Historic droughts inventory of references to legal regulation 1976-2012
Bettina Lange and Cristina Golomoz

Context of the dataset
Project Overview
Historic Droughts was a four year (2014 – 2018), £1.5m project funded by the UK Research Councils, aiming to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of past drought episodes that have affected the UK, with a view to developing improved tools for managing droughts in future.
The Historic Droughts project involved eight institutions across the UK: the British Geological Survey the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Cranfield University, the University of Exeter, HR Wallingford, Lancaster University, the Met Office, and the University of Oxford.
Drought and water scarcity (DWS) events are significant threats to livelihoods and wellbeing in many countries, including the United Kingdom (UK). Parts of the UK are already water-stressed and are facing a wide range of pressures, including an expanding population and intensifying exploitation of increasingly limited water resources. In addition, many regions may become significantly drier in future due to environmental changes, all of which implies major challenges to water resource management. However, DWS events are not simply natural hazards. There are also a range of socio-economic and regulatory factors that may influence the course of droughts, such as water consumption practices and abstraction licensing regimes. Consequently, if DWS events are to be better managed, there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the links between hydrometeorological and social systems during droughts.
With this research gap in mind, the Historic Droughts project aimed to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of drought from a range of different perspectives. Based on an analysis of information from a wide range of sectors (hydrometeorological, environmental, agricultural, regulatory, social and cultural), the project characterised and quantified the history of UK drought and water scarcity events since the late 19th century.
Inventory
The Historic Droughts Inventory is a knowledge base of past drought characteristics, drivers, impacts and responses, collated from a range of sources in a number of different sectors. The Historic Droughts Inventory will provide a common reference for policy makers and regulators, water supply companies, agriculture and industry and will enable more consistent, transparent planning.
The Historic Droughts Inventory comprises two main elements, which can be used together to provide multi-sectoral understanding of droughts: 
1.	Hydro-meteorological timelines of rainfall, river flows and groundwater, presented as consistent and comparable drought indicators, which enable understanding of past drought occurrence, based on records extended back into the 19th century through modelling and data rescue.
2.	References to past droughts from the 19th century to the present day from newspapers, legislation (e.g. parliamentary debates), agricultural media, and in-depth oral histories, which provide an improved understanding of the drivers and impacts of and responses to drought, and how these have changed through time. Each reference is consistently formatted, identifying the time and, where possible, place of occurrence, with links to full source materials held elsewhere.
The structure of the Historic Droughts Inventory is based on previous international efforts to collate drought impacts information. Fields used in the European Drought Impact report Inventory (EDII; http://www.geo.uio.no/edc/droughtdb/index.php) were selected and modified for a database holding many different types of drought  references, and not just impacts (as in the EDII). 
THIS Drought inventory 
The Drought inventory of references to legal regulation 1976-2012 provides extracts of key elements of Parliamentary Debate about water resource management, and drought more specifically during -five key contemporary drought episodes, in particular 1976, 1984, 1995, 2003-6 and 2010-12. For the 2003-6 drought there is also some reference to Parliamentary Reports in relation to drought. Each entry has been coded as either a regulatory Driver, Impact of or Response to drought and water scarcity. These classifications draw on how key concepts were defined in the Conceptual Framework for the Historic Droughts project (Lange et al., 2017). Impacts of drought are understood for the purposes of this Drought Inventory of Legal Regulation as long-lasting changes in the aftermath of a drought, such as a significant legal reform of primary legislation. Entries that refer to regulatory tools employed or developed directly in response to the drought, e.g. during the drought were coded as ‘Responses’. An example of such often deployed ‘Responses’ are drought orders. Entries classified as regulatory Drivers of drought refer to perceived structural shortcomings in the legal regulation of water resources, such as the absence of a national unit co-ordinating water policy across different regions. 
Methods 
Data were collected from Hansard Online (https://hansard.parliament.uk/), the Official Report of debates in the UK Parliament, since Parliamentarians have the power to reform the law relating to water resources, and drought more specifically, and to hold the government publicly to account for the management of water resources in the UK. To understand whether and if so, how Parliamentarians link drought episodes to the reform of policy and law in relation to water resources addresses one of the key objectives of the Historic Droughts project, i.e. to analyse bridges and gaps between drought as an element of natural systems, and its regulation through social systems, here political debate and law-making.
The data were extracted through a systematic search of digitized content of Hansard. The inventory focused, on Parliamentary debate during five major droughts, those during 1976, 1984, 1995, 2003-2006, 2010-12. We focused on these key droughts since they enable to see a historic snapshot of drought regulation that includes two droughts before privatisation of the water industry, i.e. 1976 and 1984, as well as three post-privatisation droughts, 1995, 2004-6 and 2010-2. Parliamentary debate in relation to the latter two droughts also enables to trace the increasing influence of European Union environmental legislation on water resource management in the UK, in particular the EU Water Framework Directive and EU nature conservation legislation. Moreover, we focused on these -five drought episodes in order to enable comparison of accounts of drought provided by other sectors involved in the Historic Droughts project. Most other sectors also covered these six drought episodes. 
Preparation
The search of the Hansard records was conducted with reference to a list of search terms that helped us to identify the relevant topics within every Parliamentary sitting. This list included the following terms: water, drought, water supply, Dennis Howell, heat wave, agriculture, environment, rain, fisheries, and rivers (e.g. the search terms helped us to identify the topic ‘Water Supply’, in the 22 July 1976 sitting of the House of Commons). 
In terms of temporal scope, we reviewed every sitting that took place between the spring or summer of every year in which one of the six key droughts listed above was experienced through to the winter or spring of the next calendar year (e.g. for the 1976 Drought, we reviewed every sitting between Spring 1976 and April 1977; for the 1995 Drought, we reviewed every sitting between April 1995 and August 1996). 
Finally we read through the text of every selected debate, and used the definitions from the Conceptual Framework for the Historic Droughts project for identifying and coding excerpts from Parliamentary debate which referred to Drivers, Impacts of and Responses to drought, with subsidiary classifications of changes in the State of water resource management and Pressures contributing to drought conditions.
Using the data
The Inventory format is loosely based on the European Drought Impact report Inventory (EDII) which was used as a repository for drought impact information in the Belmont Forum funded DrIVER project (Barker, 2014). The format was selected due to its previous use for capturing drought-related information; it enables both temporal and spatial occurrence of drought instances to be captured (spatial information can be entered at different resolutions) and combined with descriptive content. Due to the varied nature of the contents of the Historic Droughts Inventory, some of the categorical fields have not been used as (rigorously) extensively as in the EDII.
The content of the columns and the data codes used in the Historic Droughts Inventory are described below.
Introductory information
•	Entry ID: The Entry ID will be a unique ID field given to each entry in the Historic Drought Inventory. It will probably be generated and assigned automatically when the data are loaded.
•	Reference: Reference to the source data or document whether it is a web page, scientific article or a government document. 
•	Text: Extract from the Parliament report containing information relevant to the topic.

Temporal information 
Where a reference describes the start and end of a particular drought impact, driver, response, etc., these are captured separately. However it is often the case with the sources used in the Historic Droughts Inventory, e.g. newspaper articles, that the only temporal information is the date of the reference itself, in which case this has been used as both the start and the end date. The aim of this field is to capture when drought references occur, rather than to capture the temporal range of a drought within each reference. 
Both start and end date are split across 3 columns, containing the day (dd), month (mm) and year (yyyy). The season is specified using the classification in table A1.1. Season is used where the temporal occurrence is non-specific, e.g. for droughts mentioned within oral histories. Where it is not possible to identify a date of a particular reference to a drought, the approximate start and end date of a drought around that time from the hydrometeorological record has been used, e.g. the 1975-1976 drought considered as lasting from summer 1975 to summer 1976 has been entered from June 1975 to August 1976 in order to give a usable month, season and year to define this period. It is acknowledged that droughts rarely have a readily identifiable start date (and, in many cases, end-date), and the period over which their impacts are felt varies according to geographical location and the type of user. However this was a pragmatic approach to ensure that references that generally related to a period of time (often several years) could be handled alongside references with a very specific date.
•	Date start (dd): Day the drought reference starts
•	Date start (mm): Month the drought reference starts
•	Date start (yyyy): Year the drought reference starts
•	Season start: Season the drought reference starts (Table A1.1)
•	Date end (dd): Day the drought reference ends
•	Date end (mm): Month the drought reference ends
•	Date end (yyyy): Year the drought reference ends
•	Season end: Season the drought reference ends (Table A1.1)
Spatial information
In addition to the country and location, the spatial location and extent of the impact, etc. referred to within each entry is recorded using the NUTS classification (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) (Eurostat, 2015). These are standard hierarchical subdivisions of member states of the European Union. There are three classes of NUTS. NUTS1 are major socio-economic regions, whilst NUTS2 and NUTS 3 are smaller areas within each NUTS1. There are 12 NUTS1 in the UK. The NUTS1-3 fields were populated with the corresponding code (Table A2.1). The country is recorded as the only location information for instances where there is no more specific spatial information. Where possible the specific location is also recorded.
•	Country: The Country relating to the drought reference (i.e. England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Great Britain or United Kingdom)
•	NUTS1: NUTS1 region
•	NUTS2: NUTS2 region
•	NUTS3: NUTS3 region
•	Location: Name of the geographic feature (e.g. river name, town, county) specifically mentioned in the reference.
Other fields
•	DPSIR: DPSIR framework elements (Lange et al., 2017) describing the nature of the drought reference. The DPSIR element is specified using the code in table A1.2.
•	Media type: Categorisation of the reference to help users understand the nature of the information under discussion (e.g. legislation, regulation, policy, report, etc.). Also includes qualifiers providing more specific information to this overall categorisation, e.g. “Legislation [1995 Environment Act]”, “Legislation [Water Resources Act]”, Regulation [Drought Order]”. 
•	Sector: Economic sector mentioned in the report, e.g. Water Supply, Environment, Industry, etc.
•	URL: URL of the information source, generally on the Hansard or Parliament website. 
•	Water Company: Any specific water authority or water company mentioned within the reference.
•	Additional Information: Additional information in this column that provides a secondary level of categorisation. It identifies more specific themes in relation to the legal regulation of droughts, such as the role of particular regulators and some economic impacts of drought. 

Annex 1
Table A1.1 – Seasons classification used in Historic Drought Inventory
Season	Months	
Spring	March, April, May	
Summer	June, July, August	
Autumn	September, October, November	
Winter	December, January, February	

Table A1.2 – Key terms in the DPSIR framework (for more information see Lange et al., 2017)
Code	Description	
D	driver	
P	pressure	
S	state	
I	impact	
R	response	

Annex 2
Table A2.1 - UK NUTS1-3 regions.
NUTS1	NUTS2	NUTS3	
UKC	North East England	UKC1	Tees Valley & Durham	UKC11	Hartlepool & Stockton-on-Tees	
				UKC12	South Teeside (Middlesborough, Redcar & Celveland)	
				UKC13	Darlington	
				UKC14	Durham	
		UKC2	Northumberland & Tyne and Wear	UKC21	Northumberland	
				UKC22	Tyneside (Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, South Tyneside & North Tyneside)	
				UKC23	Sunderland	
UKD	North West England	UKD1	Cumbria	UKD11	West Cumbria (Allerdale, Barrow-in-Furness & Copeland)	
				UKD12	East Cumbria (Carlisle, Eden & South Lakeland)	
		UKD2	Cheshire	UKD21	Warrington	
				UKD22	Cheshire East	
				UKD23	Cheshire West & Chester	
		UKD3	Greater Manchester	UKD31	Greater Manchester South (Manchester, Salford, Stockport, Tameside & Trafford)	
				UKD32	Greater Manchester North (Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale & Wigan)	
		UKD4	Lancashire	UKD41	Blackburn with Darwen	
				UKD42	Blackpool	
				UKD43	Lancashire CC	
		UKD5	Merseyside	UKD51	East Merseyside (Knowsley, St Helens & Halton)	
				UKD52	Liverpool	
				UKD53	Sefton	
				UKD54	Wirral	
UKE	Yorkshire & The Humber	UKE1	East Riding & North Lincolnshire	UKE11	Kingston upon Hull	
				UKE12	East Riding of Yorkshire	
				UKE13	North & East Lincolnshire	
		UKE2	North Yorkshire	UKE21	York	
				UKE22	North Yorkshire CC	
		UKE3	South Yorkshire	UKE31	Barnsley, Doncaster & Rotheram	
				UKE32	Sheffield	
		UKE4	West Yorkshire	UKE41	Bradford	
				UKE42	Leeds	
				UKE44	Calderdale & Kirklees	
				UKE45	Wakefield	
UKF	East Midlands	UKF1	Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire	UKF11	Derby	
				UKF12	East Derbyshire (Bolsover, Chesterfield & North East Derbyshire)	
				UKF13	South & West Derbyshire (Amber Valley, Derbyshire Dales, Erewash, High Peak & South Derbyshire)	
				UKF14	Nottingham	
				UKF15	North Nottinghamshire (Ashfield, Bassetlaw, Mansfield, Newark & Sherwood)	
				UKF16	South Nottinghamshire (Broxtowe, Gelding & Rushcliffe)	
		UKF2	Leicestershire, Rutland & Northamptonshire	UKF21	Leicester	
				UKF22	Leicestershire CC & Rutland	
				UKF24	West Northamptonshire (Northampton, Daventry & South Northamptonshire)	
				UKF25	North Northamptonshire (East Northamptonshire, Corby, Wellingborough & Kettering)	
		UKF3	Lincolnshire	UKF0	Lincolnshire CC	
UKG	West Midlands	UKG1	Herefordshire, Worcestershire & Warwickshire	UKG11	Herefordshire	
				UKG12	Worcestershire CC	
				UKG13	Warwickshire CC	
		UKG2	Shropshire & Staffordshire	UKG21	Telford & Wrekin	
				UKG22	Shropshire CC	
				UKG23	Stoke-on-Trent	
				UKG24	Stafforshire CC	
		UKG3	West Midlands	UKG31	Birmingham	
				UKG32	Solihull	
				UKG33	Coventry	
				UKG36	Dudley	
				UKG37	Sandwell	
				UKG38	Walsall	
				UKG39	Wolverhampton	
UKH	East of England	UKH1	East Anglia	UKH11	Peterborough	
				UKH12	Cambridgeshire CC	
				UKH13	Norfolk	
				UKH14	Suffolk	
		UKH2	Bedfordshire & Hertfordshire	UKH21	Luton	
				UKH23	Hertfordshire CC	
				UKH24	Bedford	
				UKH25	Bedfordshire CC	
		UKH3	Essex	UKH31	Southend-on-Sea	
				UKH32	Thurrock	
				UKH33	Essex CC	
UKI	London	UKI1	Inner London	UKI11	West Inner London (City of London, Camden, Fulham, Kensington, Wandsworth & Westminster)	
				UKI12	East Inner London (Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Southwark & Tower Hamlets)	
		UKI2	Outer London	UKI21	East & North East Outer London (Barking & Dagenham, Bexley, Enfield, Greenwich, Havering, Redbridge & Waltham Forest)	
				UKI22	South Outer London (Bromley, Croydon, Kingston upon  Thames, Merton & Sutton)	
				UKI23	West and North West Outer London (Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow & Richmond upon Thames)	
UKJ	South East	UKJ1	Berkshire, Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire	UKJ11	Berkshire	
				UKJ12	Milton Keynes	
				UKJ13	Buckinghamshire CC	
				UKJ14	Oxfordshire	
		UKJ2	Surry, East & West Sussex	UKJ21	Brighton & Hove	
				UKJ22	East Sussex CC	
				UKJ23	Surrey	
				UKJ24	West Sussex CC	
		UKJ3	Hampshire & Isle of Wight	UKJ31	Portsmouth	
				UKJ32	Southampton	
				UKJ33	Hampshire CC	
				UKJ34	Isle of Wight	
		UKJ4	Kent	UKJ41	Medway	
				UKJ42	Kent CC	
UKK	South West 	UKK1	Gloucestershire, Wiltshire & Bristol/Bath area	UKK11	Bristol	
				UKK12	Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset & South Gloucestershire	
				UKK13	Gloucestershire CC	
				UKK14	Swindon	
				UKK15	Wiltshire	
		UKK2	Dorset & Somerset	UKK21	Bornemouth & Poole	
				UKK22	Dorset CC	
				UKK23	Somerset	
		UKK3	Cornwall & Isles of Scilly	UKK30	Cornwall & Isles of Scilly	
		UKK4	Devon	UKK41	Plymouth	
				UKK42	Torbay	
				UKK43	Devon CC	
UKL
	Wales	UKL1	West Wales & The Valleys	UKL11	Isle of Anglesey	
				UKL12	Gwynedd	
				UKL13	Conwy & Denbighshire	
				UKL14	South West Wales (Ceridigion, Camarthenshire & Pembrokeshire)	
				UKL15	Central Valleys (Methyr Tydfil & Rhondda Cynon Taf)	
				UKL16	Gwent Valleys (Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly & Tofaen)	
				UKL17	Bridgend & Neath Port Talbot	
				UKL18	Swansea	
		UKL2	East Wales	UKL21	Monmouthshire & Newport	
				UKL22	Cardiff & Vale of Glamorgan	
				UKL23	Flintshire & Wrexham	
				UKL24	Powys	
UKM	Scotland	UKM2	Eastern Scotland	UKM21	Angus & Dundee	
				UKM22	Clackmannanshire & Fife	
				UKM23	East Lothian & Midlothian	
				UKM24	Scottish Boarders	
				UKM25	Edinburgh	
				UKM26	Falklirk	
				UKM27	Perth and Kinross & Stirling	
				UKM28	West Lothian	
		UKM3	South Western Scotland	UKM31	East Dumbartonshire, West Dumbartonshire, Helensburgh & Lomond	
				UKM32	Dumfries & Galloway	
				UKM33	East & North Aryshire mainland	
				UKM34	Glasgow	
				UKM35	Inverclyde, East Renfrewshire & Renfrewshire	
				UKM36	North Lanarkshire	
				UKM37	South Ayrshire	
				UKM38	South Lanarkshire	
		UKM5	North Eastern Scotland	UKM50	Aberdeen & Aberdeenshire	
		UKM6	Highlands & Islands	UKM61	Caithness & Sutherland, Ross & Cromarty	
				UKM62	Inverness, Narin Moray, Badenoch & Strathspey	
				UKM63	Lochaber, Skye & Lochalsh, Arran & Cumbrae, Argyll & Bute (except Helensburgh & Lomond)	
				UKM64	Eilean Siar (Western Isles)	
				UKM65	Orkney Islands	
				UKM66	Shetland Islands	
UKN	Northern Ireland	UKN0	Northern Ireland	UKN01	Belfast	
				UKN02	Outer Belfast (Carrickfergus, Castlereagh, Lisburn, Newtownabbey & North Down)	
				UKN03	East of Northern Ireland (Antrim, Ards, Ballymena, Banbridge, Craigavon, Down, Larne)	
				UKN04	North of Northern Ireland (Ballymoney, Coleraine, Derry, Limavady, Moyle & Strabane)	
				UKN05	West & South of Northern Ireland (Armargh, Cookstown, Dungannon, Fermanagh, Magherafelt, Newry & Mourne, Omagh)	

Figure A2.1 - NUTS1 of the UK (after eurostat, 2015)

References
Barker, L.: 2016 Compiling drought impact reports for the UK. Wallingford, NERC/Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, 35pp. (Driver Technical Report) (Unpublished)
Eurostat. 2015. NUTS 2010 http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/reference-data/administrative-units-statistical-units/nuts#nuts13 Access: 11-11-2014
Lange, B., Holman, I., Bloomfield, J.P.: 2017. A framework for a joint hydro-meteorological-social analysis of drought. Science of the Total Environment, 758, 297-306, 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.10.145.