The year 2025 has seen exceptionally dry conditions in many parts of the UK.
At the time of writing, a large area of England is officially “in drought” and hosepipe bans are in force for more than 8m households.
This follows severe drought episodes in the summers of 2022 and 2018 – which raises the question of whether these events are part of a pattern towards a drier future.
However, the intervening periods between these drought events have been associated with major floods.
There is good reason to assume this “hydrological volatility” could be linked to climate change.
Writing for Carbon Brief in 2020, we explored how climate change might be impacting UK river flooding.
Here, we revisit this theme – but ask whether global warming is driving a long-term trend towards increasing drought severity in the UK.
To do so, we draw from the findings of a 2023 Environment Agency report, a chapter of which we authored and has now been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Key findings include:
- Future projections indicate hydrological droughts will become more severe in the UK, especially over the months of April to September, due to hotter, drier summers.
- However, observations from the past 50 years – and longer where records allow – do not provide evidence of worsening drought.
- This apparent conflict is largely because natural climate variability can obscure underlying trends driven by climate change.
- An increasingly variable climate in the UK means planners still need to prepare for more severe droughts, as well as more floods.
The 2025 hydrological drought
Droughts are complex events that vary in duration, time of year, location and severity.
They are often categorised into different types. For example, a meteorological drought is defined by a lack of rainfall – whereas agricultural drought is a period when there is not enough water for crops to grow.
Here, we are focusing on hydrological drought, which is when a lack of rainfall results in less water in streams, lakes, rivers and reservoirs.
In particular, we look at deficits in river flow. It is through dwindling river flows that droughts have some of their greatest impacts on society and the environment.
Over March-July of this year, flows for many UK rivers were at their lowest level on record. Hosepipe bans have been introduced by water companies, while the Environment Agency has imposed restrictions on extracting water from rivers and warned of widespread environmental impacts, such as fish die-offs and algal blooms in rivers, streams and lakes.
The map below shows how a significant number of rivers in the UK this spring saw exceptionally low flows (marked by a dark red circle) or notably low flows (marked by an orange circle) compared to the 1991-2020 average. This includes many rivers in northern parts of Great Britain – which is typically wetter the south-east.
The graphs on the right, meanwhile, show how flows in the River Derwent and the River Wye (black line) in 2025 have been at equivalent levels, or lower, than in major past droughts (red, green and orange lines). This includes the record-breaking drought of 1976 (orange line), often used as a benchmark.
How is climate change going to affect droughts in the UK?
Globally, climate change causes an intensification of the hydrological cycle. This means that both wet and dry extremes – floods and droughts – are likely to become more frequent and severe.
One way of understanding the impact of climate change on hydrological drought is to use rainfall and temperature projections from climate models to drive hydrological models that simulate how the flow of water through river catchments could change in the future.
There are numerous studies that provide such projections of UK drought. (A summary of these can be found in the chapter on modelling in the 2023 Environment Agency report, linked above.)
Across these studies, river flow models generally show that, in the future, the UK should expect lower summer river flows, increasing drought severity and decreasing minimum flows – in other words, the lowest flows in each year will get lower.
The graphs below show projections of changing low flows for a selection of UK rivers from the 1980s to the 2080s over consecutive 30-year moving averages (1983-2012, 1984-2013 and so on, through to 2050-79).
These projections are based on the “enhanced future flows and groundwater” (Eflag) dataset, which provides simulated river flows for 200 catchments around the UK, using four river flow models. These are driven by the “regional” projections from the Met Office’s UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18), a 12-member climate model “ensemble” which uses the very-high-emission RCP8.5 scenario.
(For more on why this regional data is only available under this pathway, read Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A on UKCP18.)
The multiple lines on each plot – which indicate different projections for low flows – show the uncertainties arising from the different climate model runs and river flow models used.
The charts reveal that, across all rivers and different future trajectories, the trend points in the same direction – towards diminishing minimum flows. This suggests a drier future across the UK, most notably in the summer.
Past trends in drought
Given these projections, we would expect to see a similar trend of decreasing minimum flows emerging in observational data over the last few decades.
However, our research concludes that there is little compelling evidence for any evidence of a widespread worsening of UK droughts over the last half century – yet.
The maps below show how river flows have changed since 1965 across the UK for very low (Q95), medium-low (Q70) and median (Q50) flows.
For much of the north and west of the UK, the lowest flows in each year have, in fact, increased since 1965 (blue triangles). In the south and east of the country, there are decreases (inverted red triangles), but it is a mixed picture. Overall, the number of statistically significant trends is modest.
But, while these river flow records span more than 50 years, this is still a relatively short timeframe.
As a result, we also explored much longer records, including “reconstructed” river flows, which stretch back to 1890. Here, too, we find there is no consistent trend towards worsening drought over these long periods.
In fact, our research shows how trends in the last 50 years are often unrepresentative of longer-term changes. Some of the apparent decreasing trends from the maps above disappear when a longer view is taken.
Mismatch between past trends and future projections
There is a clear contradiction between future projections and past trends. We do not yet see much evidence of the drier future that climate models project.
However, this apparent contradiction is unsurprising once uncertainties inherent in both future projections and historical observations are considered.
Future projections are highly uncertain and span a wide range of possibilities – as shown by the multiple lines in the Eflag graphs above.
Caution is needed in interpreting trends in observations, too. While 50 years seems a reasonably long period, trends can be influenced by variability associated with natural atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns.
The trends towards increasing river flows in the north and west are consistent with changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the atmospheric pressure system that influences the UK’s weather on year-to-year and decade-to-decade timescales.
There is a growing list of drivers of drought variability, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the role of the influx of freshwater into the North Atlantic due to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
In a recent paper, we highlighted that long-term trends in low river flows for many UK catchments may not be detectable for decades due to being obscured by natural climate variability.
This is shown by the plot below, which illustrates how projected trends of very low river flows over the 21st century (red line) contrasts with the estimated range of historical river flow variability (dashed lines). (The grey shading shows the range of different climate models.)
It shows that for some catchments – for example, the Lambourn River in south-east England – significant trends do not emerge until the 2050s.
Part of the mismatch between historical observations and climate projections for UK summer is due to a run of wet summers from the late 2000s onwards. This climate variability has ‘masked’ an underlying trend that could eventually emerge and bring a more worrisome consistency with the projections of climate models.
That this masking has often entailed living with an excess of water, in the form of widespread, damaging flooding, only highlights the challenges water managers face.
A drier and wetter future
Further research is required into how different types of hydrological drought will evolve.
We are confident we will see more droughts in April-September, typically associated with heatwaves, as in 2025, 2022 and 2018. This is because warming temperatures – which, unlike rainfall trends, are certain – will exacerbate droughts.
The increased likelihood of hot, dry summers also means more rapid-onset “flash droughts”, which have impacts on soil moisture as well as river flows.
As such, the droughts of recent years should be interpreted as a warning that hotter temperatures will worsen drought impacts.
However, we are much less confident that we will see more long, multi-annual droughts driven by dry winters that fail to replenish reservoirs and aquifers, such as those seen in 1988-93, 2005-06 and 2010-12. This is because climate models generally predict wetter winters for the UK. (These multi-annual droughts have, historically, posed some of the greatest challenges to water management.)
Nevertheless, climate variability means that even if winters get wetter, there will always be runs of dry years. This is a cause for concern, as the greatest problems occur when wet winters combine with dry summers. (It was the dry winter of 1975-76 which made the 1976 drought so severe).
Our finding that it is difficult to confirm whether droughts are, overall, becoming more severe offers little comfort to water managers preparing for the future.
Our research offers a number of recommendations for water planners trying to navigate this complexity. This includes using large climate model “ensembles” to test the resilience of water supply systems to different types of droughts. Although model projections are uncertain, they provide a way to assess the UK’s vulnerability to a range of future outcomes.
Furthermore, the hydrological volatility of the recent past indicates the importance of preparing for both a drier and wetter future in the UK.
The UK is known for its variable weather, but it will have a future climate that is even more variable and extreme.
The post Guest post: Is climate change making UK droughts worse? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.
When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.
Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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