Setting the Scene

A poorly fitting blazer. A textbook of infinite boredom. A hastily drawn scribble and definition of an oxbow lake. Reeling off case studies like you do it all day. Boasting to your parents that you know what a thalweg is.

I fear that these may be many peoples memories when you mention the words ‘geography’ and ‘rivers’ are mentioned in the same sentence. Based on my own school experiences, I would not blame anyone for reaching those conclusions. School geography is often hopelessly dull, particularly seeing as rivers is revisited every single year. The ‘luckiest’ students might have even gone on a field trip that involved standing in the middle of a small stream in wellies (that didn’t fit properly and gave you horrible blisters), cold and miserable, with little to no interest in rivers. Perhaps even a resentment against any hydrological theory.

At risk of sounding over enthusiastic, rivers are actually rather interesting, and incredibly relevant in the state of global affairs we find ourselves in. I don’t mean relevant in a ‘well, this scientific theory is interesting way’, but a ‘this is something that is going to have significant impacts on people around the world’ way. We’ve all heard about climate change, and climate change has the potential to seriously impact the way rivers function – functions that are often important to human beings.

In this blog, I hope to communicate the potential impacts of climate change on river discharge and flood regimes on a global scale, and how this will affect both the natural environment and humans that rely on rivers. The best introduction to the issues I will be tackling is provided by some of the main points raised in the recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) AR5 report:

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• As greenhouse gas emissions increase, the risk of adverse impacts to freshwater systems increase.

 

• In dry subtropical regions, climate change is projected to significantly reduce both surface water and groundwater resources. This will affect regional water energy water and food security, as there is less water available.

• Projections for changes in flood magnitude and frequency are less clear, but there is evidence to suggest variations in flood frequency around the world.

• Freshwater ecosystems will be negatively impacted by changes to streamflow and water quality caused by climate change.

• Rivers fed by snowmelt and glaciers will see increased seasonality and variability in flows as result of climate change.

All of these changes have the capability to impact humans – water is an important economic and social resource. Attempting to predict these changes is a difficult business, dependent on environmental modelling; in effect attempting to predict the future. Predicting the future is a hard business – according to Tomorrow’s World we would all have robot butlers by now. However, environmental modelling is a very powerful tool, and allows informed decision making about future risk. This sort of knowledge can help us understand the likely future impacts on rivers and the people dependent on them.

Hopefully it is evident that the real issues surrounding rivers are quite different to the geography plied at secondary schools up and down the country. I hope to explore the science behind these issues in this blog, the potential impacts, and what this means for humans around the world. I hope you will join me on this voyage into the unkown.