Looking towards the future

The future has always been of great concern to humanity. The ecosystem approach to river basin management parallels the catchment management concept with its attention to the physical pathways of water, the movement of nutrients and pollutants and its consideration of the social, political and economic forces operating in the basin. NERC developed the concept of the Community Programme as a complementary funding model to the standard one of studentships and post docs where the initiative lies with the Principal Investigator. Advances in weather and climate forecasting will have an increasing impact on hydrology. In the current Anthropocene Era, among these uncertainties and the risks attached to them, those concerning water will be a large component at every scale from the local to the global. The depth of this research has developed from simply solving a catchment's water balance to encompass investigations of the governing processes, physical, chemical and biological.