Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

As a city surrounded by water, and with much of it laying below or only slightly above sea level, Amsterdam is an authentic wonder of hydraulic engineering.

Amsterdam is a city literally built on the water, Lake Ij to be precise, with its founding fathers pumping water out of areas to establish polders—low-lying land enclosed by embankments—and then creating new land by depositing sand, clay, and dredged silt on top.

The city was then built on marshland and soft peat, with its buildings supported by approximately 11 million wooden piles driven 15 to 20 metres deep through unstable soil to reach a firmer, sandy layer of Earth.

Meanwhile, canals were dug out to transport people and goods, and more importantly, to manage the water levels to prevent flooding in Amsterdam. The canals, along with dikes and windmills (the windmills have long since been replaced with electric pumps), are used to control the water level in the city.

Many cities across the world are instantly recognisable for a feat of world-class design and engineering, including London Bridge, Eiffel Tower, and the Golden Gate Bridge, to name just a few.

In Amsterdam, the city itself is a feat of world class design and engineering.

This heritage of hydrological engineering means the Dutch are world experts when it came to protecting their city from fluvial flooding—caused when rainfall causes a river, stream, lake or canal to exceed its capacity and overflow onto adjacent, low-lying land.

However, up until recent years, there has been much less knowledge in the Netherlands and, indeed, globally about how to deal with pluvial or surface water flooding, caused by intense rainfall on impervious surfaces which cannot absorb or drain away the water quickly enough and/or from backflow from overloaded sewer systems.

This lack of protection against surface water flooding is what the team at Rainproof were established to address when the organisation was set up in 2014, as an initiative led by Waternet, the regional water utility for Amsterdam and its surrounding areas.

And in the distinctive Dutch way, the team at Rainproof—now called Weerproof (which translates into English as weatherproof)—is not doing this alone.

Instead, Weerproof is taking a network approach and bringing a community of people, businesses, designers, engineers, developers, asset owners, academics, government, and NGOs along with them to tackle one of the world’s greatest 21st century urban challenges with a holistic and multi-pronged approach.

Before we look into more depth at Amsterdam’s solution, it’s important to define the problem that cities across the world are facing from surface water flooding.

The Growing Importance Of Tackling Surface Water Flooding

In general, climate change is causing summers to be hotter and drier and winters to be wetter.

However, there are very important exceptions to this rule, and this is when much of the damage is being caused by climate change.

Many of the most extreme flooding events are taking place in the summer months. This is because hot air can hold more moisture (for every one degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture).

So, warmer air leads to more intense rainfall and increases the chances of flooding.

There are numerous examples of recent summer flood events that highlight how damaging intense rainfall can be. In July 2021, London suffered surface water flooding from three extreme rainfall events in less than two weeks, which caused the closure of eight Tube stations and two hospitals, as well as more than 1,000 properties flooded.

In August that year, New York was among eight other states hit by Hurricane Ida. Its peak of 80 milimetres of precipitation per hour was almost double the 38 to 50 milimetres of rain per hour capacity that can be handled by New York’s sewer system. In New York City alone, the hurricane led to the deaths of 13 people, 11 of whom were flooded in their basements.

However, what made civic leaders in Amsterdam sit up and take notice was the surface water flooding of Copenhagen in July 2011, when 150 milimetres of rain fell on the city in just two hours, leaving swathes of the city under up to a metre of water.

The City of Copenhagen estimated that the cloudburst caused DKK 6 billion (USD 870 million or GBP 690 million) worth of damage and resulted in 90,644 insurance claims, with many smaller businesses wiped out permanently.

Daniel Goedbloed is the director of Amsterdam Weerproof and was the former programme manager of Rainproof, leading on the programme for Waternet for more than a decade.

Daniel told me that “Copenhagen was the wake-up call for Waternet and the municipality, and they thought, that’s not happening in Indonesia, this is happening in the North Sea area. How vulnerable are we actually, for these kinds of downpours? If they would happen in the Netherlands, and specifically Amsterdam, we thought we would be in trouble because our forefathers did not design our cities to deal with these kinds of heavy downpours. They designed our cities and sewer systems to deal with medium-level rainfall events.

“At this stage, people did not know what the answer was for protecting Amsterdam, but a GIS analysis of the whole built up area of the city was commissioned. And after that took place, people realised the solution is not going to be in their own sewer system, which is the monofunctional system most cities are built on.

“The analysis showed us we should not solely rely on the sewer system to deal with rainwater in the city, and instead of discharging the water, we should infiltrate it and absorb it. And if not possible to absorb it, then we need to find ways to temporarily store it.

“So, in fact, what we found is that the solution we need is in the environment of the whole city.”

Few, if any, sewer systems can be designed to safely and sustainably cope with the kind of extreme cloudburst events that are becoming more frequent as the climate changes. The solution, therefore, has to be found not underground, but across the entire urban landscape.

Once the environment of the whole city was looked at as a solution, it makes sense that the city, its citizens, businesses, and institutions needed to be brought together to enact the solution.

Furthermore, turning a densely populated and historic European capital city into a sponge is not something any single organisation can achieve alone.

Daniel explained: “Waternet is responsible for drinking water purification and distribution, water safety, water quality, sewer management, ground water, and so on. So, the old mindset was that if there is a problem with extreme rainfall, then Waternet must be responsible.

“But the reality is that the whole city of Amsterdam, and indeed the entire environment of any city, contributes to surface water flooding. So, they thought of a new way to deal with this problem. We'll do this in a network approach. We'll make our own new network entity, and we’ll call it Amsterdam Rainproof.”

The Network Approach

Network approaches are created when three or more legally autonomous organisations work together to achieve both collective and individual goals.

What distinguishes networks from hierarchies is the autonomy of each organisation in the network and the lack of subordination to an overall power.

Networks are often created when no single organisation has sufficient resources to achieve a set of goals independently. Therefore, collaboration helps a group of organisations to pool resources and coordinate efforts to achieve a longer lasting and more sustainable impact.

As well as their expertise in hydraulic engineering, the Dutch are highly proficient at creating networks to solve challenges.

Some of this expertise stems from the crisis in public finances experienced by the Netherlands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which saw the nation transition from monolithic, top-down governance to a model of increasing civic responsibility, which led to growing citizen participation in the decision-making and delivery of services beginning in the 1980s.

Rainproof brought together designs and engineers with national and local government, NGOs, developers, asset owners, private businesses, insurers, and citizens.

Rather than treating climate adaptation as solely the responsibility of the water authority or the municipal or national government, Amsterdam deliberately created a new kind of entity: an independent network programme called Rainproof to build partnerships between public sector institutions, private businesses, NGOs, and academia, and to build bridges with the wider public.

Rainproof was established with its own identity, its own board of directors and decisionmakers, and, crucially, its own freedom to engage with anyone and everyone to work towards making Amsterdam more resilient to surface water flooding.

The central concept of making Amsterdam a sponge city—albeit one surrounded by water—is that rain should be captured where it falls, slowed down, stored, reused where possible, and only discharged into the sewer system as a last resort.

Achieving this goal has meant the implementation of green infrastructure and sustainable drainage solutions. In Amsterdam, these solutions have included the creation of:

• More permeable pavements to drain water.
• A new standard for new building developments to include 60 millimetres of water storage capacity.
• Façade Gardens - Where there is enough public space available on sidewalks, residents can request the council to help create a free facade garden as a sustainable drainage solution. When applications are accepted, the council removes slabs of pavement to create new areas of soil. Residents are free to choose which plants, shrubs, and trees they would like to install, but receive no council assistance to plant a garden. Pre-COVID, the municipality were getting around 300 applications per year to create façade gardens; today it has risen to 1,300 per year.
• Subsidy To Install A Green Roof - Green roofs absorb rainfall before it reaches street level. Waternet and Amsterdam City Council created public subsidies for residents who want to create a green roof, which provides EUR 30 of subsidy per square metre if a roof holds 30 to 50 litres of water, and EUR 50 per square metre for a roof that holds more than 50 litres of water. Subsidies are available to cover up to 50% of the costs of the green roof, up to a maximum subsidy of EUR 50,000. As of 2024, more than 45,000 square metres of blue green roofspace had been created across the city.
• Subsidy For Garden De-tiling - The municipality also offers a subsidy for de-tiling gardens, which means removing concrete slabs and replacing with garden space. The garden must be at least 10 square metres, and the council pays EUR 15 per quare metre for de-tiling up to a maximum of EUR 1,000 per home. One of the chief obstacles to residents de-tiling their garden was the need to carry the concrete slabs to one of seven recycling centres across the city. Therefore, to increase participation, the municipality now provides a service to collect the concrete slabs once they’re removed. In Rotterdam, this service is catchily called the Tile Taxi. Rainproof estimates that the service has led to the removal of around 80,000 concrete slabs a year.

As well as empowering businesses and residents to carry out physical changes to Amsterdam, Weerproof has also successfully lobbied the city council for legislative changes, with one of the biggest achievements being that the city must be able to cope with a one-in-100-year storm event without any damage in the city. This mandatory ruling must now be borne in mind when determining planning applications for new buildings in Amsterdam.

As a result of this, all new developments now must create basements that can store sixty litres of rainwater per square metre on their own plot.

While subsidies for green roofs and de-tiling are available across the city, Weerproof is also working more closely with three districts in the city of Amsterdam where deprivation is greatest to ensure that money being spent is going to areas with the largest financial need.

In these three areas of the city, Weerproof hired local community managers to be involved in local initiatives and events to reduce the impact of climate changes and to organise volunteers to help depave gardens, as well as working on cultural events and helping to address issues such loneliness.

Amsterdam is helping areas in the greatest need and is bringing people and organisations together to tackle extreme weather events, showing that building a climate-resilient city is not just a technical challenge—it is also a social challenge too. Weerproof’s network approach is key to tackling this.

In common with every other city, the scale of Amsterdam’s challenge simply cannot be met by just one organisation financially.

A city like Amsterdam is made up of hundreds of thousands of individual plots, rooftops, driveways, and gardens, and encouraging citizens and businesses to participate requires awareness, motivation, and the removal of practical barriers.

In recent years, the mission of Rainproof has evolved to tackle the wider and larger goal of climate adaptation, which is why the organisation has adopted the new name of Weerproof.

And after five years of raising awareness on climate change and adaptation, Rainproof was successful in lobbying Amsterdam City Council to start their own climate adaptation program in 2019.

Rainproof then became part of the council’s climate adaptation program, and its focus was broadened to all climate-related issues, such as heat stress and drought. Because of this broadened scope, the council wanted Rainproof to change its name to Amsterdam Weerproof.

As Daniel Goedbloed explained to me, “Climate adaptation is not just about rain. It's also about drought; it's also about heat stress. It's also about creating more shade, and making cooler places, as well as using rainwater to help green the city and make the city healthier again. The municipal program focuses on the internal governance and the mainstreaming of climate adaptation, and Weerproof focuses on the external network approach with our own identity, community managers, coaches, digital platform, and social media.”

Centuries after the architects of Amsterdam designed the city to protect it from fluvial flooding, the team at Weerproof are working hard to safeguard the city from surface water flooding, drought and excess sun and heat.

It’s a huge challenge, but Weerproof is bringing the citizens, businesses and public institutions of Amsterdam along with them to help take on this fight. And thanks to its network approach, Weerproof already has a sustainable track record of success in reducing surface water flooding in Amsterdam to build upon.

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

The Challenge

Despite being landlocked in the heart of Europe, Switzerland is a water-rich country.

Home to approximately 61,000 kilometers of rivers and streams and around 1,500 lakes, Switzerland accounts for just 0.4% of Europe’s total land mass, but 6% of the continent’s freshwater reserves.

Switzerland is naturally rich in terms of the quantity of its water resources, as well as their quality. Globally, around 70% of the planet’s freshwater is stored as snow or ice, and Switzerland’s lakes and rivers are fed by rainwater, natural spring water, and snow and glacier melt from the nation’s mountainous terrain. While Switzerland is now rich again with regards to the quality of its water assets, this has not always been the case.

When Professor Alexander Zehnder, former director of Eawag (the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) was growing up in the 1950s, swimming in the lakes and rivers was commonplace. However, this changed in the late 1950s into the 1960s, when Switzerland’s water bodies were widely considered to be among the dirtiest in Europe. Blighted by blooms of algae and swathes of scum and foam, raw sewage and industrial wastewater flowed directly into many water bodies.

As a result, swimming was often completely banned in prominent water bodies, including Lake Neuchâtel near Bern, the river Limmat near Zurich, and the fast-flowing river Aare, the nation’s longest river, which stretches throughout the country.

Despite the centuries-old tradition of river swimming in Switzerland being banned, it was actually the impact of pollution on fishing, another popular Swiss pastime, that had a greater impact. Although the revised Federal Fisheries Law of 1888 banned the disposal of harmful substances and industrial waste in water, by the late 1950s and 1960s, some Swiss rivers and lakes became incapable of sustaining the aquatic ecosystem and fish were dying in greater numbers from toxic substances in the water. Greater action was needed. 

First In Line To Help

Among the first people to report the problems was the Swiss fishing community, which has often acted as an early warning system for reporting challenges with the nation’s water quality. From the 1950s onwards, Switzerland’s recreational fishing community morphed into a powerful lobbying organisation, which pushed for greater water protection.

Professor Alexander Zehnder, director of Eawag between 1992 and 2004, explained the importance of their work: “I always say in Switzerland [that] a dead fish talks more than 1,000 words. When people see a dead fish in a river, they react and want to understand why. ”

“Fishing is a big recreational activity in Switzerland. People go with their kids; they go with their family. Many politically active individuals, including Swiss politicians of all political affiliations, enjoy fishing. In the Swiss political system, politicians remain close to ordinary citizens and interact with them easily, fostering a shared understanding of problems and necessary solutions.

“This can create a very powerful political lobby across all parties. In the case of fisheries, where the emotional aspects of water and fish converge, the lobby is particularly strong. So, if something goes wrong with the water and people cannot fish, there is a powerful political lobby on hand to respond.”

When Switzerland’s fishing community and regular citizens began to see dead fish washing ashore, the problem became visceral and affected people and politicians in a way no parts-per-million measurements or technical briefings could match.

While the nation is blessed with naturally beautiful water assets, improving the quality of the nation’s water bodies has required a huge amount of human effort. And these improvements have come in waves.

In 1955, the Swiss parliament passed the first Waters Protection Act. This act is regarded as fundamental to the nation’s approach to improving water quality as it shifted the onus for protecting Swiss waters from the polluters to the federal government. While this act was seminal for future legislation, its initial impact was limited. By 1963, only 14% of people in Switzerland were connected to the wastewater system.

By the early 1960s, water pollution became widely reported in the Swiss media, which created pressure on the government to act. A severe typhoid outbreak in Zermatt in 1963, caused by sewage-contaminated drinking water, added to the pressure.

This helped spark a wave of new regulations, including the Nature and Cultural Heritage Act (1967), the second Waters Protection Act (1972), and the third Act on Fisheries (1975), which provided additional powers for the government to expand the sewage network and upgrade of wastewater treatment plants.

While overall water quality improved, there were setbacks. 

Fischnetz: Creating A Systems Approach

Switzerland’s fishing community was again responsible for bringing water pollution to the attention of the nation.

By the 1990s, considerable decreases in inland fish catches, in some cases up to 60%, were being recorded by anglers. Impairments to the health of the wild brown trout population were also detected, most evidently downstream of sewage treatment plants.

This time, Switzerland needed a system-wide approach. Systems thinking is about creating a holistic approach to complex problems by focusing on the interconnected parts of a challenge and their relationships with each other, rather than addressing isolated problems.

This approach led to the creation of a national research study to measure fish catch decline in Switzerland, known as Netzwerk Fischrückgang Schweiz, abbreviated to “Fischnetz.”

As Alexander Zehnder and Patricia Burkhardt-Holma explained in their research paper for the Environmental Science and Policy journal: “A nationwide effort was initiated to elucidate the reasons for these phenomena, identify the key causative factors, and develop remedial measures. The aim of Fischnetz was to tackle this challenge and the project demanded an inter- and transdisciplinary research approach.”

As fishing catches decreased, so did angler satisfaction. The fishing community began voting with their rods—and with their wallets. Between 1980 and 2000, the sale of angling permits in Switzerland decreased by almost a quarter (23%) and combined permits for rivers and lakes dropped by almost half (46%). Since the sale of angling licenses contribute to income for Swiss cantons, this decline created financial pressure to act.

In a nation where approximately 240,000 individuals practice angling at least once a year—equivalent to 6% of the Swiss population—a significant drop in licenses represents a meaningful drop in income.

To deliver a systems approach, the Fischnetz team, led by Patricia Burkhardt-Holma, put together a project management team comprised of twelve individuals with expertise in different disciplines, including fisheries science, environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, physiology, fish disease, population biology, limnology, hydrology, and climate change.

These individuals often represented several different organisations, so they were able to bring on board additional stakeholders including the federal and cantonal authorities, chemical industry, Swiss fisheries associations, and scientific communities.

Zehnder said this broad coalition of individuals was essential. Working in an interdisciplinary fashion was crucial for bringing together experts from across Swiss industry and science to solve the problem of river and fish decline.

“It doesn't work if you have only one discipline or one sector involved,” Zehnder said. “Interestingly, the pharmaceutical industry and the chemical industry came together because people actually understood what the problem is, and they wanted to be involved from the very beginning so that we are not constructing a case against them. They said: ‘If we are at the table at the very beginning, and we put money into it, we will learn early on if we are part of the problem, and can take steps to prevent what is happening.’”

However, the even bigger challenge Fischnetz faced was aligning all of Switzerland’s 26 cantons. “I would say it was easier to get the scientists and industries onboard than the cantons,” Zehnder said. “Interestingly, some of the finance ministers of the different cantons were actually anglers.

“Getting the finance ministers of the cantons signed up was the absolute key. Having the environmental ministers is important, but it’s finance who actually do the budget. They can write a line in the budget to provide funding. It was not easy to get 26 lined up, but at the end of the day, it worked out. Getting the agreement of these finance ministers made things happen faster than we thought it would.” 

Achievements

In addition to moving quickly, Fischnetz landed some tangible results.

In more than a third of Switzerland’s’ 26 cantons (35%), new concepts for fish and/or river management were developed and implemented. The list of notifiable diseases was modified to include proliferative kidney disease (PKD), along with rules to avoid inter-river catchment transfer of infected fish. PKD is a significant concern for anglers and conservationists due to high fish mortality, especially in warmer water temperatures.

Fischnetz also initiated the citizen-led constitutional amendment initiative “Living Water” for the Swiss Fishery Association, which eventually led to revision of the Swiss Federal Water Protection Act in 2011 and the creation of the Federal Act on the Protection of Waters in 2016. Two federal by-laws and one law were adapted or revised, including changes to the by-laws of the Waters Protection Act which eventually led to technical upgrades to treat micro-pollutants at over 100 wastewater treatment plants. The funds reserved for these investments totaled approximately CHF 1.2 billion.

Fischnetz also recommended precise basin-wide measures for four areas with proven fish catch declines over the last 10 to 15 years: the Liechtensteiner Binnenkanal (LBK) and the Emme, Venoge, and Necker rivers. Measures in the LBK resulted in a clear improvement in fish reproduction, and the outcomes were partly successful in the Emme and Venoge rivers.

As of 2018, CHF 130 million were earmarked for river restoration projects by federal and cantonal authorities and communities, some projects of which were unequivocally attributed to Fischnetz. 

What Can Others Learn From This Approach?

In terms of process, one of the lasting achievements of Fischnetz is that, for the first time in Swiss scientific history, all cantonal political entities and the principality of Liechtenstein contributed cash funds to the same scientific project.

Zehnder explained that the two years’ time and energy taken to set up Fischnetz was very important as it led to the inclusion of experts, executives, and policy officials from science, government, and the private sector.

While creating a broad base of transdisciplinary expertise was very important, the ongoing support of independent institutions was also crucial.

Eawag provided long-term planning, bridge-building between stakeholders, and freedom from short-term political pressures that other institutions could not match. With financial resources and an annual budget exceeding CHF 50 million, the partnership with Eawag helped provide Fischnetz with flexibility when additional funds—though small—were required at relatively short notice.

In retrospect, the Fischnetz team identified three elements that were essential to its success.

The first was the availability of finances right at the beginning of the project to ensure a process was in place to obtain the necessary funds when they were needed. This allowed Fischnetz to concentrate energy on research and developing relationships and content.

Second, the involvement and participation of all stakeholders from the start made the process more inclusive. Everyone started from the same baseline without the need for intensive educational activities to bring late-comers up to speed. This was particularly true for politicians with executive functions and direct access to legislation and government administrations. Though they have little time for the project, their specific, early involvement allowed them to develop ownership.

The third was the importance of continuous and transparent communication to build confidence, as well as the need for clear and comprehensible communication to ensure that all stakeholders can understand and relate to the main arguments and conclusions. 

A Systems Approach

As Zehnder and Burkhardt-Holma explained in their research paper:

“One discipline alone is usually insufficient to find solutions to the complex problems in our modern world. Increasingly, academia alone cannot provide answers and inputs from a combination of disciplines and societal stakeholders are necessary.”

Adopting a systems approach meant Fischnetz provided a platform to build bridges between different geographical and disciplinary boundaries and to deliver solutions which required input from a combination of experts.

By working together and taking a systems approach, Fischnetz improved the quality of decision-making and improved the quality of Switzerland’s waterways and fishing stocks. 

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

“Water is the driving force of all nature” is a truism widely credited to the artist, engineer, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci.

One of the biggest challenges the modern world faces is how we sustain this driving force at a time when climate change threatens the supply of water while global population growth is simultaneously causing a significant and sustained increase in the demand for water.

And nowhere on earth is this challenge as acute as it is in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Data from the World Resources Institute shows that the Middle East and North Africa is the most water-stressed region in the world, with more than four-fifths of the population (83%) exposed to extremely high water-stress, followed by South Asia, where almost three-quarters of the population (74%) is exposed.

UNICEF highlights that of the 17 most water-stressed countries in the world, 11 are in the MENA region. These are: Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Israel/The State of Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In their analysis, Naser Alsayed, doctoral researcher at SOAS University of London and Dr. John Calabrese, Assistant Professor at the University of America in Washington, say the most pressing issue for water security in the Gulf is the “astonishing” rise in the demand for water. Annual water demand has increased almost five-fold from six billion cubic meters* in the 1980s to 28.5 billion cubic meters by 2020.

And demand is set to increase further with a 2020 report by Orient Planet Research forecasting Gulf nations will hit approximately 33.7 billion cubic meters of water demand annually by 2050.

Alsayed and Calabrese state: “This poses a major threat to regional water security.”

A large part of this astonishing increase in water usage can be attributed to a globally significant population boom in the Middle East and North Africa.

While historically people settled in towns and cities close to rivers to access reliable freshwater supplies for drinking, cooking and irrigation, now people gravitate towards places which provide economic opportunity that can improve their careers and wealth.

Data from the United Nations shows that across the MENA region total population grew rapidly from around 100 million people in 1950 to around 380 million in 2000 — an increase of 280 million people in half a century.

During this period the population of the MENA region increased 3.7 times, more than any other major world region. To put this into context, this was more than double the population growth of North America and almost treble the population growth of Europe.

Since the year 2000, the region’s population has slowed slightly but the region is still estimated to be home to 501 million people as of 2023.

By 2050, half of MENA countries will see their total populations grow by more than 50% compared to their population size in 2015, with the populations of Iraq and Sudan expected to more than double over this time period.

These figures have led to a large increase in residential water use, which is defined as water used for human consumption, including potable water for drinking, washing and sanitation.

However, residential use accounts for a relatively small amount of water usage.

While adults are recommended to drink three or four litres of water a day to stay hydrated in the Middle East, this still accounts for less than 1,500 litres a year.

The agricultural needs of a growing population are leading to a much larger increase in water use.

Between 500 and 4,000 litres of water are needed to produce 1kg of wheat. While 1kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water, depending on how hot the climate is.

This usage really adds up. Consequently, approximately 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are made for agricultural purposes.

However, the MENA region also faces an outsized challenged here with much higher freshwater withdrawals used for agriculture than in most nations as they battle with naturally low rainfall and limited natural water sources.

This includes Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt, where freshwater withdrawals for agriculture account for around 80% of water use according to 2021 data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, OECD and World Bank. Meanwhile, agricultural use accounts for 90% of water use in Iran, Sudan and Yemen.

While water remains the driving force of nature, in the 15th century Da Vinci may not have been able to fully envisage the extent to which water is also a driving force of energy generation, technology, manufacturing and other industrial uses.

This is a challenge particularly affecting the Middle East. For example, multi-billion investments are being made in the UAE and Saudi Arabia as these nations rapidly expand their AI infrastructure, having attracted tech giants like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.

As a result, water consumption for data centres powering AI across the MENA is expected to almost quadruple in five years, from 119 billion litres a year in 2025 to more than 426 billion litres a year by the end of the decade, according to research firm Mordor Intelligence.

Meeting the need

From the waterwheels of Hama in Syria to Iran’s system of qanats – a series of man-made sub-horizontal, underground water channels, built around 1,000 BC to transport water for drinking and agriculture – the MENA region has a proud history of innovation in storing, transporting and conserving water.

While many of Iran’s qanats are still operational after more than 3,000 years of use, nations across MENA are now leading the world in water innovation in different ways.

Desalination nations

Desalination (desal) is a crucial strategy for mitigating water scarcity in the MENA region.

In 2023, Tunisian journalist Achref Chibani published a piece for the Arab Center in Washington DC, explaining that the six Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC) of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE produce around two-fifths (40%) of the total desalinated water in the world, using more than 400 desalination plants across the region.

Around 90% of drinking water in Kuwait and Oman comes from desalination plants, while in Saudi Arabia it is 70%.

As of last year, more than 850 desalination plants were operating across the Arabian Gulf.

The cumulative projected desal capacity in the region is expected to reach 80 million m3/day by 2050, which is more than double the capacity in 2020 and eight times more than the capacity available in 2010.

One of the people working to solve the desal challenge is Constanze Simmermacher, global principal for desalination and membrane treatment at the global consulting and technical advisory firm Jacobs.

As a business, Jacobs has more than 40 years of experience in delivering desal projects worldwide. Constanze herself specialises in desalination and membrane treatment and has been working in the water sector for more than two decades.

She recently moved to the UAE, having successfully delivered desal projects for over a decade.

Constanze explained how reverse osmosis is used to desalinate water – with pressure used to force saline water through a semipermeable membrane, which extracts the salt and impurities – and that desal has become much more efficient in recent decades.

Back in the 1970s, around 20 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy were required to desalinate one cubic metre of water. This has improved significantly to between 2.5 and 3.5 kWh per cubic metre – a reduction in energy use of more than four-fifths.

Constanze told me: “Globally, with accelerating population growth, declining rainfall and unsustainable groundwater extraction, desalination becomes more important for drinking water production.

“As countries like the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia continue to grow, water demand is rising, not just for homes and cities in desert climates, but also for new industries like microchip manufacturing in Saudi Arabia, which requires additional volumes of ultra-pure water.

“Today desalination has become more energy efficient. Achieving further energy reductions is becoming increasingly difficult, so more and more desal projects are aiming to integrate renewable energy sources, like solar energy, to support plant operations and enhance sustainability.

Given their energy intensity, delivering 100% renewable desal projects is a challenge. Despite this, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) and ACWA Power have commissioned Hassyan, which aims to be the second largest reverse osmosis plant in the world and the largest powered solely by solar energy. It is scheduled to open next year, before becoming fully operational in 2027.

However, writing for the Middle East Institute, Alsayed and Calabrese warn: “While conventional water resources deteriorate, it is critical that Gulf countries do not rely solely on desalination. It cannot serve as a complete solution due to its high costs, environmental impacts and strategic vulnerabilities — all of which pose risks to long-term water security.”

Upping reuse

Reuse has an increasing role to play in tackling the scarcity of water in years to come.

As of 2022, nearly 90 percent of Israel’s treated wastewater was being reused for irrigation purposes.

A report by the US Environmental Protection Agency notes that the Shafdan wastewater treatment plant on the outskirts of Tel Aviv is the largest water treatment facility in Israel, treating around 97 million gallons per day of municipal wastewater.

The plant prevents discharges of raw sewage and treats wastewater to be reused in agriculture.

Shafdan takes sewage from Tel Aviv, where is it receives secondary biological and tertiary soil aquifer treatment before being piped to the Negev Desert.

More than 60% of the agriculture in Negev is irrigated by water from Shafdan, which is considered a model plant by the United Nations.

A 2023 paper by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) states that the number of reuse projects across the MENA region has doubled every decade since 1990, growing from 40 projects in 1990 to more than 400 in 2020.

However, as of 2022, the amount of water reuse in MENA nations varies significantly, with nations like the UAE and Qatar directly reusing more than two-thirds of wastewater, and North African nations in particular Egypt, Libya and Algeria, reusing less than 10%.

So as of 2022, the region was only directly reusing 10.5% of wastewater. The paper found that the region still needs to overcome challenges which limit the potential of water reuse, including cultural barriers and distrust, institutional fragmentation, inadequate regulatory frameworks and the lack of appropriate tariffs, economic incentives and financial models that would support cost recovery and the sustainability of reuse projects.

Leaking less

A key part of any water management strategy is tackling leaks.

Non-revenue water (NRW) is the share of water put into the water supply system that isn’t billed—lost through leaks, metering/data errors or theft, and authorized unbilled uses.

As Adel AbouJaoudé, global director of conveyance and storage solutions at Jacobs explained to me: “Investing in water loss reduction is far more cost effective than investing in developing water resources to meet increasing water demands, especially in water-scarce regions where water is produced by desalination. Other desert nations can follow this approach and build local technical capacity for leak prevention and prioritise smart network upgrades in national water strategies.”

For nations around the world, there is the potential to learn much from the Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA), which, according to The World Bank, reduced NRW from 42% in 1988 to 4.6% by 2023.

To achieve this dramatic drop in leakage, AbouJaoudé explained that Dubai invested heavily in digital solutions, including deploying advanced leak detection system using distributed geophones and noise correlation techniques.

It also replaced all mechanical water meters with up to one million smart meters, enabling remote reading and real-time monitoring of the entire water network, with some users even able to receive alerts in the event of unusual water consumption.

DEWA also introduced a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor the water network; advanced digital analytics enabled DEWA to analyse flow metering data, establish accurate water balances and identify potential areas of water loss.

Installing digital infrastructure enabled DEWA to take a whole systems approach to improving its water network.

Digital is a difference maker

Nations across the world need to operate a broad range of water management strategies to handle water supply and demand.

While desalination, water reuse and leak detection highlight a few of the main methods being used to improve water supply, digital infrastructure is the foundation stone of success in all these strategies. Digital infrastructure is the difference-maker, empowering water authorities to better diagnose and fix the challenges they are facing.

As AbouJaoudé remarked: “Digital solutions play a vital role throughout the entire project lifecycle of all water solutions.

“At the concept and design stage, digital models enable water authorities to run and assess multi-criteria scenarios and how to best design and build water infrastructure.

Not just for capital cost evaluation, but also for estimating long-term operation and maintenance costs.

“This complexity can only be effectively managed with advanced digital tools.

“Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools are critical during design development, providing the foundation for construction monitoring and commissioning. Over time, the BIM model can evolve into the backbone of the operations and maintenance (O&M) system, hosting all as-built data and equipment documentation.

“Linking mathematical modelling tools with the BIM model creates a digital twin—essentially a ‘flight simulator’ for the system. This enables operator training and allows “what-if” scenario testing to support better decision-making.

“Integrating the system with a water demand forecasting module—powered by AI, machine learning and weather forecasting data—enables operators to predict water demand days in advance. This allows the system to be run in a way that optimises energy use and matches demand with the availability of solar, wind and traditional power sources.”

While water security for all nations can be a bit of a mirage, the engineering solutions helping to make water supply in the MENA region less scarce are very real indeed.

And even when the engineering solutions are improved by AI, machine learning and cloud-based technology, we can see that digital solutions enable water authorities to take whole systems approaches which make a real, tangible difference to water networks and ultimately improve water security.

Embracing a whole systems approach to water scarcity will help to preserve water and ensure it can remain a driving force for years to come.

British Water and The Water Council in Milwaukee announce memorandum of action to help businesses export expertise internationally

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

In an era where water challenges know no geographical boundaries, two influential water sector organisations signed an agreement that opened up new business and innovation opportunities between the United States and the United Kingdom. British Water, the U.K.’s leading trade association for the water and wastewater supply chain and wider industry, and The Water Council (TWC), a globally recognised hub for freshwater innovation, stewardship and economic development based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, signed a memorandum of action at British Water’s International Reception held in London in February.

The memorandum allows British Water members to engage with TWC’s World Water Hub in Milwaukee to help them to understand and access business development and innovation opportunities, both in the United States and internationally. TWC offers guidance on regulations and market entry strategies, as well as make connections to enable British Water members to develop U.S. business opportunities and scale up exports.

British Water will help U.S. companies understand U.K. market opportunities at a time when U.K. water companies are planning to invest a record GBP 104 billion (approximately USD 130 billion) to upgrade water and sewage systems to reduce spillages from combined sewage overflows in Britain between 2025 and 2030 — the largest investment ever made by the U.K. water industry. The U.S. faces similar challenges to the U.K. with combined sewage overflows “major water pollution concern for 772 cities,” according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. About 46 million people live in U.S. cities with combined sewer systems, including an estimated 140,000 miles of municipally-owned sewers, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2004 Report to Congress: Impacts and Control of CSOs and SSOs.

The partnership comes at a particularly interesting time for British Water members looking to export globally as TWC recently received a USD 2.5 million grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Regional Innovation Cluster initiative. The grant will enable TWC to provide practical resources, such as tailored webinars and virtual market visits, to help British Water members gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. market while building connections with innovative Wisconsin-based companies. The funding will also enable TWC to enhance programs such as the BREW 2.0 Post-Accelerator, which supports late-stage startups including SMEs looking to expand and foreign direct investment (FDI) prospects.

The accelerator programme includes matchmaking with potential clients, tailored training, customised market resources, and capacity-building initiatives. The programme also enables startups to use TWC’s Milwaukee headquarters as a landing pad, offering not just office space, but access to a thriving ecosystem of water technology leaders, potential partners, and research facilities including the School of Freshwater Sciences, the only one of its kind in the United States. GKinetic Energy, an Irish firm that has developed a flow-accelerating hydrokinetic turbine capable of producing clean energy from canals, rivers, and tidal flows, is one of ten start-ups which were selected to be included in the 2024 BREW 2.0 Post-Accelerator.

In the U.K., British Water’s deep understanding of the U.K. market and strong industry connections provides U.S. companies with invaluable insights and introductions, while the organisation’s activities offer practical knowledge that can help American companies navigate the unique aspects of the U.K. water sector. Rapid Radicals, a Wisconsin-based company developing revolutionary wastewater treatment technology that can treat water 22 times faster than conventional methods, has been exploring opportunities in the U.K. market with British Water. The business uses rapid solids removal in combination with a proprietary catalytically enhanced, ozone-based advanced oxidation process to remove solids and treat organics, bacteria, pathogens, and emerging contaminants such as micropollutants. Rapid Radicals believes its solution could help address combined sewer overflow challenges in the U.K.

Both TWC and British Water will serve as knowledge hubs and entry points for companies looking to expand internationally. They will also collaborate at events such as The Global Water and Energy Exchanged (WEX) and WEFTEC, the Water Environment Federation’s Technical Exhibition and Conference, the largest conference of its kind in North America.

British Water members will also now be able to gain early access to TWC’s flagship “Land & Expand” event post-WEFTEC. Land & Expand, which is held every other year, introduces overseas companies to Milwaukee’s World Water Hub and offers insights and guidance on expanding into the U.S.

For businesses in both markets, the message is clear: international expansion in the water sector no longer needs to be a solo journey. Through the partnership, companies gain access to experienced guides, established networks, and practical support that can help them navigate new markets successfully.

The partners signed the Memorandum of Action at British Water’s International Forum in London on Monday, February 24th.

English Rivers Are in Crisis But Not For The Reasons People Think— Billions in Investment May Not Achieve the Gains Expected

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

David Elliott, Director of Ferns Natural Capital Strategy and former Group Chief Innovation Officer at Wessex Water

Headlines about English rivers being in crisis are a frequent occurrence in national media these days.

Analysing data from the State of our Rivers report helps to understand why this is the case.

The data, collected by the Rivers Trust, shows that none of England's rivers are achieving "high" overall status, the highest ranking available. And none are achieving "good" overall status either, the second highest ranking available.

The report also measures English rivers for ecological health to evaluate what is living in the river, and the presence, absence and abundance of species.

Researchers found more than four-fifths (85%) of rivers fail to reach good ecological standards; and only 15% achieve good ecological health status.

The report makes for worrying reading.

However, it’s important to remember that English rivers have not always been in this state.

Water quality in English rivers saw significant gains following privatisation of the water companies 35 years ago.

A number of rivers which had been declared "biologically dead," including the Thames, Mersey, Stour, and Wandle, were transformed after privatisation.

However, progress has stagnated over the past decade.

And according to the Office of Environmental Protection (OEP), the situation appears to be deteriorating.

The OEP, an independent watchdog which holds the UK Government to account on environmental performance stated in their May 2024 report: “Most of England’s water bodies are in an unsatisfactory state. […} Overall progress has been limited with some recent stagnation and decline in the state of water bodies. In some cases, the condition of water bodies has remained visibly poor and a cause of considerable public and ecological concern.”

However, while the state of England’s rivers has now become a matter of significant public and media interest the causes of poor river health are not generally well understood.

The conventional narrative most regularly played out in the media places blame squarely on water companies and sewage discharges.

However, the reality is far more complex.

Storm overflows, while undoubtedly polluting and therefore a potential risk to public and river health, are not alone.

The most challenging pressure on river health is land use – both rural and urban.

However, alongside land use sits a complex web of other factors that are often overlooked in public discourse (we will identify some of the lesser considered factors later).

The causes of poor river health are plural not singular.

Urban land use is one of the major challenges.

As cities expand and more and more surfaces are paved over. Rainwater which would naturally soak into the ground instead flows across paved areas picking up pollutants and then either directly into the river, untreated, through surface water outfalls, or into the sewers and is then too often expelled into rivers and other water courses. These toxic contaminants picked up from roads and other surfaces, is a significant source of harm.

England has a combined sewage system made up of hundreds of thousands of kilometres of sewers, some of which was built by the Victorians.

The UK government published its storm overflows discharge reduction plan in August 2022.

Responding to this reduction plan would require water companies to spend £56 billion between 2025 and 2050 to cut spills from Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) that discharge into inland waterways and designated bathing waters.

To tackle CSOs in London alone, Thames Water’s Drainage and Wastewater Management Plan (DWMP) has identified a need to remove more than 7,000 hectares of impermeable surfaces from the greater London area and replace them with Sustainable Drainage Solutions (SuDS). This is an area equivalent to 50 times the size of Hyde Park and almost 5% of London’s total surface area.

To achieve this is no small undertaking. The reality is we have a rainwater management issue that stems from treating rainwater as waste (even though it is also a precious resource) when it lands on our properties or public realm.

Rural land use is one of the other major challenges.

Last year a new report published by the think tank Onward found that farmers are responsible for ­polluting more rivers than water ­companies.

Analysis of Environment Agency data by the Onward found pollution from agriculture affects 40% of Britain’s rivers and lakes compared with 36% that are damaged through pollution from untreated wastewater run-offs.

The agency estimates that about half of all nitrates and 25% of phosphorus found in rivers derives from agriculture.

The water sector is investing heavily in these two main areas: reducing nutrients and tackling sewage overflow.

Water companies plan to spend more than £62bn tackling these two issues, which includes £56bn to cut spills from Combined Sewer Overflows and £6 billion to reduce nutrient pollution.

Through their drainage and wastewater management plans (DWMPs) the previous Conservative administration required water companies to upgrade 160 of their wastewater treatment works to meet the strictest phosphorus limits by 2028.

The government expects a further 400 will need to be upgraded by 2038, to reduce harmful nutrient pollution from treated wastewater.

Even if water companies achieve better than technically feasible limits in reducing phosphates and nitrogen, rivers still won't reach good ecological status without addressing agricultural contributions.

The current approach to river health is hampered by having only three main "investable streams": nutrient reduction, storm overflow reduction, and flood alleviation.

This narrow, siloed focus fails to address the full spectrum of pressures on river systems. Other significant factors include:

• Microplastics
• Pharmaceutical pollution from human consumption
• "Forever chemicals", man-made Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)
• Habitat barriers preventing fish migration
• Loss of natural floodplains
• Groundwater and surface water abstraction
• Urban development

Because these multiple causes of poor river health are not well understood, particularly how they act in combination then the problem of poor river health is at risk of being misdiagnosed.

And if our efforts to restore our rivers to health are misaligned with the causes, we are in danger of the wrong course of treatment being prescribed.

This situation reminds me of a football coach or director of football being pressured by the club’s fans to spend lots of money on one or two solutions such as buying a new defence or forward line. While buying these players might solve one problem it will not solve the wider holistic problems a club faces with culture, player commitment and engagement, management styles and playing styles.

And the investment in players will therefore not deliver the results people want.

Nature-based and community-based solutions can offer a more holistic approach to river restoration.

These might include constructed wetlands that can handle both agricultural and sewage treatment outputs while improving biodiversity and isolating carbon.

However, despite broad agreement on their potential, such solutions rarely seem to progress beyond pilot schemes.

Of the billions of pounds of planned investment, only about £3 billion is allocated to nature-based solutions.

This limited adoption of nature-based solutions highlights the challenges three key stakeholders: regulators, buyers (typically water companies), and sellers (supply chain), face when managing risk.

Understandably, stakeholders can be risk averse. However, this creates friction that prevents scaling up innovative nature-based solutions as stakeholders want to rely on proven solutions.

The regulatory system itself also poses challenges as it is historically geared towards financing visible infrastructure that can be valued as assets and paid for through water bills over time.

Nature-based solutions, which often involve behavioural changes and diffuse benefits, can be more challenging to regulate, validate.

The system also lacks proper incentives for holistic solutions.

While water companies have statutory obligations to reduce nutrients, other stakeholders do not face the same obligations, so there is much less of a lever that regulators can pull to compel other stakeholders to comply.

This creates a bias toward single-issue solutions rather than comprehensive river improvement programs.

A more effective approach would involve:

1. Creating investable river improvement programs which focus on holistic solutions rather than separate investment streams which tackle individual issues.
2. Creating catchment partnerships to increase collaboration and to deliver more local engagement and accountability.
3. Implementing policy mandates for water harvesting in new developments.
4. Using market mechanisms to enable collaboration between farmers, water companies, and other stakeholders.

Success stories for creating these market mechanisms exist.

As the former director of strategy and new markets at Wessex Water, in 2016 David led the development of a nutrient trading scheme in the Poole Harbour catchment in Dorset through a platform called EnTrade, which made it easier for farmers and land managers to collaborate with water companies to reduce nutrient loss and earn money from environmental, nature-based projects on their land.

This method meant EnTrade were able to pay farmers to change land use practices, at the time amounting to £2-4 per kilogram of nitrogen reduction achieved through land management changes

And cost the water company that same £2-4 per kilogram compared to the much more expensive £20-2,000 per kilogram cost (plus significant carbon impact of reducing nitrogen through traditional water treatment methods and the need to upgrade water treatment facilities. It doesn’t mean that water companies don’t invest in assets, it just helps to decide where the next best place to take action lies.  There have since been many other similar pilots.

However, scaling such initiatives requires overcoming institutional inertia and risk aversion.

While pressure from activists and the media has raised awareness of river health issues, the resulting focus on rapid solutions – like building storage tanks to reduce overflow incidents – may divert resources from more effective long-term strategies.

Achieving healthy rivers requires a fundamental shift in how we manage water systems, highlighting the need for more and closer collaboration between water companies, farmers, local authorities, developers and communities all of whom need to contribute, supported by Government policies which deals with some of the challenging decisions such as how and when we use pharmaceuticals, and how we manage their impact on the environment.

If the sector doesn’t invest in holistic systemic change, many billions in investment may fail to deliver the river quality improvements the public expects.

New procurement rules begin this month– are you prepared?

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

Graeme Young, Partner, CMS UK

New procurement rules for the U.K. water sector begin this month and will affect the whole sector, from water and sewerage companies to contractors, consultants, and the entire supply chain.

As of Monday, February 24th, the water companies in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland will be subject to new rules and regulations as laid out by the Procurement Act—a single rule book covering all public sector procurement.

The new rules aim to make things simpler by creating a single, uniform set of rules and regulations covering all public sector procurement, making things simpler, easier, and more consistent for contracting authorities.

As water companies operate as regional monopolies and are not exposed to competitive forces in the market, there were also concerns that they may not procure as efficiently as they would if they are subject to some form of regulated procurement.

Being governed by the same rules as the public sector means that the U.K. water market can be selectively opened up to other countries as part of international trade negotiations—a concept of market access which is well known in international trade.

The new rules will apply to all water and sewerage companies, even those that are privately owned or traded on the stock exchange.

The sector had a total expenditure of around GBP 10 billion per year and GBP 6 billion of capital expenditure per year between 2015 and 2020, but this is set to increase in the coming years.

The new rules will affect billions of pounds of spending.

However, GBP 104 billion is set to be invested in water and sewage infrastructure between 2025 and 2030—a near-doubling of current levels, meaning even more money is going to be subject to the new rules going forward.

Ahead of it going live in February, the Cabinet Office has published 47 pieces of guidance for the sector.

One of the main changes is the creation and operation of a new, fully integrated digital platform for public sector tender notices, which water tenders will be part of.

When this central digital platform is open for business, all British Water members should register to make sure that they’re part of it.

For British Water members engaged in other forms of utility procurement and public sector procurement, this new central digital platform will also be used for procurement in those sectors.

The threshold for contracts for goods and services to be part of the new procurement rules is GBP 429,000.

For capital projects and services, the thresholds are GBP 5,372,609 and GBP 884,000, respectively.

All these thresholds are inclusive of VAT.

In the water sector, long-term capital delivery frameworks and other contracts can last for a considerable number of years.

Any contracts that are awarded prior to the new regulations coming in force will continue to be subject to the current regulations, which governs procurement in the sector.

The existing grounds for direct awards (i.e., awards without any form of open competitive tendering) are generally replicated within the act.

In addition, direct awards can now be made where necessary to protect life or public safety during an emergency situation, even where the circumstances leading to that situation could be regarded as foreseeable.

This seems intended to enable utilities to respond to extreme situations similar to those that arose during the pandemic.

As we mark five years since the start of the pandemic, let’s hope that these rules are not needed to tackle a national health emergency for quite some time.

British Water is keen to hear from members on their experience with the new procurement rules, and will continue to discuss the implementation of the new act over the coming months.

Climate Change And The Water Revolution: Innovating For A More Sustainable Future

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

In an era defined by the growing challenge of climate change, the water industry finds itself at the forefront of a global environmental crisis. The industry faces many challenges, but perhaps none as pressing as climate change.

In 2023, The World Economic Forum voiced concerns that water security is our most urgent global challenge, because the climate crisis is severely disrupting the water cycle on which people and the planet depend.

As the United Nations Environment Programme has highlighted, nine out of 10 natural disasters are weatherwater-related, including extreme rainfall, flooding, drought, aridification, wildfires, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and increasing frequency of extreme weather events are putting unprecedented stress on water resources and infrastructure.

Tackling the causes and impacts of climate crisis requires innovation in the sector.

As our world changes around us, the need to innovate and work differently to tackle challenges becomes more important.

It was heartening to see the strength of the U.K. Pavilion at the International Water Association (IWA) World Water Congress & Exhibition (WWCE) in Toronto. The three key themes of the U.K. Pavilion, which delegates are set to discuss further at IWA in Glasgow in 2026, were:

• Climate adaptation: including how to manage excess water and adapting to water scarcity.
• Nature recovery: increasing the use of nature-based solutions.
• A more resilient water future: delivering whole systems resilience, managing interdependent risks, and putting people at the heart of future plans, including customers, and increasing and sustaining the great talent pool which works in the sector.

It was an honour to host a panel of British Water members in the U.K. Pavilion to discuss the challenge of innovation.

From innovations in water recycling, energy-efficient treatment processes, and adaptive water management systems to climateresilient infrastructure, the industry is reimagining its approach
to water stewardship.

Stephen Slessor, CEO of British Water member RSE, told the audience that their firm has changed the ways they build their products and has now switched to green steel, which has reduced
its scope one and two emissions by 95%. RSE has also introduced a circular economy model in its steel works, so all the rough cuts and scrap gets recycled back into new products.

This push for innovation is not without its challenges, though.

As a highly regulated industry, the water industry has naturally been conservative in its approach over the years and has to tread a balance between adopting new technologies and managing the potential risks of those challenges.

On the WWCE U.K. Business Forum panel in Toronto, Lila Thompson, CEO of British Water, highlighted the challenges consultants and contractors face, which can lead some of them to not include innovation solutions into tenders and bids, because they are concerned introducing a new innovation that could negatively affect their bid.

Yet the adoption of digital technology has the potential to play a huge part in driving the adoption of innovation. When I think of this challenge, I am reminded of the old adage of “measure twice, cut once.”

Now, we can build a project digitally numerous times before we actually break soil. Compared to the cost of delivery, planning is cheap.

Planning and designing a project digitally enables us all to test new solutions and find out new insights on how best to implement new technology and solutions to deliver the best result before work starts. As I like to say, this ability now helps to make projects shovel worthy, not just shovel ready.

Delivering digitally also highlights the work which can be done to create a truly integrated, holistic, catchment approach to water management.

At the IWA Conference in Toronto, British Water became one of 30 signatories on a renewed commitment to the U.K.’s Catchment Management Plan.

Recognising the need for collective action to tackle climate change, a group of businesses, civil society organisations, and public sector entities have come together to support the Catchment Management Declaration (CMD).

Through the creation of a new leadership group, the signatories agreed to explore a number of long-term ambitions, including:

• Championing a move to a more outcomes-focussed, place-based approach to environmental planning and delivery, including actively sharing best practice and learning from catchment and landscape exemplars.
• Developing an open framework to represent all data, evidence, and best practice to drive continuous improvement and facilitate sharing of resources to support policy makers and practitioners.
• Reviewing governance frameworks for the financing and delivery of catchment management and landscape transformation, including international best practice.

The CMD initiative aligns with the U.K. government’s 25 Year Environment Plan and emphasises the importance of catchmentbased approaches in addressing water-related challenges.

As climate change increases the complexity of water management, digitalisation has emerged as a key tool in the industry’s adaptive arsenal. Advanced sensors, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics are being deployed to predict and respond to climateinduced changes in water availability and quality.

For instance, AI-powered predictive models are helping utilities anticipate and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events on water infrastructure. Smart water meters and leak detection systems are enabling more efficient water use, crucial in regions facing climate-induced water scarcity.

However, the water sector still lags behind other industries in digital adoption, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for transformative change.

During the WWCE UK Business Forum panel in Toronto, Simon Ayley, director of strategic growth partnerships at the Water Research Centre, explained that with parametric (algorithm-based) design artificial intelligence being introduced very quickly, with very fast methods of initially designing a solution and optioneering and costing, these tasks can all be done in hours now, rather than weeks.

He highlighted that due to the five-year regulatory cycle, the water sector has moved at the pace and manoeuvrability of a cruise ship. But going forward, we have to be able to respond faster. We need to use these digital tools to save time, and then we can respond more quickly, more holistically, and in a data-informed way.

One of the most significant challenges facing the water industry is the need to balance immediate climate adaptation measures with long-term resilience building. While rapid responses to climate-induced water stress are important, the industry must also invest in long-term engineering solutions which can withstand the uncertainties of future climate scenarios.

In this evolving landscape, catchment-based approaches offer a promising path forward. Catchment-based solutions encourage holistic, and collaborative and solutions which consider the interconnected nature of water resources.

Going forward, we need to ensure the industry is aware and prepared to deliver the innovation we will need to tackle the challenge of climate change.

Anglian Water seeks to build and deepen relations with its supply chain as it prepares for AMP8

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley Systems

After Anglian Water’s liaison meeting with British Water, Mark Coates, vice president of Infrastructure Policy Advancement at Bentley Systems and chair of British Water’s International Forum, spoke to Anglian Water’s Major Infrastructure Procurement Manager Alison Bevan, MCIPS, and Head of Delivery Portfolio Management Euan Black. They spoke about their upcoming programme of work and building relationships with their supply chain as they prepare to deliver a vast capital programme as part of their AMP8 (2025 – 2030) plans.

Anglian Water is, by geographic area, the largest water and sewerage company in England and Wales, covering 20% of the land area (27,476 square kilometres) and serving approximately seven million customers. This figure is set to grow, as the region’s population is predicted to increase by more than 700,000 people by 2043, placing extra pressure on water resources and the wider environment, with new housing developments and connection to water supplies crucial to enabling sustainable growth.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of the land use in the East of England is used for agriculture, more than any other region. Agriculture’s economic contribution is especially sizeable, at roughly twice the national average. Lincolnshire supports 75,000 food sector jobs, processing around 70% of the U.K.’s fish and around 30% of England’s vegetables. This statistic demonstrates the extent to which economic activity in the region depends on water resources.

Coupled with these challenges, the Anglian Water region also has the lowest rainfall, at 2.14 millimetres per day, compared to a national average of 2.85 millimetres per day. The region also has the highest average temperatures in England (11.4 degrees Celsius versus 11 degrees Celsius).

Anglian Water operates 143 water treatment works, supplying more than one billion litres of water every day to 2.5 million households and 110,000 businesses. Between 2025 and 2030 (AMP8), the water company plans to deliver a record GBP 9 billion of investment, designed to deliver environmental enhancements and mitigate the impacts of climate change—particularly across climate vulnerable assets, as well as unlock social and economic growth in the region. They plan to achieve all these goals while keeping bill rises to a minimum.

Euan Black, head of Delivery Portfolio Management at Anglian Water, says the water company is delivering efficiently and to plan across the current AMP cycle and remains on track to close out AMP7 in a strong position.

Anglian Water will spend its largest amount on capital investment in 2024-2025—year five of AMP7—as it aims to work even more efficiently with the supply chain and end the current five-year cycle in a good position to start AMP8, where the scale of planned investment is double that of the current AMP.

Black says that it’s important for Anglian Water and its supply chain to plan for the long-term and view investment as 10- or 15-year programmes of investment rather than in five-year chunks around AMP cycles. Examples include the two new reservoirs planned, one in Lincolnshire and another in the Fens, in partnership with Cambridge Water—with the planning underway now but the benefits not being realised until 2036.

TACKLING THE CLIMATE CRISIS WITH ITS SUPPLY CHAIN

Building and strengthening relationships with the supply chain to help tackle key challenges has been an important focus for Anglian Water, particularly over the past two decades,
and will remain so in the future.

For example, Anglian Water’s engagement with its supply chain on climate change began back in 2007 when they invited key partners to HRH The Prince of Wales’ first Mayday Summit.

More recently, in February 2023, Anglian Water bought its value chain together to discuss climate change resilience, climate change adaptation, and the work towards net-zero carbon. This Climate for Change event welcomed over 100 attendees and featured Chris Stark, who was then chief executive of the Committee for Climate Change, and the day kicked off with a call to arms. Stark has since been appointed head of Mission Control for Clean Power by the new Labour government and oversees decarbonising the U.K.’s electricity by 2030.

Anglian Water sees collaboration as an enabler to the complexities of adapting to climate change. With committed leadership, and in partnership with a determined supply chain, the utility has reduced capital carbon, the carbon embodied in its assets, by more than 64.2% by 2023-2024 from its original 2010 baseline, continuing to work to achieve net-zero operational carbon emissions by 2030.

GEARING UP FOR AMP8

This collaboration with the supply chain is set to become even more important during AMP8, as Anglian Water prepares to double its investment programme. For example, in March 2024, Anglian Water announced Binnies would be rejoining the @one Alliance ahead of AMP8 to help deliver water-specific engineering expertise, along with nature-based solutions capabilities, in collaboration with the Alliance’s other seven partners.

During AMP8, Anglian Water will deliver a range of new projects, including:

• Using nature-based solutions to create treatment wetlands the size of 100 football pitches
• Delivering 52 new Sustainable Drainage schemes (SuDs)
• Increasing capacity of the waste water network by 112 Olympicsized swimming pools
• Further reducing the risk of pollutions and spills
• Renewing 695 kilometres of vulnerable pipes to futureproof water mains and sewers against climate impacts.

The water company says it needs its supply chain to help it succeed across all activity but particularly with projects or solutions that it has never delivered before, which are becoming apparent as the industry faces into the unknown challenges of climate change. Black says that Anglian Water is expecting to see a huge increase in key suppliers during AMP8, so the supply chain is going to need to be reactive and nimble enough to grow. Repeatability and consistency will also be extremely important too, as Anglian Water expects to create and deliver solutions that will work across several sites, with solutions and learnings being repeated on similar projects. Anglian Water strongly believes it is important to engage proactively and early with suppliers to solve the breadth challenges which will be seen during AMP8.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD SUPPLY CHAIN PARTNER?

Alison Bevan is Anglian Water’s lead on procurement for major infrastructure and also leads their sustainable procurement strategy. She says that Anglian Water will look at how it can develop its world-leading alliances during AMP8 to take it even further into AMP9. The principles of its alliances are good faith, value for money, open book, rewarding for outperformance, integration, collaboration, and relational contracting. While the capacity and financial capabilities of the supply chain are extremely important, the health, safety, and the wellbeing culture of an organisation are also key to Anglian Water. Furthermore, the values and sustainability of suppliers are crucial for Anglian Water as it aims to deliver against their purpose—to bring environmental and social prosperity to the region it serves, through its commitment to love every drop.

Bevan says, “As a purpose-driven organisation, Anglian Water has the ability to make a significant impact through how it engages with organisations, so there’s no point contracting with organisations which don’t share our purpose-driven values. Working together with the supply chain, Anglian Water can identify opportunities to deliver activities which increase social value, improve the local environment and local communities. Ultimately, Anglian Water wants to build partnerships with suppliers looking to pull in the same direction.”

The water company will also build sustainable practices into its contract terms and conditions with suppliers, as well as look how it can share best practice on sustainable practices with
its supply chain.

Over the coming year, Anglian Water expects to issue 18 significant procurement frameworks including data, digital and tech frameworks which are out now as well as cyber security, energy consultancy, programme delivery partner, and civils and minor buildings.

Anglian Water highlighted four key reasons why supply chain partners want to work with them in AMP8. These include the volume of work, the predictability of work, the opportunity to innovate and bring ideas to the table, and the opportunity to make a real difference to the local environment and communities.

One of the big growth areas in AMP8 is going to be nature-based solutions. Of all the nature-based solutions proposed between 2025 and 2030 across the whole industry, more than two-thirds will be in the East of England—and Anglian Water is now looking to engage with the supply chain on this ahead of an expected procurement exercise in the latter half of this year.

Supply chain health and robustness is going to be particularly important for water companies looking to deliver record investment in AMP8. It is encouraging to see Anglian Water’s awareness of the opportunities and challenges of building and deploying a robust supply chain as we close out AMP7 and start AMP8.

Better Data And Monitoring Is Helping To Drive Better Standards In The UK Water Sector – We Should Do More Of It.

Mark Coates, Vice President, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley

David Lloyd Owen, Managing Director, Envisager

One of the most effective quotes for communicating the value of data and performance is attributed to the English mathematician, Karl Pearson: “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.”

We can likely all agree with this statement, whether you are measuring performance of a water asset, measuring delivery of a water infrastructure project, or measuring personal, team, company-wide, or sector-wide performance. 

How can you improve performance if you do not measure and know where you are now?

There are some interesting examples that show how measuring and reporting data is improving performance in the U.K. water sector, which has had some success over the past three decades that tend to get very little media coverage.

Drinking water quality is one such example. The Drinking Water Inspectorate tests more than two million samples of water a year. In 1990, one year after the privatisation of the U.K. water sector, 98.9% (DWI, 2015) of drinking water samples met the World Health Organisation’s 1984 drinking water standards, according to the Drinking Water Inspectorate. In 2022, 99.97% of samples met the tighter WHO standards circa 2017. The rigorous collection, monitoring, and reporting of data provides water companies with insight if there are any problems with water quality and helps to drive better performance.

Water leakage is another area where performance has significantly improved after the collection and publication of reliable data. Water leakage in England and Wales peaked in 1994-1995, the first year in which reliable data was available from Ofwat, when 5,112 million litres were lost each day. Analysis shows that water leakage dropped considerably over the next five years to the mid-3,000 million litres of water per day, before remaining reasonably steady during the first decade of the millennium. In 2021-2022 the last year for which data is available water companies leaked an average of 2.924 billion litres of water a day. This represents a 43% fall in water leakage over a 27-year period.

However, many agree that latest national figures on leakage remain too high and more can and is being done. In 2022-2023, Affinity delivered the largest percentage reduction in leakage of any U.K. water company. Affinity achieved a 15% annual reduction in leakage by using state-of-the-art technology, data capture, and analysis to find and fix leaks. Affinity’s team of data analysts monitor water usage across its network to see if there are any sudden spikes in usage, which indicates the presence of a leak and dispatches engineers to investigate.

Similarly, data monitoring and reporting has also helped improve the quality of U.K. bathing waters. Data shows the number of bathing waters classed as good or excellent has also improved markedly over the past 30 years. Under the original Bathing Waters directive, the percentage of bathing waters meeting the “guideline” standard increased 2.5 times from 28% in 1990 to 72% in 2010. When revised, Bathing Waters Directive set higher standards. 34% of beaches were rated poor in 2000, falling to 1% by 2001, while those classified as “excellent” rose from 26% to 71%.

While most would accept that there is still much more to do on the quality of bathing water, it is important to acknowledge the improvements that have taken place so far.

What these examples show is that British Water companies are making progress when sufficient regulations are in place, the data collection is reliable, and the need for monitoring is more important and rigorous. Going forward, it will be important to ensure that current Ofwat key performance indicators (KPIs) are driven by environmental performance metrics, as well as those linked to economic and service delivery to support water companies on their journey to improve environmental performance.

Additionally, the Environment Agency (EA) has been severely underfunded since 2010. Between 2010 and 2021, funding for the EA’s work was cut by nearly two-thirds, from GBP 120 million to GBP 43 million, plus GBP 5 million for new activity. As a result, inspections for water pollution have become the exception, with companies self-reporting their performance. This kind of approach is in nobody’s interest and, as the media storm of the past few years has shown, it is not a way to foster stakeholder confidence.

However, this situation is set to change. From around 2,500 company inspections in recent years, the EA plans 4,000 in 2024-2025 and 10,000 in 2026-2027. This commitment includes inspecting all Category 1 and 2 pollution incidents and 33% of Category 3 incidents. At the same time, it will help to bring an end to self-reporting.

When water companies know where pollution is coming from, they can move from broad brush assumptions and solutions to focussing resources towards delivering more precise and tailored solutions, which means action can make more of an impact. “We cannot manage what we cannot measure” may be a cliché, but it is a useful one. As combined sewer overflow data is combined with weather data, problematic systems can be identified. The forthcoming rollout of real-time water quality monitoring will further help to understand where pollution is coming from.

Good monitoring and data are not threats, but opportunities to deliver better insights which water companies can leverage to improve performance further. Good quality data is a guideway towards best practice. Ultimately, delivering strong and robust data is in the sector’s interest as it improves performance and creates a compliance regimen that can be trusted by all stakeholders, including the regulator, customers and a sceptical media.

A data-fuelled water company is a better-informed water company. When organisations have better information, they can create better solutions—an outcome that benefits the whole sector from consumers to the supply chain.

Well-gathered and regularly monitored data is not only the basis for better performance, it also provides a basis for restoring trust.

We should do more of it.

We Need to Address the Thin Blue Line in the Water Sector to Overcome the Sector’s Big Challenges

Mark Coates, VP, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley Systems

The term “the thin blue line” was coined to highlight how police forces act as a narrow layer to preserve law and order and prevent chaos in society. Usage of the term caught on in 1922 after New York City Police Commissioner Richard Enright said it to highlight the importance of the police during a public relations effort.

Isn’t it time we started adopting the terminology of the thin blue line to highlight how important those working in the water sector are to our society?

As David Suzuki, the Canadian biologist, naturalist, and broadcaster, said, “Water is our most precious resource, but we waste it, just as we waste other resources.” It is fair to say that, without the skill and dedication of those working in the water sector to deliver high-quality drinking water, civil society would also descend into chaos.

More should be done to acknowledge and celebrate those working with water, because the thin blue line in the water sector keeps getting narrower. Yet society has never needed our thin blue line more than now.

THE CHALLENGES WE FACE

The recent Workforce Renewal and Skills Strategy: Workforce Resilience report by Energy & Utility Skills highlights how the water sector is grappling with the multiple challenges, including achieving net-zero operational emissions by 2030 and fulfilling the requirements of the Environment Improvement Plan (EIP) 2023.

The sector is also gearing up for substantial growth and change with the GBP 96 billion PR24 water and sewage system upgrade programme, and the U.K. government committing GBP 56 billion to water companies between 2025 and 2050 for upgrades that will reduce spills from combined sewer overflows.

At the same time, the water sector is experiencing increasing overall demand from a growing population while navigating more frequent extreme weather events, including more instances of flooding from intense rainfall and more frequent water shortages.

Against this backdrop, the workforce in our industry is ageing, and competition for vital skills from other sectors is becoming more intense. Just 8% of the industry’s workforce is currently under the age of 24, and more than a fifth are less than a decade away from retirement age.

Meanwhile, The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board reported that contractors working in water treatment saw their workforce decline by almost one-fifth during the pandemic–more than any other engineering construction industry (ECI) sector–according to the ECITB’s Workforce Census.

Between 2019 and 2021, the water sector lost 21% of its headcount, according to data gathered from 24 ECITB-registered companies working across the water treatment sector. The ECITB indicated that a major workforce challenge awaits the sector in the coming years, with 48% of the contractor workforce over 50 years old. Therefore, these workers are less than 16 years away from pensionable age, although many are likely to retire sooner.

WHERE WE NEED MORE SKILLED WORKERS

In March 2023, Energy & Utility Skills produced a “horizon scan” of the issues likely to affect the water sector’s workforce over the coming years, which identified five skills disciplines to focus on.

Following discussion with a specially convened group of employer representatives from the water industry, it was agreed that Energy & Utility Skills should focus on three key disciplines: nature-based solutions, net zero and bioresources, and artificial intelligence, data, and digital skills. The water sector is particularly struggling to attract workers in these disciplines.

Research from Energy & Utility Skills found there were 31,000 enrolled in IT and computing courses, 29,300 in physical and environmental courses, 28,900 in engineering courses, 11,400
in maths courses, and just 180 in agricultural/land courses. In the 2019/2020 school year, there were 36,220 graduates from these same subject areas with at least a third class/honours pass on a first-degree course. Of these, 23,880 were employed 15 months after completing their studies, but just 130 (0.5%) work in the water industry.

The Energy & Utility Skills report highlights that widening the resourcing net to successfully attract candidates from all communities and backgrounds will be essential to securing the required capacity and capability. Women account for 33% of the whole water workforce, with many of these concentrated in admin and customerfacing roles, which are prime targets for automation in the short to medium-term. Meanwhile, just 4% of the craft workforce are female, and minorities account for just 7% of workforce, compared to 13% across the population as a whole.

SOLUTIONS

The Energy & Utility Skills report highlights some potential solutions to tackling the workforce resilience challenges we face.

The report suggests that:

• Employers in the water sector should commit to achieving 5% of their workforce on an apprenticeship. However, this is likely to be more of a challenge for supply chain partners, particularly Tier 2 suppliers.
• The importance of employers providing work placements and practical experiences while studying is well evidenced and should be promoted across the industry. Such an approach might consist of a short summer university programme, consisting of expert lectures by employees and external specialists, as well as tours of sites.
• There is a strong need to develop technical standards in certain disciplines, particularly in nature-based solutions.
• Some students opt for a placement year and base their dissertation on it, which can also work well for water companies. There is potential for more partnerships between water companies and universities.

For bringing on the next generation of artificial intelligence, data, and digital talent, the report states that the sector requires a paradigm shift in terms of mindset and processes to embrace collaboration, educate employees on digital advancement initiatives, and ensure that the commitment and ownership for digital advancement moves from senior management
to middle management and the operational workforce.

To attract and retain talent into the water industry, the report also highlights how the digital and data workforce can be celebrated. In the United States, the Utilities Analytics Institute grants annual awards including best innovative utility analytics team, best utility analytics leader, and best community engagement.

I believe more could be done to showcase emerging talent in all three key sectors cited by Energy & Utility Skills, including naturebased solutions, net zero, and bioresources and data and digital skills. We could acknowledge and celebrate newcomers and apprentices in these sectors, as well as emerging talent such as the top 30 under 30 years of age and the top 40 under 40 years of age.

Industry and company purpose are also becoming increasingly important for attracting candidates. Our sector offers people a career with incredible purpose–to help us reach net zero and implement nature-based solutions to better manage the world’s most precious resource and tackle the impact of climate change.

It’s time we do more to acknowledge the important work people do in our sector, and the sense of purpose we offer, to help make the thin blue line richer, deeper, and more resilient.

United Utilities’ Industry-leading Innovation Lab

After United Utilities’ liaison meeting with British Water, we caught up with Kieran Brocklebank, head of innovation at United Utilities, to find out about the Innovation Lab event

Mark Coates, senior international director of infrastructure policy advancement
at Bentley Systems and immediate past chair of British Water’s U.K. Forum

United Utilities’ Industry-leadingInnovation Lab After Affinity Water’s liaison meeting with British Water, we caught up with Kieran Brocklebank, head of innovation at United Utilities, to find out about the Innovation Lab event United Utilities delivers 1.8 billion litres of water a day to more than seven million customers and more than 200,000 businesses in the North West of England.

Keeping water flowing across the region requires a vast behind-the-scenes operation, which involves 86 water treatment works, 165 reservoirs, 43,000 kilometres of water pipes, 79,000 kilometres of wastewater pipes, and 584 wastewater treatment works. Maintaining and improving a network, predominantly built in Victorian times, means that United Utilities supports more than 22,500 skilled jobs across the region.

United Utilities says that their purpose is to provide great water for a stronger, greener and healthier North West. Being passionate about supporting a stronger North West means that United Utilities is particularly keen to enable businesses in the North West to grow.

At the British Water Annual Conference, Jane Simpson, United Utilities’ director of capital delivery, commercial & engineering, explained more about what this growth will mean.

Going forward, the utility will do less with tier one and more with tier two and tier three suppliers. This change will enable more businesses and workers in the North West to develop expertise and skills, strengthening those companies and individuals and, in turn, improving and strengthening the North West economy as a whole.

United Utilities is also passionate about innovation, as it enables them to provide a better service to customers by making their experience better, faster, and cheaper.

The utility has been celebrated by Ofwat as having one of the most embedded innovation cultures with the water sector. It has driven innovation by making it a core value that is linked to every
employee’s annual appraisal and bonus process. This initiative is successful because it places the onus of innovation on individuals, wherever they are in the business.

While operating in a heavily regulated industry, United Utilities has worked hard to evolve its company culture into a place where experimental learning is embraced in a safe space, as well as where the appropriate checks and measures are baked into its innovation process. Developing a learning culture with checks and balances gives employees the ability and confidence to suggest improvements, as well as deliver on them.

Embracing this innovation culture has helped United Utilities to lay the foundations of its groundbreaking Innovation Lab event. For the past five years, United Utilities has run an Innovation Lab with external suppliers from across the world with the aim of encouraging suppliers to work with the water sector. The utility’s Innovation Lab event also looks to accelerate how ideas are tested and adopted.

This 14-week innovation programme provides successful applicants with the opportunity to test their solutions in a live environment, while gaining access to and building relationships with senior United Utilities executives, with the potential to lead to longer-term commercial partnerships. More than 600 businesses from across five continents have submitted their ideas for consideration to the industry-leading Innovation Lab. The first four Innovation Lab events led to United Utilities testing 30 new concepts, with 12 proven “world firsts.” They also led to five long-term contracts with suppliers who are new entrants to the water sector.

Some of the successful innovations that have come out of the lab series include:

Artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up wastewater asset inspection: United Utilities is using AI to help speed up repairs to its network of wastewater pipes by semiautomating the review of CCTV inspection footage.

Since the introduction of CCTV for pipeline inspections in the 1950s, the process of reviewing footage has remained largely manual—and very time consuming.

The increasing volume of work across the water sector has highlighted the need for modernisation.

Every year, United Utilities inspects more than 1,000 kilometres of pipeline using CCTV cameras. This process generates thousands of hours of footage, which had been manually reviewed to check for pipe damage or obstructions that could lead to flooding. With the Innovation Lab, United Utilities has adopted cutting-edge technology to dramatically speed up the process. After a successful partnership with VAPAR, an Australian AI company, CCTV survey processing times have been reduced from 10 days to two days—an 80% improvement. VAPAR uses AI to speed up pipeline repairs by semi-automating the fault detection process from inspection footage.

Founded by two female engineers in Australia, United Utilities first began working with VAPAR in the second Innovation Lab held in 2019. VAPAR uses a collaborative intelligence approach, which sees AI being used to support human expertise.

AI to assess pipe health and predict failure: U.K. firm Datatecnics took part in the first Innovation Lab and have since developed five new products, which boost the resilience of water networks by using AI software and innovative hardware to assess pipe health.

Datatecnics’ Critical Infrastructure Pipeline Protection System® is able to take an inert pipe surface of any material and transform it into a digital reporting environment.

After gaining backing from United Utilities, they have co-created new products and services that are helping United Utilities to predict failure before it occurs. Building on this achievement, they have won a place on the prestigious Imagine H20 Accelerator programme and have gone on to secure extra investment.

3D printing: ChangeMaker 3D has produced the first 3D concrete printed wastewater chamber to be used in the U.K. water sector and identified the huge potential for 3D printing in the water sector. Their work with United Utilities has always had a focus on increasing social value for the North West.

ChangeMaker 3D have now won new investment from Ofwat’s Innovation Fund to work with United Utilities and others to continue their development, creating an environment where the digital skills of the future are identified and training material developed.

Water quality: Altitude Thinking from Grangemouth has developed a series of autonomous, remotely operated vehicles to collect water quality samples and data from difficult to reach locations.

United Utilities’ fifth series of the innovation lab has just begun. It will be interesting to see what other improvements lab participants bring to the sector in future years.

Ahead of International Women’s Day, we caught up with Alicia Douglas, CEO and Founder of WaterRising Institute, to find out more about what the institute and its crucial partnership with British Water will do to improve gender equality in the water sector.

Mark Coates, senior international director of infrastructure policy advancement at Bentley Systems and immediate past chair of British Water’s U.K. Forum

In 1942, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw gave an interview to Boston’s Christian Science Monitor where he said, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

When you listen to Alicia Douglas, founder of WaterRising Institute, a Michigan-based, not-for-profit organization dedicated to women’s empowerment and the sustainable management of water, it is also apparent that Americans and the British are one people joined together by a similar set of global challenges.

The shared challenges facing the United Kingdom and the United States include an aging workforce, the need to re-invest in old infrastructure, dealing with the impacts of flooding from climate change, and the challenge of attracting and retaining women into the water sector.

When it comes to the statistics and trends of women working in the sector, both nations are strikingly similar. According to the Brookings Institution, although women make up 46.8% of workers across all occupations in the U.S., they account for only 14.9% of the water workforce.

Sector demographics published by Energy & Utility Skills highlight that, although women account for 47% of workers in all sectors in the U.K., they only make up 19% of today’s water sector workforce. Many other minorities are even less represented in the water sector. Globally, women occupy less than 5% of water workforce leadership.

Currently in both the U.K. and the U.S., there is a deficit in terms of finance for infrastructure repair and a pipeline of trained professionals. This situation is especially true for women.

To fill the gap, the public and private water sector needs systemic and transformational shifts to not only attract, but also retain women.

Douglas began working in the U.S. water sector after the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, when the city changed its domestic water supply source from Detroit-supplied Lake Huron water to the Flint River.

The switch caused water distribution pipes to corrode and leak lead and other contaminants into domestic drinking water.

All in all, nearly 100,000 city residents were exposed to lead through their drinking water—close to 9,000 of whom were children under the age six.

The Flint water crisis was noted for disproportionately affecting women, with fertility rates decreasing by 12% in the city and foetal death rates increased by more than half.

When working closely on the Flint water crisis, Douglas noticed that there were not many women working on managing the city’s water supply.

When she discovered this situation was a wider national problem and then a wider global phenomenon, Douglas launched the WaterWoman Project, a WaterRising program focused on increasing gender diversity in water management by engaging with the leaders of the global water industry.

It is a journey that has taken Douglas from Flint to Washington D.C. to New York, and across the world from France to Israel, and from Portugal to India.

Two weeks ago, Douglas landed in London on 19th February 2024, where, on behalf of the board of directors of the WaterRising Institute, she signed a memorandum of understanding with British Water CEO Lila Thompson to help improve the pipeline of female talent entering the water sector in the U.K. This momentous occasion also saw Dr. Mark Fletcher, British Water Chair, Dr. Anusha Shah, President, Institution of Civil Engineers, and several other key leaders from the U.K. water sector in attendance.

As part of the memorandum of understanding, British Water and the WaterRising Institute will work together to build awareness about the breadth of water jobs among women and girls and to highlight the demand for new workers.

Douglas was then joined by British Water’s Charles Shachinda and her team member from India, Neha Khandekar, as she went to 10 Downing Street to meet Myles Stacey OBE, special advisor to the Prime Minister on Education. WaterRising is working with British Water on bringing water and education leaders together in the U.K. to help get more women interested and excited about working in the sector.

As part of WaterWoman Project, Douglas and her team are also working tirelessly on a three-year timeline to build a movement and partnerships that increase awareness and collect data for research on gender gap analysis in policy and practice. The institute is seeking support from and building partnerships with key leading national public and private agencies in the U.K. and India to leverage existing policies and allocate a dedicated section for workforce development in the water sector.

“We have a water crisis, and we need all genders to be at the table to solve it,” Douglas said. “We can’t solve the water crisis without addressing gender.

“As women, we are used to nurturing the next generation in our families and communities, and we should have an equal role in managing and nurturing our water, as water is feminine and one of the most precious resources on Earth. Water needs her voice.

“We need data to identify the gaps for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as barriers faced by women in the workplace in the water sector. Access to more robust data can enlighten us to better understand and support companies on workforce development. As women, we also believe that we need to know if there are gaps in retaining young men in the industry.

“I’m very excited about the progress we are making in the U.K. by working with British Water to make gender equality a priority in how we manage water in one of Europe’s largest economies.”

In the U.K., for much of 2022, all but one of the top jobs at the U.K.’s FTSE -listed water companies were held by women after the promotion of Louise Beardmore to chief executive at United Utilities.

However, this statistic masks the wider structural challenge the U.K. workforce faces on gender equality and the lack of a pipeline to create the next generation of female leaders in the water sector.

Women are still underrepresented in leadership, management, and entry-level roles across the U.K. water sector. To change this situation, we require not only training, but a larger gender
sensitisation program to break the apparent systemic barriers, which WaterRising’s data collection and analysis aim to confirm.

By working together as one people, British Water and WaterRising plan to solve their shared challenge of increasing female representation.

The Importance of Innovation In Delivering AMP8

Mark Coates, senior international director of infrastructure policy advancement
at Bentley Systems and immediate past chair of British Water’s U.K. Forum

In Delivering AMP8 We caught up with Stefan Iles, category manager at Dŵr Cymru (Welsh Water), to talk about how thecompany is making use of innovative solutions to meet Ofwat’s upcoming requirements to improveefficiency levels and customer service.

Welsh Water is owned by single purpose company Glas Cymru, which has no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of customers. It is the only not-for-profit utility company in England and Wales, serving 1.4 million homes and businesses, and supplying 828 million liters of drinking water every day. It is the fourth-largest company in Wales and maintains 27,000 kilometres of water mains and over 36,000 kilometres of sewers.

Like all water firms in England and Wales, it must prepare for the five-year asset management plan (AMP8), which starts on April 1, 2025.

AMP8, which is set by Ofwat, the body responsible for economic regulation of the privatized water and sewerage industry in England, will transform the water industry’s commitments towards tackling storm overflows, climate change, and customer expectations on service, society, and the environment. British water companies are planning to double the amount of investment in their infrastructure from 2025 to 2030, which will mean the greatest investment in aboveground and belowground assets for more than 30 years. Other water companies—including Southern, Northumbrian, and Yorkshire—have recently issued periodic indicative notices for capital works in AMP8. The plan has a combined value of GBP 14.8 billion, although it could end up being only half the total investment over the regulatory cycle.

Welsh Water aims to spend GBP 1.2 billion on the environmental improvements required through the National Environment Programme (NEP).

It will be impossible for water firms to deliver the intended AMP8 outcomes without innovation. Welsh Water is no different and will aim to achieve its NEP improvements by employing sciencebased innovative solutions, such as using natural and nature-based approaches. The utility is confident that it will achieve improved river water quality while ensuring long-term cost effectiveness.

The company has already shown its dedication by doubling its value of investments focused on innovation from circa 1% to 2% of turnover from AMP6 to AMP7.

Welsh Water is targeting leveraged investments regarding competitively won work with partners for research, technology development, science, and innovation. These investments will pay for solutions that include introducing peak flow wastewater treatment technology to supplement its RainScape scheme, which reduces sewer flooding by separating rainwater from the existing system.

Other measures include spending GBP 130 million on 17 zonal studies to refurbish and redesign priority drinking water networks that are most problematic for customers during the AMP5, AMP7, and AMP8 periods. Welsh Water will also invest GBP 115 million to improve the resilience of its reservoirs against severe storms, as well as around GBP 90 million on a new water treatment works in southeast Wales, as part of AMP7 and AMP8.

Last year, the utility updated its innovation strategy to help deliver strategic outcomes from its Welsh Water 2050 vision and to support its PR24 submission. This vision sets the company’s ambition to “become a truly world class, resilient, and sustainable water service for the benefit of future generations.” It believes that this strategy is the best way to ensure that it can continue to provide resilient, sustainable service over the long term.

This strategy focuses on six principal areas, including:

• Achieving acceptable water quality for all customers
• Working towards a lead-free Wales.
• Ensuring the affordability of services delivered to customers.
• Continuing to help protect river and bathing water quality
• Improving service to all customers.
• Using nature to reduce flood risk and pollution.

Each response has a dedicated journey plan that provides a detailed roadmap to deliver the innovation strategy. They include safeguarding clean drinking water through catchment management, working with customers and communities, and supporting ecosystems and biodiversity.

To achieve the 2050 goal, Welsh Water has doubled the leveraged value of its innovation investment between 2020 and 2025. The utility has four key enablers for innovation: people and culture, co-creation and communication, processes and systems, and resources.

Welsh Water is seeking to create a culture that provides a safe space for its people to succeed or fail fast and learn while also providing support to help balance risk and uncertainty.

The firm will work more closely and openly with partners under the co-creation and communication banner. It looks forward to working with the new centre of excellence for innovation in the sector—Spring Innovation—to both coordinate technology development trials and disseminate knowledge, including knowledge from work funded through Ofwat’s GBP 300 million AMP8 innovation fund.

Processes and systems include Welsh Water’s iLab governance process, innovation forums, and customer service strategy. The iLab is made up of heads of services from across the organisation who have quarterly sessions to review its progress.

As a not-for-profit company with a core value of being open to ideas, the firm has listened to its customers’ views and proven its desire to embed innovation throughout its business.

The belief is that this plan will put Welsh Water well on the way to delivering its AMP8 aims and becoming a world-class water company.

How Smooth Spending Is Critical to Utilities and Subject Matter Experts in AMP8

By Mark Coates, Senior International Director of Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley Systems, and Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation

Cyclical spending means the water sector is losing workers, efficiency, and innovation. Utilities and subject matter experts must work together to ensure that the supply chain has the capacity and capability to deliver in AMP8.

In 2010, British Water conducted a survey to assess the number of employees working in member organisations throughout the regulatory Asset Management Plan (AMP) cycle. Members include supply chain companies working in the United Kingdom’s water and wastewater sector.

The survey found that the average reduction in employees among members during an AMP cycle was 40%. When extrapolated to the whole water sector, it equated to between 20,000 and 40,000 employees lost and rehired every five years. British Water estimated that the impact of this cycle leads to between 3% to 5% lower productivity based upon the costs of redundancy and rehiring staff.

The costs of a boom-and-bust cycle to the water sector are quite staggering. In 2010, using Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development data, British Water estimated that the cost of employees being lost and rehired during the AMP cycle was worth GBP 600 million at every price review, or GBP 2.6 billion over four price reviews. That number would be over GBP 4.2 billion now that we are approaching AMP8.

Back at the start of the last decade, Ofwat assessed that the lost productivity during the investment programme results in water customers paying an additional GBP 5 to GBP 6.50 on their bills. However, it is the subject matter expert (SME) supply chain that feels the effects of the impact on skills, training, health and safety performance, productivity, morale, and the mental health of workers and employers.

According to the survey, 91% of members said that the boom-and bust cycle negatively affected morale, while 95% reported that it negatively affected staff turnover, with similar responses received for efficiency and profitability. More than four-fifths of members (81%) said that it negatively affected innovation.

With investment in Britain’s water infrastructure set to double during AMP8 to tackle combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and reduce leakage, it is important to raise concerns about the impact of cyclical investment on the sector’s ability to meet this pipeline of work.

It is heartening to see the investment that it is being planned to modernise Britain’s water infrastructure. However, there is also a need to modernise funding and planning of AMP cycles to achieve the best results with this investment.

British Water’s modelling and data on the impact of the boom and-bust cycle was a landmark for the sector, and its work was cited heavily in the HM Treasury’s July 2012 report titled Smoothing investment cycles in the water sector.

Government and water companies have made strides in smoothing out the investment cycle. Ahead of AMP6 (which began in 2015), the industry made attempts to reduce the effects of the boom-and bust cycle by setting up the Cyclicality Working Group. Their work resulted in accelerating early contractor involvement tendering for AMP6 and long-term alliance frameworks, where supplier contracts span five to 10 years between a select number of engineering consultancies and contractors.

While their efforts work well in some areas of Britain, more could be done to restructure how the sector works. Currently, asset management plans are drawn up on a five-year cycle, as has been the case since the 1990s. These cycles, however, still create uncertainty and pauses in investment. While some frameworks operate outside of this strict cycle, investment can still be dampened in the run-up to the end of one cycle and the start of another, as happens with business investment before and after a nation’s general election.

People pause investment while they wait to see what will happen.

The AMP cycle tends to lead to a period of up to 18 months in which consultants are appointed and designs are drawn up—but no actual construction work takes place. It is then followed by a “race to spend,” with intensive activity in the next 12 to 18 months.

While there are always many reasons for a business to collapse, the water sector has had some high-profile casualties, including North Midland Construction—a company that had worked chiefly in the water industry but had to call in administrators in 2021 after a refinancing plan fell apart. When North Midland Construction collapsed, it owed GBP 80 million to the supply chain.

A longer-term planning and procurement cycle would enable the industry to not only phase its spending better, but also come up with better strategic approaches to long-term issues and solutions. Scottish Water is now working to 30-year business plans with seven-year mini plans, and British SMEs are already noticing an improvement in smoothing out investment. It could help to unlock the potential of more regular work for British SMEs, which thrive on certainty and regular income.

Water companies in England and Wales are already rightly assessed and ranked, according to customer measure of experience (CMEX), which measures the quality of services delivered to household customers. They are also ranked for developer measure of experience (DMEX). To help improve the industry for SMEs, it should also be possible for Ofwat to incentivise utilities to spend in a way that supports the supply chain, as well as increase accountability by rating utilities for the supply chain measure of experience (SMEX).

British Water currently ranks water companies in its annual Water Company Performance Survey for some elements of cyclicality, with members scoring utilities for performance during the AMP transition on factors that include:

• Effort and commitment to reduce disruption
• Attitude to suppliers’ continued profitability
• Utilities’ handling of the tender process for establishing framework agreements
• Regular communication of projects

An SMEX assessment from Ofwat ranking water companies on supply chain engagement could help assess SME headcount, project pipeline visibility, innovation, and ability to plan for the future, as well as metrics that could indicate if the supply-chain ecosystem is healthy enough to withstand the impacts of cyclicality.

In 2021, British Water established its Supply Chain Task Force to address issues that had become threats or obstacles to supply chain sustainability and well-being. Angus Fosten, business development director at Partech Instruments, has been leading the task force’s cyclicality work and found that cyclicality is getting worse for SMEs, not better. The task force also found that 30 years of the boom-and-bust cycle has damaged the supply chain and has impacted skills retention, as companies are having to diversify and slim down to survive.

Getting all parties together to talk through these issues is vital, and British Water has been working hard to get them in a room together. In fact, they did so at the first annual conference Better Together: Time for Change on 21 November in Manchester. Finding solutions is particularly critical now. The industry is facing major challenges with leakage and water shortages, and AMP8 will require twice as much investment as AMP7. The bigger the sums involved, the more important it is that we spend it in the right way.

With government ministers, utilities, and SMEs all looking to successfully deliver investment in British water infrastructure, it is imperative that all parties work together to ensure that Britain’s supply chain is in good health and has the capacity and capability to deliver the significant increase in infrastructure investment that our country needs. Flattening the spend curve would enhance efficiency across the supply chain, leading to enhanced value for the water companies and their customers.

After Affinity Water’s liaison meeting with British Water, we caught up with Gerald Doocey, head of asset planning at Affinity Water, to find out about his organisation’s plans.

By: Mark Coates, senior international director of infrastructure policy advancement at Bentley Systems and immediate past chair of British Water’s U.K. Forum

Affinity Water is the largest water-only company in the United Kingdom, supplying 948 million litres a day to 3.8 million people. It owns and manages water assets and networks in an area of approximately 4,500 square kilometres, which is split over three regions in the South East of England. Its central region serves parts of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Greater London, Hertfordshire, and Surrey. The east region delivers water for Essex while the southeast region serves part of Kent.

Affinity Water has been supplying water to the local community for more than 170 years and covers three London airports. It currently has the highest individual demand for water in the U.K. at 157 litres per person per day, compared to the national average of 141 litres per person per day.

The firm faces the challenges of climate change and population growth, so to help overcome them, it has big plans to reduce water usage. It also has one of the most ambitious leakage reduction targets in the water industry. Affinity Water had the largest reduction in leakage of any water company in 2022-2023 at 15.8%, surpassing their target of 14%. The company states that they are well on track to meet their 20% reduction target for this asset management plan (AMP) period by 2025. In part, it is because Affinity Water is running one of the industry’s biggest campaigns, Save Our Streams, which has more than 240,000 customers signed up to receive advice and devices for saving water. Also, last autumn, the firm produced a draft plan for providing a sustainable, efficient, and affordable supply of water for the next 50 years from 2025.

Affinity Water faces a shortfall of 449 million litres of water a day by 2050 but aims to manage this through its water resources management plan (WRMP). The company’s WRMP was developed in alignment with the U.K.’s first regional plan for water resources. The plan includes further reductions in leakage and the demand for water, as well as investment in new infrastructure for new sources of water to ensure long-term, resilient supplies for customers, leaving more water in the environment to help globally rare chalk streams in Affinity Water’s supply area.

New water resources include a scheme to transfer water normally flowing into the sea from the Midlands to Affinity Water’s supply area by using existing infrastructure. The “Grand Union Canal Strategic Transfer,” one of Affinity Water’s most innovative strategic resource options, would also see the firm take treated water from Severn Trent’s Minworth site through a new, closed 15.5-kilometre pipeline to the canal near Atherstone in Warwickshire. Water would be abstracted at a location near Leighton Buzzard and stored, first being treated at a new water treatment works on site and then transferred to its supply area.

Another part of the WRMP is a Thames-to-Affinity water transfer, which would see water transferred through a new pipeline from the River Thames. The water-only company is looking at two routes. A western route would be facilitated by shared use of existing lower Thames reservoirs, taking water from the Thames using either a raw-water transfer from an existing lower Thames reservoirs system or a direct river intake to a new water-treatment works. The eastern route would involve a new raw-water transfer from the river upstream of King George V reservoir, transferring the required water to the Lee community.

With these innovations, Affinity Water is looking to build on successes already achieved. In terms of water quality, it has maintained industry-leading performance in the compliance risk index (CRI) rankings in the industry, the metric used to measure water quality performance. Much of this success has been down to acceleration work with reservoirs maintenance and improvements in treatment processes, as well as the competency of its workforce.

In 2022-23, Affinity Water met all its water industry national environment programme (WINEP) obligations—requirements to improve the natural environment—and is on track to achieve the same by the end of AMP 7.

In AMP 8, which starts in two years, the firm wants to install smart meters for 377,000 households and 20,000 non-households. This advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) programme will transform how the water company operates. It is currently working on its technology requirements and a procurement strategy, allowing it to go out to tender towards the end of this year to deliver the smart meter programme. It will run a pathfinder trial and install 20,000 AMI meters through the regulator Ofwat’s Accelerated Infrastructure Delivery Project next year.

To achieve its goals, Affinity Water is looking at increasing enhancement spending in AMP 8 by about 40%. It is currently in the process of selecting partners that can deliver the size and complexity of its plans for the period. It also wants to invest GBP 135 million in strategic regional water projects, GBP 110 million in maintenance and repair, and GBP 50 million on trunk and distribution main replacement. It expects its AMP 8 smart meter programme will cost around GBP 150 million. To reach its connect 2050 programme, it believes that trunk mains laying booster pumps and storage will require about GBP 90 million.

The firm also wants to be carbon neutral by 2030 and has built carbon accounting into the heart of its planning process, recently rolling out a new carbon calculator developed with Mott MacDonald. It used Copper Leaf (C55) Portfolio optimiser to develop their AMP 8 plans. It is also working on the world’s first water neutrality development in collaboration with Ofwat and the charity Nesta. It has an innovation steering group that meets bi-monthly, looking at water poverty, remote leakage detection, and smart metering.

In its strategic direction statement, covering 2025 to 2050, Affinity Water has four core ambitions:

1. Leave the environment in a sustainable 
and measurably improved state; 

2. Be prepared and resilient to shocks and stresses; 

3. Deliver what customers need at an affordable price for all; and

4. Work with communities to create value for the local economy and society.

Affinity Water is now putting the building blocks in place to help it meet these ambitious goals.

By Mark Coates MCIHT, Senior International Director of Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley Systems.

British firms have a multibillion-pound opportunity to deliver water infrastructure for new, world-leading property developments in the Middle East.

The Egyptian Ministry of Housing, Utilities & Urban Communities signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United Kingdom’s leading water sector trade association, British Water, during the U.K. World Water Innovation Summit in London.

The agreement aims to establish a framework for bilateral cooperation on water projects for 27 provinces and new cities across Egypt. It will allow the export of the U.K.’s water sector and supply chain expertise needed to help with Egypt’s ambitious modernisation plans on desalination, water reuse, and investment in human capital.

Egypt plans to build new cities spanning 580,000 acres and accommodating 30 million inhabitants. The country’s population is set to grow from 100 million to 180 million in the next 40 years. These new cities include the New Administrative Capital, a city of 6.5 million people located 45 kilometres outside Cairo, with all main government departments, foreign embassies, a 20-tower central business district, and the “iconic tower” that will be the tallest in Africa.

Egypt is far from unique in Africa and the Middle East. Many parts of the area have rapidly growing populations and are keen to bring order to new urban growth, no longer wanting their cities to be overcrowded or relatively unplanned. These new cities offer not just more space to live, but also the prospect of living better with more thought given to the supply and conservation of key resources like water.

Perhaps the most high-profile new development is the smart city of NEOM in Saudi Arabia, with three futuristic new cities—The Line, Trojena, and Oxagon—built in an area the size of Belgium.

NEOM water transmission requires approximately 600 kilometers of large diameter (DN 700 to DN 2200) carbon steel pipe, associated valves, equipment, utilities, and pipeline culverts. Up to 20 pumping stations will be commissioned and delivered by the end of 2024, and six major water reservoirs (and other large storage tanks) with a total storage capacity of 6 million cubic metres will be delivered over the next four years.

In response to the business opportunities for U.K. firms in the region, British Water is setting up a new Middle East and Africa (MEA) focus group. In addition to existing opportunities for British firms to provide physical infrastructure, there will be a significant need for British expertise in the field of digital and data. In the new city of The Line, all water assets will be smart and able to be monitored and controlled in real time (or near-real time) due to data and digital software.

NEOM will meet all its water needs through desalination using revolutionary and sustainable technology, which is fully powered by renewable energy. High-value chemicals and minerals for use in industry will be extracted from the brine left behind by the desalination process and, to protect the marine ecosystem, the development is committed to a fully integrated resource recovery seawater treatment (FIRRST)—a world’s first at this scale.

The Middle East’s new megacities place a huge value on data and digital solutions due to the dry conditions and the extreme water stress in those countries.

NEOM has pledged that 100% of wastewater will be recycled and used for irrigation. It is also determined to recover all resources from wastewater and biosolids, and then harvest cellulose, nutrients, grit, and biogas, which will be used for landscaping, agriculture, construction, and to offset energy needs.

Large-capacity water reservoirs will also be strategically located throughout NEOM. Potable water reservoirs, able to satisfy up to five days of demand, will be built at key points in the network. Most of these reservoirs are significant concrete structures with a storage capacity of over 100,000 cubic meters.

British contractors are in a key position to help with these projects. British Water already has direct relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Major U.K. contractors—with which British Water has strong relationships— are all active on these new megaprojects. Mott MacDonald, for instance, has a 70-year history in Egypt.

The idea behind British Water’s MEA focus group is that it can also open the door to smaller, more specialized contractors with specific expertise in water technologies, data and digital solutions, water treatments, and expert consultancy, as well as plant, pipe, and monitoring equipment.

Scale is everything. British Water can leverage the skills, experience, and contacts of its 400 members. And it does not end with Egypt and Saudi Arabia— British Water is planning different focus groups for different world regions.

To find out more about the British Water MEA focus group, please contact Charles Shachinda, British Water’s Technical Officer – International.

Angela MacOscar, head of innovation at Northumbrian Water, highlights past successes from innovation festivals, and how this year’s event will be bigger and better than ever.

Mark Coates, Senior International Director of Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley Systems

To make innovation happen, sparks of inspiration and ingenuity need to fly.

Some people may be sceptical that one event can yield dozens of inspiring ideas to solve a range of problems. However, Northumbrian Water has proven that its innovation festivals do just that.

By bringing together people from a variety of sectors since 2017, the events have produced ideas that can save lives, as well as money.

The water company’s week-long festival is made up of “sprints” and “hacks.” Sprints are focused, time-constrained sessions where teams come together to brainstorm new ideas and create solutions to problems. Data hacks are like sprints, but participants analyse data to come up with insights and innovative solutions.

At the 2017 Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) Innovation Festival, members recognised the need to digitally map underground pipes and cables. Then, at the 2018 event, a dedicated sprint came up with a pilot version of a map that caught the attention of the United Kingdom government, which led to the government officially setting up the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR).

When utility companies know where other firms’ underground pipes and cables are, they can avoid accidentally striking them. Field workers will be able to let asset owners know if they find an issue without needing to know to whom to send the information too. 

There are an estimated 60,000 accidental strikes per year in the U.K., which cost around GBP 2.4 billion to fix and result in lost productivity. These incidents can be fatal and cause lengthy delays to a project. Health and safety figures show there were at least 37 cable injuries in the U.K. because of accidental strikes last year.

While utilities have always shared maps, it was an incredibly slow and labour-intensive process to get hold of them, and there was a lack of consistency in how they were created. Northumbrian Water identified that legal issues around data sharing between utilities and government agencies were the biggest hurdles that prevented underground mapping from taking off. By exploring the barriers to data sharing, NWG and Ordnance Survey could write a data sharing agreement to overcome the problem.

Northumbrian Water got the right people together for days of discussions at its innovation festival and found a way forward.

The Geospatial Commission secured GBP 3.9 million of funding from the government to extend North East underground map pilot for a further two years. After extensive work in collaboration with Ordnance Survey and the Geospatial Commission, Northumbrian Water helped develop what would become NUAR.

The U.K. government then adopted the system and started rolling it out to three pilot areas—the North East England, Wales, and London—in the spring of this year. The government will begin to roll out NUAR to the rest of the country from this September, meaning that, for the first time, all the data for the U.K.’s underground pipes and cables will be in one place on a colour-coded map. However, for security reasons, utilities will only be able to see a very small portion of the map at any one time.

Northumbrian Water estimates that underground mapping will save its business alone around GBP 1 million a year—and billions of pounds for companies across the U.K. over the coming years. The register is predicted to deliver at least GBP 350 million per year of economic growth through increased efficiency, as it reduces asset strikes and reduced disruptions for citizens and businesses.

More than 300 organisations have now signed up to work with the NUAR by entering into a data exploration agreement (DEA). These organisations include energy, water, and telecommunication companies; local authorities; and other public sector bodies that own buried assets. DEAs are one of the first steps in the process that allow NUAR’s data experts to map an asset owner’s data to the NUAR data model and provide feedback. As employees can record inaccuracies in the register when they find them, utilities can review any flagged-up inaccuracies and evaluate whether the register needs updating.

Another inspiring initiative to spring from an innovation festival is “NoDig.”

Northumbrian Water and technology firm Origin Tech came up with the idea at the 2021 festival to tackle the problems caused by leaking pipes.

Water leaks are common. Data from the regulator Ofwat shows 51 litres of water per person per day were leaked in England and Wales in the financial year 2020-2021. Normally an average of GBP 750 can be spent on excavation or digging to fix a leaking pipe.

But with NoDig, a mixture of water, gel and minerals is injected into the pipe. The solution then finds the hole, goes through it, and seals the pipe from outside.

These “self-healing” pipes can save water companies the costly price of digging up roads and pavement, enabling repairs to happen more quickly.

Northumbrian Water, which has 25,545 kilometers of water mains and serves around 2.7 million people, is currently using the system on smaller pipes. However, they are working on developing it so that it can be employed on pipes with wider dimensions.

Given the breakthroughs made during previous innovation festivals, there is much expectation that this year’s event will be bigger and better than ever.

It is hoped that the event, being held between 10 and 13 July at Newcastle Racecourse, will deliver many more game-changing ideas.

Among the 35 activities at the festival, there will be 34 sprints and three data hacks. Delegates will come from all over the world, with around 2,000 people at the racecourse and at least another 1,000 online. This number is a far cry from the first festival in 2017, when only 1,000 people from 140 organisations came to six sprints and one hack. While that first festival was smaller, 34 innovative ideas and solutions came from that festival.

Following last year’s theme of “untapped potential,” this year’s event will explore the power of people and what communities can achieve when they work together. The theme of “citizens” is based on a book of the same name by Jon Alexander, which highlights how the world is going to enter the age of the citizen.

Unleashing the power of everyone equips society to face the 21st century challenges of economic insecurity, climate crisis, public health threats, and polarisation. Because when institutions treat people as creative, empowered creatures rather than consumers, it encourages people to help make change happen.

Alexander, who wrote Citizens after the pandemic, said, “If we give ourselves and each other the chance, we can fix this.” As it has proven in the past, the NWG Innovation Festival is all about bringing people together to fix things.

Government, Consumers, and the Water Sector Need to Work Together to Reduce Water Usage

Interview with Douglas Whitfield, operations director at South East Water, and Lee Dance, organisational director at Water Resources South East

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, Bentley Systems

South East Water supplies 2.3 million customers through a network of 9,000 miles of pipes. It delivers about 530 million litres of water every day, with each customer using 150 litres a day on average. The company has more than 250 boreholes, six rivers, and six reservoirs from which to draw water, as well as 87 water treatment works.

Between 2020 and 2025, South East Water—which serves customers in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, and Berkshire—will invest over GBP 433 million in extending and upgrading treatment works and laying new water mains.

Reducing consumption of resources is one method that society can adopt to help save the environment, according to Canadian author and journalist JB MacKinnon.

One of South East Water’s main aims is to make their water supply more resilient by reducing water usage. However, tackling this challenge cannot be done by South East Water alone. It requires industry, government, and customers to work together.

South East Water has led the United Kingdom’s water companies in installing water meters, which has proved a particularly effective way of cutting down water usage. Therefore, the company started a compulsory metering programme between 2011 and 2012 and finished between 2019 and 2020, with 90% of its households now on a water meter.

Measuring people’s water usage and charging them per unit has led to people being more strategic with their water use, resulting in an average 16% drop in usage. It also reduced water leakage, as customers’ water supply was checked when the meters were fitted and South East Water identified and fixed any leaks.

South East Water maintains that it would be advantageous for smart metering to be made more accessible and understandable to customers and companies. A study of 158 water meters installed in Port Macquarie in New South Wales showed that smart metering can save up to 46% of their total water usage through leak detection.

The water company would also like to see the governmentproposed policy of requiring all water-using products—such as taps, showers, toilets, and dishwashers—to include an efficiency label to raise awareness of their water usage. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs consulted on this idea at the end of 2022, and it would enable customers to clearly see which
products are more efficient than others and make an informed choice on the products to buy, helping them save water and money.

The Australian government recently revealed some of the results of its water efficiency labelling and standards scheme (WELS). Last year, water usage labelling saved customers AUD 1.5 billion in utility bills. It also saved 158 gigalitres of water, equivalent to 63,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Across the wider South East region, the population has increased by around 1.2 million people between 2002 and 2020. Ensuring that new housing developments are water neutral—meaning that water usage does not increase after new homes are built—is expected to become an increasingly well-used tool to limit water usage. In fact, water-neutral design codes are being used by some councils across the south and are expected to become more commonplace in the future.

There are also a number of measures that customers can undertake to reduce water usage. For example, fixing leaky toilets can deliver significant benefits. The campaign group Waterwise has said that a single leaking toilet wastes an average of between 215 and 400 litres of water per day and that between 5% and 8% of all toilets are leaky.

Waterwise stated that the majority of leaky toilets use the newer dual-flush mechanism. To counteract this loss, customers can get leaky loo strips that identify leaks that are not clearly visible. When placed at the back of the toilet’s pan, they turn a different colour if there is a leak.

Other measures that South East Water recommend to reduce domestic consumption include harvesting rainwater to water gardens and reducing time spent in the shower, which can save 8 litres of water per minute.

While it takes all parties working together to reduce water usage, South East Water is keen for people and businesses to understand that every individual effort makes a difference.

Scottish Water Plans Greater Investment While Working to Achieve Strategic Ambitions

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, Bentley Systems

Mark Dickson, Scottish Water’s Director of Capital Investment

After Scottish Water’s liaison meeting with British Water, we caught up with Mark Dickson, Scottish Water’s director of capital investment, to find out his organisation’s plans.

Scottish Water maintains more than 30,000 miles of clean water pipes, supplying 5 million customersand over 2 million households. It has 33,300 miles of sewer pipes that collect more than 1 billion litres of wastewater every day from Scottish homes.

The publicly owned supplier has more than 2,000 water and wastewater treatment works,and its underground pipe network stretches across nearly 100,000 kilometres—more than twice the circumference of the world.

These assets are complex and diverse, but many of them were built more than 50 years ago. Additionally, some of the statutory body’s water mains and sewers are well over 100 years old.

Scottish Water has made managing the risk of these assets a key driver to improving its service over the past few years.

It also has three primary strategic ambitions to achieve before 2027: service excellence, great value and financial sustainability, and going beyond net-zero emission.

To achieve these ambitions, upgrade ageing assets, and prepare for one of the biggest issues facing all water companies—climate change, the organisation plans to increase investment by up to 20% to 30% over the next five years.

In its strategic plan “A sustainable future together,” Scottish Water sets out how it plans to deliver service excellence, including taking a systems-based approach to transform its operations.

It will work in partnership to protect source waters and proposes to remove lead from the public water network by 2045.

The organisation wants to guarantee that there is always enough water available by reducing leakage, improving operational efficiency, and encouraging customers to use water wisely.

To ensure great value and financial sustainability, the strategic plan shows the supplier’s commitment to keeping customer prices as low and stable as possible over the long term. It will limit investment to that which can be delivered efficiently and effectively.

The supplier has conducted a detailed review of the way it currently manages assets and has been working with industry experts to create a 10-year plan to improve the way it does this. With better information, it expects to make better investment decisions.

The Scottish government has an ambitious plan to reach net-zero emissions for all greenhouse gases by 2045.

Scottish Water has already reduced its operational carbon footprint by 41% since 2006. But it wants to go further and beat the Scottish government’s target, achieving net-zero emissions by 2040.

The organisation recognises the scale of the challenge; however, it has set out a range of measures in its strategic plan to accomplish its beyond net-zero emissions goal.

These measures include increasing its own and hosted renewable energy generation from 200% to 300% of its electricity usage by 2030, further investing in energy efficiency and partnering with its supply chain to support low-carbon construction.

Another area of its business that Scottish Water has been working on is improving its GBP 865 million procurement system.

While the feedback from its supply chain is generally positive, the company wants to speed up its procurement process from an average of eight months to six. The body hopes that these changes will make the process attractive and engaging for firms.

Scottish Water also wants to achieve greater efficiency through its supply chain, a goal set out in its annual procurement and supply chain strategy for 2022-2023.

It also wants to work with tenderers on detailing costs that would build up in the lifetime of a framework, which they already must do as part of the process of bidding for a contract.

For the past year, Scottish Water has focused on supply chain ethics and looking extremely carefully into where raw materials and products are coming from.

It has a strong “risk-mapping approach” that can drill down into up to four layers of a supply chain to find out where materials and products come from.

The organisation has changed suppliers where it does not feel that ethical standards are being met and is looking for partners— like-minded bodies in the industry to help it end unethical supply chains. Conducting its business ethically is important to Scottish Water, and it requires that its suppliers to do the same.

Scottish Water has set the bar high. It has ambitions to deliver excellence while acting responsibly and ethically—at a time when it faces significant challenges. As with all water companies, it has to serve a growing population and operate in a challenging economic climate. However, Scottish Water is determined to innovate and improve activities to continue providing a quality service to customers—and to do all this in a fully open and transparent manner.

A Smarter Way to Future-proof Our Water Supply

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, Bentley Systems Joe Lawson, Account Manager, Water Utilities, Northern Europe, Bentley Systems

After what has been the driest summer in fifty years—exacerbated by extreme, record-breaking temperatures—the Environment Agency declared drought status across eight regions of England on Friday, 12 August 2022.

In the seven days that followed, drought status was declared in a ninth region of England Yorkshire—and in several areas of southwest Wales too.

As a result, households across the United Kingdom have been urged to cut their water usage by taking shorter showers, letting their cars go dusty, and learning to love a brown lawn. With a hose pipe ban in place in many parts of the U.K., you can forget about filling the hot tub or the paddling pool too.

While the water industry is working hard on its response to the environmental challenges that currently face us, we know that we can, and must, do more if we are to future-proof our water supply—not just this summer, but for the years and decades to come.

Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, recently called for increased deployment of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) across the U.K.’s water network. It is a call that we all welcome.

Like many of us in the industry, Armitt believes that this type of infrastructure is the best way to take better control of our water consumption, increase supply efficiency, reduce wastage, and improve the country’s overall resilience to drought.

That is because in addition to giving customers greater control over their water use and bills, the detailed, real-time data generated by AMI is a vital tool in our battle to reduce leakage and meet unprecedented—and growing—demand.

Thames Water is already using AMI technology to help optimise their supply and minimise wastage, as part of their “smart water” initiative.

Software developed by the Thames Water data team—a suite of 16 data science products—means that they are now able to make better real-time decisions about the operation of their network, as well as respond more quickly to blockages, leaks, and burst pipes.

By monitoring and responding to intelligent, real-time analytics, they can reduce the number and duration of supply interruptions experienced by their customers. The impact of AMI technology has already been significant, including:

• Saving 43 million litres of water per day: Smart meters have helped detect more than 28,000 leaks on customers’ private supply pipes. Timely repairs on these leaks have saved a massive 43 million litres of water a day.

• Dealing with sewage blockages 10 times faster: Thames Water has significantly increased their response time to sewage blockages. Before AMI, they cleared on average 20 to30 blockages per month. With AMI technology, they now clear 350 blockages per month.

• Meeting leakage reduction targets: Customer-side leaks account for around a quarter of Thames Water’s total leakage, and the meter data was cited as playing a large part in meeting the leakage reduction target in 2019-2020. 

• Helping customers have “smarter homes”: Data from smart meters is also being used to support Thames Water’s award-winning smarter home visit programme, highlighting higher-consuming households who are then prioritised for a visit by one of their engineers. During the visit, customers receive free water-saving advice and can have gadgets installed in their homes to help reduce their water use, such as water-saving taps and shower heads. Smart-metered customers use, on average, 17% less water than those individuals without a meter. Typically, high-usage households can reduce their usage by around 100 litres per day following a smarter home visit.

• Reducing supply interruption due to burst pipes in the winter: Thames Water’s freeze-thaw indicator runs simulations and allows them to increase supply availability at reservoirs to mitigate water lost from frozen pipes that have burst.#

By 2025, Thames Water will begin the roll out of smart meters across the Thames Valley, and they expect to have meters fitted for all suitable homes by 2035.

They said that they would like to see government, regulators, and the rest of the sector getting on board too, with smart meters rolled out to all homes across the U.K. as a matter of national priority.

This sentiment is indicative of the other conversations with various U.K. water utilities throughout this year. There is an understanding that the real-time status of the U.K.’s water networks has been a top priority for many years but with the recent infrastructure, weather, and economic challenges, and threat of worse to come for the U.K., this topic has never been more important. 

With the steady increase in smart meter and Internet of Things solutions throughout the network, the amount of available data has skyrocketed and is on an increasing trajectory. This influx of data provides an incredible opportunity to optimise the business of water through advanced analysis and data-driven decision-making to improve network resilience, reduce nonrevenue water losses, and drive higher quality environments for our consumers. 

The increase in digital twin ready projects and drive towards the next generation of data-driven operation centres is connecting disparate data, information, and knowledge. It is providing a wider and more insightful view of a utilities water system to truly enable data-driven decision-making. It is all being done through centralisation and analysis solutions, such as the iTwin-powered OpenFlows digital twin platform. Digital twins are becoming an ingrained part of the U.K. water utility networks work and will soon improve the reliability of water systems, reduce utilities’ Capex and Opex, lessen their environmental impact, and provide their consumers with safe and efficient services. 

Since the Census Helps Plan Infrastructure and Housing, Could a National Framework for Data Help Overcome the Shortcomings of the COVID-19 Census?

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, Bentley Systems Dave Philp, Chief Value Office, Cohesive

What comes to mind when you think of the census? Or rather, when comes to mind?

Many people think of it as a historical document. For them, it might conjure images of rapidly growing
industrial cities. There is some justification for that—the census has been part of our lives for a very long time. The first census of England and Wales was taken in 1801, partly to accurately record the number of men who might fight in the Napoleonic Wars.

Since that time—and particularly in the digital era—we have seen huge improvements in our ability to collect, store, analyse, and present data. Yet, the census remains important not just for historical reasons, but also for modern-day planning. It provides a large and consistent dataset on a range of important topics, which can be built up to national level or broken down into tiny constituent parts. Information from the census helps the government and local authorities plan and fund new transport infrastructure, as well as services, such as education and health.

For example, the figures that came out on December 8 showed how people in different parts of England
and Wales get to work.

Previous iterations have provided enormously valuable insight into patterns of public transport use, gaps in provision, places that are most dependent on cars, and the relative importance of different modes in different areas.

These key insights have been vital in correcting an occasionally London-centric narrative, which fails to understand, for example, how crucial buses are outside the capital, or just how much other areas are reliant on cars as their only realistic option for getting to work.

Because this is census data, sample sizes remain perfectly usable, even when we drill down to tiny areas for hyperlocal insight, making it useful for local and national planning.

We also know that the census is measuring the same thing in the same way—whether in Cardiff, Carlisle, or Canterbury. There are no gaps. North and south, rural and urban, city and village—everywhere is measured.

When we then combine this data with other consistent national datasets—on deprivation levels or demographic characteristics like race and age—we can understand what is happening on multiple levels.

There are other datasets on public transport use, but they often have limitations that make them far less usable.They might only cover a specific geography, such as Greater London or Greater Manchester, or they might not measure all modes. They might use different methodologies so that it is impossible to put together to form an accurate picture: a jigsaw where the pieces don’t fit.

So, the census data remains vital. And yet, sadly, the transport data in the 2021 census was compromised by COVID-19. Census Day was March 21, when more than 4 million workers were on the government’s furlough scheme and with millions more working from home. Non-essential retail remained closed and social gatherings were still restricted—as was public transport.

The effect on the data was that the data was reduced to the level of historical document—a snapshot of life under COVID-19, but little more. It tells us little to nothing about the underlying shifts in public transport and car use since the previous census. It does not help us form future-focused policy.

For example, 31.2% of working adults told the census takers they worked “mainly from home.” While it may have been true in March 2021, it wasn’t true before COVID-19 and it isn’t true now. In fact, separate data collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows the number of people working from home had fallen to below 15% by April this year.

Of those who said that they did commute to work, 65.6% said that they drove a car or van. At the time of the last census, in 2011, that figure was 60.8%. While we might conclude that we have failed on public transport, and that more people indeed been choosing to use the car, we simply cannot make that assumption given the circumstances. When the census was taken, many people either could not use public transport—because it wasn’t available— or chose not to for reasons that no longer apply—because they were worried about their own health and the health of others.

Another census taken now would likely give very different results. However, we do not take a second census. Instead, we have to try to piece together a far fuzzier picture based on different datasets on car use, bus use, train use, and walking and cycling.

It isn’t just commuting data that was skewed by the pandemic. COVID-19 affected all parts of our lives and, consequently, all parts of the census. Even the most basic data—on where people live—was tainted.

For example, the census figures for 2021 show that several London boroughs had significantly lower populations than in 2011. Camden was down from 220,338 to 210,100, Westminster from 219,396 to 204,300, and Kensington and Chelsea from 158,649 to 143,400. Those figures were very different from what statisticians believed the situation to be before COVID-19 struck. Population estimates provided by the ONS suggested Camden, for instance, had a population of 279,516 in 2020.

Were those estimates wrong? Almost certainly not. Rather, the census was taken at a time when tens of thousands of people were working from home or left London and other cities to live more cheaply somewhere else. It is reasonable to assume that, as people have returned to offices, they have also return to live in cities.

A second census isn’t a realistic option. Indeed, there has been talk that the 2021 census might be the last. One reason for this idea is cost. While the 2011 census cost GBP 482 million, the 2021 edition was said to have cost in the region of GBO 900 million. That isn’t the whole story, as the sum includes a major modernisation process at the ONS, which will make its data more widely available and relevant. But the fact remains that conducting a census is not cheap.

It is also not necessarily the best way of achieving its very important ends. As our data literacy improves, as more data becomes easily accessible, the census already looks like a cumbersome anachronism. COVID-19 taught us the importance of timeliness in data—and information from the census, which is conducted every 10 years, can hardly be said to be timely. How useful is it to know commuter patterns from 2011 when setting transport policy in 2015 or 2020? And should we have to wait until 2031 to know conclusively what impact our decisions have had?

The key data challenges we face now have relatively little to do with collection, or storage, or analysis. Rather, they have to do with our national data architecture—the tedious but vital work of planning what we want to collect and why, as well as of making sure individual acts of data collection add meaning to a deeper pool.

A local authority collecting live data about public transport use is valuable to that local authority. All local authorities collecting the same data in the same way is infinitely more valuable to national and local decision-makers alike. It does not have to be costly or labour intensive, as much of the most valuable data is already being collected by the private sector, if not the public.

However, this data is not always shared, and it is not always recorded in a way that is commensurate with other datasets. Of course, private companies—even those that are paid for or subsidised by the public purse—should not be expected to publish genuinely commercially compromising data. Still, there is a great deal that we could and perhaps should expect them to publish.

A national framework for data—with consistent definitions, categories, quality standards, and protocols for sharing and storage across central and local government—might be a good starting point.

A country could leave it up to individual towns and cities to connect themselves, build their own train tracks, and create their own designs. However, if you want a true rail network, you must make sure that all the tracks are of the same size and type.

We have made great strides in harnessing the power of individual datasets. Now, the real power of data lies in bringing them together. If 2021 is indeed to be the final census, perhaps its legacy
will be to spur us to a better approach.

Britain's Water Industry is Pioneering Digital Workflows to Help The U.K. be a World Leader In Decarbonisation

U.K.'s Water Industry

Although it might not always be considered a major contributor to climate change, the water  industry has a surprisingly large carbon footprint. The water industry accounts for 6% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the U.K., largely as a result of energy used to run household appliances like washing machines and dishwashers.

Modern building regulations limit the water and energy consumption of new-build homes. However, the industry faces an emissions-cutting challenge when supplying water to the vast majority of the U.K.’s 28 million homes.

In November 2020, Britain’s water companies agreed on a bold new pledge to tackle the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions worth GBP 2.8 billion and to become a net-zero industry by 2030, making it the first sector in the U.K. to do so.

The sector has been working toward this goal for more than 20 years. The net-zero pledge was agreed upon with the insight of a decade’s worth of emissions data, and the industry itself has been steadily reducing its carbon footprint since the start of 2010, reducing operational greenhouse gases by 45% since 2011.

This achievement has occurred by increasing renewable electricity generation by 43%, releasing almost half of it back into the national grid. It has also been successful in creating biogas from sewage treatment sites, generating 35,000 cubic meters of biomethane and mitigating 68,000 tonnes of emissions.

The sector is proud of its achievements but understands that there is always more to do. Water companies have taken significant steps towards meeting their net-zero targets and providing a more environmentally friendly water supply to their customer base.

“ By collaborating as a sector to tackle the water industry’s emissions and setting out a path to net zero, we can set an example for industries across the world to follow suit.”

Ahead of COP26, Northumbrian Water’s CEO Heidi Mottram set out her company’s plans to reach net zero by 2027, placing it at the vanguard of climate action by the sector. Northumbrian is the first and only company to use 100% of its sewage to create energy and can save 125,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions as it powers all 1,186 of its sites using renewable energy.

In her pledge, Mottram argued that collaboration was the key to success when tackling climate change, which is exactly why the industry’s net-zero 2030 plan is so significant. Tackling the climate crisis at an industrial level requires sectoral bodies to bring about systematic changes that everyone can become a part of.

Anglian Water has a decarbonisation programme that aims to generate 44% of its power supply from renewable sources by 2025, rising to 80% by 2030. It includes planting 11 million trees on 20,000 hectares of land across the low-lying Anglian region. The company’s plans also involve harnessing its data analytics to improve emissions monitoring, enabling greater insight into its carbon footprint and understanding the challenges to overcome.

Like Anglian, Yorkshire Water is especially motivated to help tackle the climate crisis, with many of the region’s major cities suffering from severe flooding in recent years—Hull being a particularly severe case. Yorkshire flooding in 2015, 2017, and 2019 cost a combined GBP 145 million and impacted thousands of homes and businesses.

Yorkshire Water ’s decarbonisation plans involve the deployment of solar panels that produce 120 megawatt hours, leading to a 30% reduction of on-grid electricity use by 2030. Yorkshire is also the first company to trial the use of electric vehicles (EVs) on its sites, deploying a small fleet of EVs on a new, GBP 72 million self-sustainable waste-to-energy plant in Leeds.

The U.K. is often regarded as a world leader in tackling global CO2 emission levels and leading the global decarbonisation effort. It was selected as the host for COP26, as it has the resources and the motivation to create a more sustainable world for future generations.

Helping us be that leader is Britian’s water industry, which has been a pioneer for more than a century—from the days of Joseph Bazalgette to the GBP 4.2 billion Thames Tideway scheme. In Victorian times, the challenge was developing a system to supply homes with clean water and flush sewage away, preventing epidemics like the cholera outbreak of 1849. Today, our system is much more high-tech and sophisticated, but our industry faces an equally important challenge. The risk of increased greenhouse gas emissions, long-lasting climate change, and rising global temperatures pose an existential threat to our way of life.

By collaborating as a sector to tackle the water industry’s emissions and setting out a path to net zero, we can set an example for industries across the world to follow suit. These schemes create thousands of jobs and inspire a generation of innovative minds to develop new a d exciting solutions to help the sector achieve its goals.

Southern Water Targets an 80% Reduction in Sewer Overflows

Water and sewage treatment utilities are now seeing the environment as a benefit to progress

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy

During the Victorian era, when much of the United Kingdom’s water infrastructure was first built, engineering was king.

If there was a question, the answer was usually to build better, and build bigger.

Nature took a back seat.

Times have changed, and so has the water industry. Now nature is seen not as an obstacle to progress, but as a key part of the solution in providing a clean, secure, and sustainable service.

And thinking smarter is prized above thinking bigger – with the collection, sharing, and analysis of data playing an increasingly vital role.

Just a little bit of smart thinking can make a huge difference.

Southern Water, for example, has calculated that preventing water from roads and roofs going into the system will have a significant impact on reducing storm overflow spillages (CSO). This is because only a minority of CSOs account for approaching half of spills.

The aim is to reduce the peak levels of water so the system is not overwhelmed – just as government’s spent the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic trying to “flatten the curve” of cases so that hospital admissions were spread out over a more manageable time-frame.

Some relatively simple interventions – swales alongside roads, or smart butts that monitor rainfall and release contained water at safe times – can help achieve those goals.

In the long term, the aim is to make sure environmental considerations around water supply and sewage are factored into new and existing developments removing hard surfaces from the built environment such as impermeable driveways, concrete play areas, paving over gardens, and extensions which create more roof run off. That requires close cooperation with external partners - whether local authorities or developers - as well as an understanding of water network that is both panoramic in scope and forensic in detail.

It is vital to know not just what the network looks like, but how it functions in different scenarios: to think of the network as an ecosystem rather than a static system of pipes.

Data is crucial - not just the ability to collect it and share it with partner organisations, but to analyse it in ways that yield genuine insight. Skills in these areas are now at a premium in the industry.

Keeping CSO spillages to a minimum is only one environmental objective. The modern water customer doesn't just expect reliable, clean, and relatively cheap water. Their concerns are far broader. That is particularly true of the places covered by a company such as Southern Water. Hampshire, the isle of Wight, Kent, and Sussex all have not only highly-prized rural environments, but thriving tourism industries based around coastal areas, too. Protecting and enhancing those are an economic as well as an environmental concern.

If protecting nature is a significant challenge, working with nature provides at least some solutions. Sustainable drainage systems can, for example, directly run off to natural features or environments where it is beneficial. Nature seals can reduce the amount of wasted water. Farmers can be educated to make simple changes to their practices, which dramatically affect the amount of run off - cultivating against rather than with the slope, for example. 

The existing built environment is another matter. Roads, for example, represent a major challenge - they cannot simply be removed and replaced with alternatives with better drainage. Southern Water's approach is more targeted: identify the biggest problems and look for ways of retrofitting drainage solutions that make a real impact.

There is a thread of pragmatism and conservation running through a lot of physical work that southern is doing. While some things can be ripped out and built anew, such a Victorian approach can be impractical and have an excessive impact on the environment. CSOs, for example, may be decades old, but they still fulfill an important function that protects public health as well as property. When there are smart solutions to stop them overflowing, tearing them up and replacing them with a segregated system starts to seem not just unnecessary but wasteful.

Southern currently has five separate pathfinders where they are trailing new and innovative approaches. Each covers an area with distinct challenges, and in each, the approach is tailored to local circumstances. Deal in Kent has a specific challenge with surface water flooding; Margate requires a large, Highly engineered urban drainage system. For the Isle of Wight, Southern Water is working on a whole-island system that aims to cut outfalls into the sea and rivers by up to 80% for 90% of the island. No two challenges are exactly alike, and therefore neither are the optimal solutions. What matters are results - and that is a sentiment even the Victorians would agree with.

Anglian Water: How Tackling Leakage Enabled the U.K.’s Driest Region to Avoid a Hosepipe Ban

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy

Why Wessex Water Is Moving to an Outcomes-based Model to Deliver Even Better Results

Mark Coates, International Director of Public Policy and Advocacy

Wessex is investing more than GBP 1.4 billion into its capital investment across the region by the end of AMP7. This investment comes with its own challenges, particularly in the face of increasing market pressure, with material prices above the highest inflation figures Britain has seen.

However, despite its excellent performance for PR 24, Wessex believes that focusing on long term outcomes rather than short-term outputs will enable it to deliver a better service for customers.

Taking this approach enables water companies to think more strategically over an extended period, freeing them up to choose the best tools and delivery routes to achieve the results policymakers, customers, and suppliers need, rather than effort being focused on delivering granular outputs that focus on long-term outcomes does not stop Wessex responding to the more immediate challenges during an AMP7 cycle, which require more direct action. 

Delivering this investment required a shift in urgency from a project, as Wessex had planned to deliver it in AMP8 but it is now part of the AMP7 plan. Wessex would like to make delivering an outcomes based approach a priority in AMP8. Like many in the sector, Wessex is working with ageing sewage and water infrastructure while improving reliability, system resilience, and value for money.

For example, one key area of focus has been on procuring a 6.5-kilometre sewage pipeline to build resilience to its network in Bristol. The scheme will connect Bristol’s existing trunk sewer to the Frome Valley relief sewer, as well as will direct waste more efficiently around North Bristol to its water recycling centre in Avonmouth. 

As part of this policy, it has harnessed the power of local wetlands in the Wessex region at its Cromhall Water Recycling Centre. As part of a trial project to find a nature-based alternative to chemical dosing to reduce phosphorus in treated wastewater released back into rivers, according to Wessex Water, it has found an 111% increase in biodiversity value, with the projected increase expected to continue significantly over a 30-year period.

These schemes benefit from an outcomes-based approach.

Wessex works with more than 2,000 suppliers every year, from subject matter experts to international civil engineering firms. Traditionally, procurement has been based around short-term 
outputs, such as cost, with people asking, “What can you deliver for us and for how much?”

Instead, Wessex’s model has evolved to thinking about procurement in terms of long-term benefits, instead asking, “What value are you adding to our business model by working with us, and do your values align with ours?” 

It is important for Wessex to deliver value for money, but it must also approach procurement by building relationships with suppliers based on shared values and ensuring procurement activities are undertaken ethically and free of conflict of interest.

By adopting this approach, Wessex can continue to deliver an industry-leading water and sewage treatment program for the people of the region that is ethical, sustainable and delivers value for money at a critical time in society.

To remain one of the U.K.’s best water and sewerage company, Wessex knows that it has to keep the innovation and outcomes flowing