Scotland struggles with shifting climate
Famous for its freshwater lochs, rivers and rain, Scotland is seeing the impact of climate change with drier, warmer weather arriving ever earlier, prompting previously unthinkable warnings of water scarcity. At Loch Ness, famous for hosting a mythical monster in its murky depths, 84-year old harbour master and local since childhood Gordon Mangus says "it's been this low for several months now and I have never, ever seen it this low."
Transcript
00:00 (wind blowing)
00:26 - I have never, ever seen it this low.
00:30 I was talking to one of the fishermen today
00:32 and he reckons the surface temperature
00:33 at the moment is about 15 Celsius.
00:36 Now that's unheard of in July for Loch Ness.
00:39 I mean, that's almost Mediterranean for here.
00:43 I mean, it won't be very deep,
00:46 but the fact that the surface temperature is that high,
00:49 that's because there's very little water coming in.
00:52 See the speed of the river going down.
00:54 And we're getting a bed profile as well.
00:57 So the bed profile is, bed depth is about 0.8,
01:01 which is very slow here.
01:05 - Everybody thinks of Scotland as a wet country,
01:10 but the droughts are becoming more frequent in Scotland now
01:12 as a result of climate change.
01:14 We used to see drought very rarely,
01:15 about once in every 18 years.
01:17 And by 2050, we're predicting we'll have
01:19 very low water levels about every other year.
01:21 So Scotland's climate's changing
01:23 and we saw it and see the impacts of that change.
01:26 - Everybody's very concerned about water.
01:39 We had a fish kill in the river Ness two or three weeks ago
01:41 when all of a sudden the river dropped 100 mil,
01:43 four inches overnight.
01:45 And one of the small streams running down the side
01:47 dried up and there were lots of dead fish.
01:48 We had to go in and do a fish rescue.
01:50 So you're starting to see this sort of event
01:51 happening all the time, you know?
01:53 And I think there's real concern about the future of salmon
01:56 and a more challenging environment as we go ahead, I think.
01:59 - We can see that pretty much since March
02:20 with a tiny little exception,
02:21 it's been lower than normal.
02:22 The red section, that's record lows.
02:24 So it's never been that low since they've been measured.
02:27 - We're not gonna be seeing lochs drying up
02:28 across Scotland, but actually people who are managing this,
02:31 people who are using it for drinking water
02:33 and industrial uses, we're gonna have more periods
02:36 where we're gonna have to have more careful management
02:38 of our water and actually bring this into discussion
02:40 and thinking about how we can use water really responsibly.
02:43 (water rushing)
02:47 (wind blowing)
02:50 (wind blowing)
02:52 (water rushing)
02:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]