Rey Vicario, DoloresHolman, Ian P.Knox, Jerry W.2021-11-222021-11-222021-07Rey Vicario D, Holman I, Knox J. (2021) Towards the operationalization of water sharing for irrigation in England, Project Report, July 2021, Cranfield Universityhttp://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/17290INTRODUCTION: Many catchments in England are over-abstracted and/or over-licensed and have no spare summer water that can be allocated to support business expansion, meaning that access to water is increasingly becoming a constraint on economic growth. This situation is particularly acute in eastern England. The legislation for managing water abstraction was introduced in the 1960s and is currently under review. A key limitation is its inflexible approach which limits the capacity to cope with the changing environmental pressures of increasing demand for water, or to allow abstractors access to additional water when available (e.g. peak flows). To address these and other water regulatory limitations, the government is implementing a raft of reforms to the abstraction licensing regime in England. While water trading can support more efficient water allocation, high transaction costs and delays in approvals have often limited abstractor uptake. Water sharing is an alternative approach to formal water trading that is gaining more attention in the so-called Priority Catchments2, where the development and testing of innovative abstraction management approaches is underway. However, there remains a widespread lack of understanding of what water sharing means from hydrological and regulatory perspectives - what are the available sharing options along the spectrum from informal to formal arrangements? What are the different scales at which sharing might be feasible (neighbouring businesses to catchment scale) and how might the approval process for authorising and monitoring sharing be operationalized by the Environment Agency (EA)? The aim of this short study was to explore these unresolved issues through the development of a range of realistic water sharing ‘scenarios’ between agricultural abstractors coupled with a mock evaluation process led by the Environment Agency.enAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 InternationalTechnical Report