Water is vital to the Canal & River Trust. Without enough of it navigation wouldn't be possible, wildlife and waterway businesses would suffer and the experience for our different visitors (including anglers, cyclists and walkers) would be much poorer.
To make sure that our future water supplies are secure we've created a new Water Resources Strategy.
Preparing the strategy
We ran an eight-week external consultation on a draft version of the Strategy back in 2014 and received plenty of responses from you. We'd like to say thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.
Following the consultation we reviewed all of the responses, produced a consultation response document and used the feedback to help us develop our Water Resources Strategy.
The strategy sets out our work plan for the next five years (2015 – 2020) and looks as far ahead as 2050 to understand and respond to the longer term pressures and challenges. This is the first time that we have published our Water Resources Strategy.
Within the Strategy we have set out fourteen strategic actions, which we aim to complete within the next five years. These include:
- Aspiring to a level of service of 1 in 20 years (we will maintain and operate the canal network so that drought closures are implemented, on average, less than once every twenty years, i.e. there is a 5% chance of a drought closure occurring in any single year)
- Assessing the future impact of climate change, funding, environmental legislation and increased network usage
- Completing detailed water resources assessments for any proposed restorations or new canal developments
- Publishing an annual report of our progress towards our strategic actions
