About us
Who we are…
Community Action for Water is the web site of an academic-led coalition of individuals and organisations seeking to stimulate more and better local action to manage water in our local communities. We aim to:
1) Support Individuals and communities looking for ways to contribute to water management, particularly rain management, in their neighbourhoods;
2) Support local authorities, water companies and the voluntary sector in efforts to work creatively with communities and individuals to produce a better water environment.
What we do…
Our current work is focused on rainwater management in the Hull and East Riding region via the MAGIC project and in coalition with Timebank Hull and East Riding as well as the Living With Water Partnership.
We also have an ongoing strand of work seeking to support organisations and individuals engaging communities in the co-design of local green infrastructure.
One strand of previous work has considered how authorities investments in local blue and green infrastructure can contribute to local wellbeing.
Another set of preceding work looked at the different ways water companies were working with their publics.
Evidence Base
What is Community Rainwater Management?
Climate change is altering weather patterns to bring longer periods of both hot, dry weather and heavy rainfall. 5.2 million UK properties are now threatened by flooding, but The Environment Agency also predicts that demand for water in southern England may outstrip supply in the next 20 years. Conventional solutions to these problems involve large-scale, expensive infrastructure projects, installed in a top-down fashion by the water industry.
The MAGIC project (Mobilising Adaptation: Governance of Infrastructure through Co-Production) demonstrates the value of an alternative, community-led approach. We argue that many small, distributed interventions in a local community can have a demonstrable impact on reducing flood risk and pollution, while also engaging local communities with rainwater management. We call this approach Community Water Management.
For example, many people install a water butt to get a supply of free, non-drinking water for the garden or for car-washing. But water butts can also help us deal with our increasingly extreme weather:
they can be part of the solution to preventing flooding
they can help to reduce our consumption of treated mains water
they can help to prevent sewers overflowing into natural water courses, which causes pollution
