. A YouGov poll last month found just over half of Reform voters wanted a heatwave in the coming weeks. The party, which has promised to scrap the net zero target and 'unlock Britain's vast oil and gas reserves', is projected to win eight of the 10 most flood-prone constituencies at the next general election, according to an analysis in May by the NGO Global Witness and Round Our Way, a campaign group. Far-right parties across mainland Europe have been even more vocal in using the heatwave to take aim at climate policy, even as blazing wildfires force thousands to flee their homes and doctors warn of widespread excess deaths. In Spain, where the current heatwave brought a record June temperature of 46C, the Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, mocked a government promise to regulate fear-based advertising by asking if they were also going to 'ban the propaganda of climate religion'. In Italy, which has limited outdoor work during the hottest parts of the day in most of the country, the Lega party MP Claudio Borghi said: 'Climate change has always existed, the causes are anything but clear, and the solutions are contrary to what … is correct.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Alice Weidel shared a social media post from a climate sceptic that compared the heat on Tuesday to slightly hotter temperatures on the same day in 1952, as the country was 'clearing away the rubble of war'. The post took a swipe at the World Economic Forum, the German public broadcaster and the Green party. The biggest political row over the heat erupted in France, where the National Rally figurehead, Marine Le Pen, called for a 'major' air conditioning plan – one week after the party failed in its parliamentary push to halt new wind and solar projects. In an opinion article in Le Figaro on Thursday, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, a conservative, called to stop support for renewable energy and expand France's nuclear energy sector. The proposal earned rebukes from the ecology minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who described it as 'petty politics' that would write Algeria a check for oil, and the former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who called it an 'incomprehensible' misstep. 'As we endure several days of an unprecedented heatwave, we are witnessing a troubling resurgence of anti-science scepticism,' he said. Some far-right parties have focused their attention on old-school climate denial, while others have moved from questioning the science to aggressively campaigning against solutions. 'I don't think the extreme heat is being weaponised, but the efforts to limit it certainly are,' said Ciarán Cuffe, a co-chair of the European Green party and former Irish environment minister. He added that Le Pen's call for more air conditioning – which he said should be one solution among many – may even represent a shift in strategy. 'It's a recognition that these heatwaves are happening, and that they are extreme.' The paradox is that far-right parties bashing green rules are polling well above 20% in several European countries, even though the share of people who deny climate science is typically in single digits. In the UK, pollsters find just 6% of Reform voters list environmental policy as a reason for voting for the party, according to More in Common. That said, the level of threat perception among their voters is much higher than in other parties, said Hodgson. 'They see threats around them and think we need a strong response. So it makes sense for politicians to campaign around those moments.' Climate campaigners have argued that the far right's success in dominating the climate narrative is weakening support for action and providing centrist parties cover to scrap green policies, even if it has failed to create a widespread backlash against green policy. 'The far right has a strategy but everyone else doesn't,' said Luisa Neubauer, a German activist from Fridays for Future, which staged its first night-time protest against climate inaction outside the German economy ministry on Wednesday, as a result of the high heat. Too many people in power or with platforms 'have not yet understood that we're in a war of language – and a war of the truth – about the climate', she added. 'And too few of us are actively standing in the way of that.'
The Independent
8 hours ago
- The Independent
Beavers and river restoration boost resilience to drought, conservationists say
Restoring rivers to a natural state and introducing beavers can help make landscapes resilient to the increasing risk of drought, conservationists said. The UK is facing increasing extremes such as drought and heavy downpours as the climate changes, with England weathering the driest spring for 132 years this year and two regions in the north of the country already in drought. But in the South West of England, after the region saw around half the average rainfall in spring, river restoration work maintained lush vegetation and wetlands at the National Trust's Holnicote estate on Exmoor, Somerset. The National Trust embarked on its 'riverlands' project on the estate in 2020, releasing beavers into two enclosures and working to restore the River Aller to a 'stage zero' state with multiple channels, pools and shallow riffles as it would have had before human interference. The approach has been pioneered in Oregon in the US, and the UK's first attempt at scale on a main river landscape involved diggers moving more than 4,000 tonnes of earth to fill the river channel and laying hundreds of logs within the floodplain. Thousands of wetland trees were planted and wildflower seeds sown to attract pollinators. The project to give the river space and connect to its floodplain, completed just two years ago, has created a new natural landscape from once neat agricultural fields, with channels, pools, wetlands and marshes. The wetlands are rich in plants, the young trees are starting to grow and meadows in the floodplain are full of wildflowers. The landscape – along with the nearby beaver wet woodland – slows down the flow of water and holds it in the landscape to reduce flooding and counteract drought, as well as reducing pollution and loss of sediment, the Trust said. The wetlands that have been created are habitat for water voles, as well as an array of birds, insects and fish including eels. Ben Eardley, senior project manager for the National Trust in Somerset, said curbing flooding was a big part of the reason for the project, with communities downstream at Allerford and Bossington suffering from floods in the past. 'But then increasingly, you can see the impacts of hotter dry weather which I think are equally important in addressing,' he said. While some restoration schemes only improve the river channel itself, the work at Holnicote makes the wider landscape more resilient, he suggested. Even after the dry spring, the beaver enclosures, where the animals have created pools, dams and woodland clearings, were still 'brim full' of water, while the restored river catchment stays wet year-round, Mr Eardley said. The denser vegetation acts like a blanket on the soil, holding moisture in and keeping the soil temperature more consistent, he added. 'It's a combination of different things that lead to more resilience. 'And it's not saying that you have to have all of those things everywhere, but if you've got more diverse landscape with a greater mosaic of different habitats. then just by default, you'll have greater resilience,' he said. Farmers and landowners are among those who visit the 'exemplar' river restoration project, which comes amid intense debate over competing uses of land in the UK – for food security, energy production, climate action and to help restore nature and natural processes that can benefit people. Mr Eardley argues that it does not have to be a binary choice between beavers or river restoration and agriculture, but land could be managed to provide both, with benefits for landscapes which are suffering more extreme weather throughout the year as the climate changes. 'You might need to sacrifice some small areas for beaver habitat or whatever. 'But then in that wider landscape you're going to have better, lusher grazing for longer, during those summer months, whereas before, everything would have burnt off,' he said. 'Because you've got higher groundwater levels, your soil and your vegetation are healthier.' Stewart Clarke, senior national freshwater consultant at the National Trust said: 'Water is at the forefront of climate change impacts including flooding and drought, and after a very dry first six months of the year and with many UK regions either in or on the cusp of being in drought conditions, looking after the lifeblood of our landscapes is absolutely vital.' He said that giving rivers more space could create 'nature-rich corridors' through towns and countryside, store water during floods and droughts and give rivers space to adapt to changing flows. The riverlands project is one of a number of schemes the trust had undertaken to 'future proof' rivers, he said, adding: 'The new stage 0 wetland, and the beaver wetlands which it resembles, have created important stores of water and carbon to help in the fight against climate change. 'Over the coming years we aim to create and restore hundreds of such wetlands both for these benefits to people and for the rich wildlife they can support.' And while the Holnicote beavers are currently in enclosures – though prone to escaping – following the Government's recent decision to allow licensed beaver releases into the wild in England, the National Trust is applying to be able to have wild beavers on the estate. Then the beavers could link up with the stage 0 river landscape, and ultimately take over its management in their role as ecosystem engineers.
