Planning how we use and manage water in the future needs to start now

This is one of the headline messages from the Water Climate Change Impacts Report Card. In the UK, many people will experience climate change through its effect on water, and especially through floods and droughts. We need to plan for future impacts to avoid unacceptable consequences, and many actions will take many years to design and implement. This means that we need to anticipate future changes and start to take steps to adapt to them now.

Produced by the Living with Environmental Change Partnership (LWEC) the Climate Change Impact Report Cards pull together the latest evidence to provide a robust, reliable and up to date report on climate impacts. The report card on water included contributions from Dr Isabelle Durance, Sustainable Places Research Institute, and Professor Steve Ormerod, Cardiff University.

The water report card is for anyone who works with or has an interest in water in the UK. It looks at the effect of climate change on fresh water - including rainfall, floods and droughts. The report card is intended to help people understand the scale of possible change and to help inform decisions about the way that water is managed.

It is hoped that resources will be available to update the report card series every two years. Two new cards for 2014 are in preparation: Infrastructure and Health and Wellbeing.

The Water Report Card is available here:http://www.lwec.org.uk/resources/report-cards/water

The LWEC Partnership comprises 22 public sector organisations that fund, carry out and use environmental research and observations. They include the UK research councils, government departments with environmental responsibilities, devolved administrations and government agencies.