The drought inventory of references to water resources provides extracts from sources related to water supply. The inventory focusses primarily on the impacts on and responses related to public water supply and demand. Each entry has been categorised based on the DPSIR (Drivers, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses) type (Lange et al., 2017). Both short and long-term DPSIR were recorded, however the entries are predominately short-term. Entries were also categorised based on whether they are supply or demand based, and the type of impact or response. This dataset combines and geo-references information from multiple sources into one place, allowing interrogation of drought events and how droughts propagate through water supply systems. Consequently, this dataset provides a unique historical perspective of the interaction between water supply systems and episodes of drought and water scarcity.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 United Kingdom (UK), with a view to developing improved tools for managing droughts in future. 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 drought and water scarcity events since the late 19th century. 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.

Data were collected from multiple sources, including water company Drought Plans, regulators, regulator reports, the British Hydrological Society (BHS) Chronology, The Gazette and the literature. For each source, the method of searching for pertinent records was different. Water company Drought Plans were queried to find specific responses to individual drought events, using key drought dates. These events were selected from Marsh et al. (2007) and Durant (2015) to capture both surface and groundwater drought events, covered the whole of the UK, and were between 1890 and 2015, as per the remit of the Historic Droughts project. Requests to regulators were based on specific information, such as the number of drought orders. The BHS Chronology was systematically searched using key drought event dates and the terms “drought” and “dry”. Specific references were extracted from the literature and regulator reports where they referred to a drought event. The Gazette was queried using the term “hosepipe bans”, as this information at a water company scale was not available from another source.