The Environment Feb 2020 issue

The Environment

February 2020

THE MAGAZINE FOR THE CHARTERED INSTITUTION OF WATER AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

LIZ BONNIN CLIMATE CHANGE: WE CAN CRACK THIS

12

ANALYSIS Scotland’s zero-carbon plans

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16

POLLUTION Come on feel the noise

18

SPECIAL REPORT Diverse and inclusive?

20

SPECIAL REPORT Mental health at work

24

FLOODS Time for some straight talk

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A UNIQUE THREE-DAY EVENT AND EXHIBITION FOCUSING ON FLOOD AND COASTAL ISSUES IN A CHANGING CLIMATE Telford International Centre, UK, 2-4 June 2020 PRODUCED BY:

CONVENED BY:

Exhibition and sponsorship opportunities still available Find out more at floodandcoast.com or email info@floodandcoast.com

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Contents

16

10 COMMENT

CAREERS

05

16

Letter from the editor

OPINION 06

How do you make your business greener and more sustainable? First, you walk away from your comfort zone, B Corp leaders tell Andy Middleton

18

MY ENVIRONMENT 08

Conservationist Rodrigo Costa Araujo works deep in the Amazon rainforest, where he’s recently identified a new species of marmoset

Liz Bonnin’s latest assignment takes a long, hard look at how livestock farming impacts our planet. Can she persuade the rest of us to eat more sustainably? Karen Thomas went to meet her

20

COVER IMAGE: BBC/ANDREW CROWLEY

Scotland has taken up the challenge from the Committee on Climate Change, aiming to go further, faster than the rest of the UK to meet its emissions targets

Could noise pollution become the next public-health scare? New research suggests it has broader impacts on health and wellbeing than we think

FLOODING 24

ANALYSIS 12

Troubling new research points to a mental-health crisis among men in engineering. Is macho workplace culture to blame, asks Mark McBride-Wright

POLLUTION

INTERVIEW 10

Is the water and environmentalmanagement industry doing enough to recruit, retain and promote people from Black and minority-ethnic backgrounds – and will it take mandatory pay-gap reporting to make the sector more equal?

Six industry leaders share their views

27

Are we setting the right tone and using the right language when we talk to people and communities about the risks they face, asks Phiala Mehring North Wales is vulnerable to flood risk – and its poorest coastal communities are more exposed than anyone. Reagan Duff looks at how Wales can protect its citizens from climate change while addressing social inequality

16 30

CIWEM’s Environmental Photographer of the Year SL Shanth Kumar documents how rising seas threaten fishing villages in India

WATER 32

Could groundwater help the world’s most drought-prone cities to avoid water shortages? Stephen Foster, Michael Eichholz, Ricardo Hirata and Mohammed Faiz Alam report

AREA REPORT 36

New Orleans is sinking because its sophisticated storm-water management systems prevent groundwater recharging – so it’s time to turn to a natural approach, writes Dan Grandal

CIWEM NEWS 38

Now the elections are over, we must hold the new Conservative government to its environmental promises, says CIWEM policy director Alastair Chisholm

40

CIWEM buys the Flood and Coast conference

40

CIWEM events – what’s coming up near you

41

Obituary: David Bellamy

42

Producing Flood and Coast will put CIWEM on the map at COP26, writes Terry Fuller

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One team, one goal Climate change is our greatest challenge. It requires us to work as one for the benefit of all.

We find sustainable ways to make infrastructure more resilient by bringing together experts in climate science, flood and asset management, water resources, economics, digital solutions and engineering.

Our teams work closely with stakeholders and communities to make sure our projects create inclusive social outcomes and better places to live while contributing to net-zero ambitions.

Opening opportunities with connected thinking.

Search Mott MacDonald climate resilience

British Construction Industry Awards 2019 Climate Resilience Project of the Year: Shoreham Adur Tidal Walls

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Mind the gap RECENT WEEKS HAVE catapulted the impacts of climate change on our weather systems into global headlines. At the turn of the year, as Australia and the Amazon burned, communities across the UK were bracing themselves for or emerging from a new wave of floods.

After a wet autumn, rain raised the UK’s already high groundwater and river levels. In the week in which most people returned to work after Christmas, the Environment Agency issued nearly 60 flood warnings, indicating that it expected the communities in question to flood, and put out nearly 200 additional flood alerts naming other areas at risk.

December’s flood woes came after a deluge hit swathes of Wales, Gloucestershire, the Midlands and Yorkshire in November, wreaking havoc on communities, farmland and businesses. November’s storms breached riverbanks and flood defences across the middle of the country. Defra described the level of rainfall as “unprecedented”.

This issue of The Environment looks at flood from three angles; what impact rising seas have on coastal communities, what agencies will need to do to plan for more frequent, more damaging storms, and how we talk about flooding.

The latter is particularly pertinent.

Flooding draws all manner of tensions to the surface. Agencies tasked with tackling floods are frustrated by how oblivious people and businesses are to the risks they face.

But flood-struck communities feel just as frustrated with the authorities. What we say and what we are understood to mean are not always the same thing. And the words we use can mean one thing to us, something else entirely to those we seek to convince.

When floods strike, both sides often find themselves at cross purposes. Wellmeant public information campaigns leave Jo Public feeling angry and confused.

Conversations leave neither side feeling heard or understood.

How does this come to pass?

A lot of this comes down to trust, our article finds. Funding constraints prevent the authorities protecting every at-risk community. More frequent, more violent storms will bring the threat of flooding to communities that have no experience of it, but that will struggle to plan – and pay – to protect themselves.

Often, our article concludes, communication happens only after the fact, when the communities in question are at their most vulnerable. Flood-hit communities often mistrust the outside authority that failed to protect them, that rolls into town after the event, expecting to be respected and heard.

Sometimes, there’s too much talk, when what we all need is to listen more.

Karen Thomas Editor, The Environment @KT_environment

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HOW DO YOU GREEN YOUR BUSINESS? DITCH YOUR COMFORT ZONES Businesses need insight, boldness – and fresh thinking – to transform the way they approach climate change.

Andy Middleton asks B Corp leaders, politicians and campaigners to identify the best ways forward

losses to humanity, nature and our way of life will far outweigh the costs of a faster transition.”

ntónio Guterres, Kate Raworth, David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg: the list of scientists, activists and politicians calling for a transformative response to our existential crisis could fill every page of The Environment for a year.

It’s not an absence of evidence that stops progress, but a lack of insight and boldness in imagining, designing and delivering practical solutions that have enough ambition to solve known problems. Why not start with an imagined future so compelling that it inspires action today?

I asked a handful of UK leaders from the worlds of B Corp, third sector and politics what might drive that shift and what initiatives are driving change.

Their responses offer useful insight into shifts we require in language, policy, supply chain and customer engagement and partnership.

Louise Wilson is joint managing director at B Corp crowd-funded finance impact specialist Abundance Investment.

Kickstarting a financial revolution means levelling the playing field between money “doing good” and “not doing good”, she says.

Wilson says the language we use to describe our worlds is everything: “Until I prove

In terms of country-level thinking, Wales’ deputy minister for housing and local government Hannah Blythyn says the next big step must be “a full transition towards a circular economy”.

In early 2019, Blythyn launched a £6.5 million Circular Economy Investment Fund to support businesses using plastic waste for manufacturing in Wales.

Within the next two years, she hopes, “Wales will have taken significant steps towards a circular economy as a key action on climate change that also brings considerable economic opportunities in our transition to a low-carbon economy”.

Blythyn wants change adopted across sectors and community: “There is enormous commitment and goodwill across the country to challenge the amount of single-use plastics and waste going to landfill. However the onus is on us all to do more; homeowner and business owners alike have a responsibility to do more for Wales and the world.”

Mark Cuddigan is chief executive at baby-food pioneer Ella’s Kitchen, where his mission is to get under-fives eating more veg and to grow a nation of veg lovers by promoting a vegetableled approach to nutrition through products, advice and campaigns.

To support the government

A

TRANSITION that I am an ethical investor, I must be badged unethical. Until my investments demonstrate positive impact, I must be called a negative-impact investor.”

She senses an arc of change in which costs increase for fossil fuels and “compromised” industries, as externalities are included, and a corresponding fall in financing costs for innovations in “positive” categories that will speed up the transition to a cleaner, just world.

There will be significant financial losses for some and major gains for others, Wilson acknowledges, but risk awareness must drive decisions: “If we carry on slowly, as we are, the overall

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OPINION

Louise Wilson, Mark Lloyd, Hannah Blythyn, Mark Cuddigan, Tessa Clarke, Laura Tenison

target to halve childhood obesity by 2030, Cuddigan says leaders must work together to drive environmental change.

And so Ella’s Kitchen is spearheading collaboration across the food sector and government “to get organisations to do the right thing with more pace and commitment”.

When Ella’s Kitchen gained B Corp status in 2016, the staff were inspired to develop their own B Impact Assessment, sharing it across the supply chain to help their suppliers to measure social and environmental performance. Cuddigan hopes to “get them hooked on doing business like a B Corp and show how organisations can work together to improve impact and make the world a better place”.

RESTORATION Mark Lloyd is chief executive of The Rivers Trusts, helping 60 UK trusts to work together in one of the world’s fastest-growing environmental movements. The trusts employ more than 300 staff and turn over £30 million a year, delivering thousands of projects to restore healthy rivers cost-effectively.

But although the movement is growing, Lloyd is worried: “Our nation’s aquatic wildlife continues to decline, water supplies are under threat and it’s estimated that restoring all rivers to good health will cost £27 billion,” he says.

That makes it imperative to find new ways to fund and organise integrated catchment management. Lloyd is forging innovative partnerships with the private sector to deliver paid ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, aquifer recharge, soil restoration, nutrient balancing and natural flood management.

“These could unlock significant green finance to enable delivery at a scale that

will shift the needle on the dial; we need government and regulators to embrace disruption of the current system of water management in favour of one that places partnership with the third sector at its core,” he says.

Household consumption generates a staggering 60 per cent of all greenhousegas emissions. Olio is a resource and food-sharing app that aims to puncture that. Co-founder and chief executive Tessa Clarke aims to help a billion consumers to reduce the carbon impact of their waste. “With the average American home cluttered by 300,000 things it’s clear that for humanity to stand any chance of mitigating the worst effects of the climate and biodiversity crises, we’re going to have to radically rethink our relationship with consumption,” she says.

Clarke believes that individual action will play a critical role to move us towards a sustainable future, but that “we need system-wide change through government action that properly prices the impact of carbon and stops subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of £10.5 billion a year”.

Cutting fossil subsidies would trigger a wide-scale shift in consumer behaviour towards re-use and repair, Clarke says, and “enable platforms such as Olio to fulfil our potential as the rails of redistribution at a hyper-local community level and dramatically reduce virgin consumption”.

PERFECTION Laura Tenison is managing director at B Corp brand JoJo Maman Bébé. She is convinced that a mindset shift is key.

“Our next big step is educating consumers to accept slight imperfections to the things they buy,” she says.

“Unrealistic expectations for flawless

products conflict with demands for producers and retailers to reduce packaging. It is possible to cut back on packaging, but that could mean the carton packaging gets dented or clothing dusty – for which customers expect a discount.”

JoJo is testing bags made from seaweed and “putting pressure on suppliers across the board to find low-impact alternatives – we see this being a growth area”.

Tenison urges individuals to call for action; consumer peer pressure will push retailers and manufacturers towards sustainable packaging and recycling, post-use. There are positive developments, with retailers including JoJo investing heavily to make their production runs recyclable. But “there is no doubt that many more consumers must follow through with responsible disposal at end of garment or product life”, she says.

What should we conclude from all this?

Let’s make this spring a time to ensure that the businesses around us have appropriate ambition for the shift ahead – and commitments that are bold enough to make us feel simultaneously uncomfortable and optimistic. It’s in that unfamiliar space where the sweetest change will start. o Andy Middleton is chief exploration officer at The TYF Group, a Wales-based training, education and adventure business. In July 2020 he hosts one of the world’s largest celebrations of climate impact, inviting 50,000 young people to the Principality Stadium in Cardiff to acknowledge city-scale changes they’ve made and plan for transformations ahead. To find out more, follow Andy on Twitter @gringreen.

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My environment:

RODRIGO COSTA ARAÚJO He leads a team working to conserve Amazonian marmosets with support from the Conservation Leadership Programme, a partnership between Fauna & Flora International, BirdLife and WCS. The team is using his thesis to determine the threats that face Amazonia and the marmosets, to guide conservation and publicise their plight, at home and abroad.

He recently discovered a new species of marmoset in the Amazon, naming it Mico munduruku after the region’s Munduruku Amerindians, and is one of the authors of the description of a new titi monkey in southern Amazonia, Plecturocebus grovesi.

Politicians are allowing farmers to use carcinogenic and biodiversitydangerous pesticides, stimulating massive destruction of forests to produce GMO corn, soy and lowquality beef at a continental scale ARE YOU AN ENVIRONMENTALIST? Yes, I am an environmentalist. This is the only option available for each of us, if humankind is to exist on this planet for longer than a few more generations. We are just one piece of a complex planetary system; we depend entirely on the proper functioning of natural systems to live.

And because I work with and in the natural environment to understand how it functions and to support its protection – mainly on Amazonia and monkeys – I am also a professional environmentalist.

RODRIGO COSTA ARAÚJO is based in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, where he works as scientist and conservationist.

His doctoral thesis at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia and

the Animal Genetics and Evolution lab of Universidade Federal do Amazonas focuses on marmoset monkeys threatened with extinction as they lose their southern Amazon habitats to deforestation.

WHAT SMALL CHANGES HAVE YOU MADE TO LIVE MORE SUSTAINABLY AND TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT? I aim to live sustainably in my daily life. I’m father to a lovely little girl and at home we pretty much eat vegetarian

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MY ENVIRONMENT

resources. We’ve seen predatory use of natural resources and the complete destruction of natural environments to produce non-native crops and extract raw minerals – and all to support export markets. Only a very few people have profited from this. Most Brazilians have low levels of education, poor-quality jobs and live in very basic conditions.

The newly discovered Mico munduruku marmoset is named after the Amazon’s Munduruku Amerindians

meals and buy our food in local markets that are environmentally friendly, fair trade, and organic, grown by local producers. The animal protein we eat comes from fish, bought directly from local, artisan fishermen, and chicken, and from eggs that come from local, home-grown producers.

We have very few household appliances, but those we have are small and extremely efficient in terms of energy and water usage. We minimise how much water we waste, by reducing our use only to necessities.

We have also reduced our gas consumption and car journeys to the minimum necessary.

As a family, we love to spend our spare time out in nature, where our recreation has a low environmental impact. We don’t go on holidays and we only acquire new objects and clothes when necessary. We recycle all our plastic, metal and glass, and organic waste.

It’s all about saving energy, which saves natural resources, which is where the energy comes from.

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THINGS CHANGE? We urgently need to change the way we produce goods and generate income – and that will only happen if we tackle the way we do business and politics. That demands concrete changes.

We need governments and companies to stimulate production and consumption of healthy food that is free of pesticides and genetic modifications,

We’ve seen predatory use of natural resources and the complete destruction of natural environments to produce non-native crops and extract raw minerals – and all to support export markets

SCALING UP, WHAT DO BUSINESSES AND POLITICIANS NEED TO CHANGE TO MAKE OUR LIVES MORE SUSTAINABLE?

environmentally friendly, and fair trade. We need to invest in people, offering more opportunities to study, better professional development and supporting science, innovation and good working conditions.

These changes would improve people’s health, reducing the burden of care, which would make it possible to invest more in increasing people’s productivity and incomes and support fairer ways to share resources directly with producers.

That would empower people, and boost the country’s growth.

In Brazil we have potential to enjoy an abundance of wealth, from scientific research, technology, processes and patents, from tourism, biodiversity-based medicines, native food crops, and from ecosystem services.

However, over the last 500 years, colonialism has threatened these

Politicians are working harder than ever now – in the opposite direction. They are allowing farmers to use carcinogenic and biodiversity-dangerous pesticides, stimulating massive destruction of forests to produce GMO corn, soy

WHAT ARE THE BARRIERS TO CHANGE?

and low-quality beef at a continental scale. They are also destroying public education at all levels, freezing science and innovation initiatives and undermining workers’ unions, labour conditions and pensions.

They are attempting to destroy the public health system, and normalising violence against AfroAmerican and indigenous peoples, women, and the poor. Brazilians also face massive media manipulation regarding all these issues, via social media and networks such as WhatsApp. Last year, levels of violence rocketed in Brazil – especially against so-called minorities, who represent the majority in Brazil. Levels of destruction in the Amazon have hit an 11-year peak, after the third-worst year since we started to monitor the forest. That means a few will keep profiting and the many will still live very basic lives.

On the other hand, Brazil’s federal bank reported in November that the country’s banks had posted their highest annual profits in 25 years.

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NEXT? Next is to finish my PhD research. After that, I hope to keep working on science and conservation, and to expand my scope, in terms of area and species. I would love to work with more species of primates at different sites in Amazonia and abroad, to teach, and to mentor other people in science and conservation in a research centre or university in Brazil.

Unfortunately, the current scenario for science and conservation in my country makes that quite unlikely. So, I plan to look for positions and funding overseas to support my research and work to conserve primates and forests in South America.

My main goal is to contribute towards global understanding of Amazonia, with its diverse peoples and ecological systems. Understanding this ecosystem better will allow all of us to enjoy the benefits it brings – the way it helps the Earth to function as it should.

I am a dreamer, passionate about people and nature – and I’m not alone.

There are millions like me. We all must do our best, every day, to work together to maintain this complex system we call Earth, to keep it working properly, and to live healthily and fairly. o

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MEAT

A THREAT TO OUR PLANET? Liz Bonnin’s hard-hitting new documentary asks difficult questions about what we eat and how we farm. Karen Thomas went to meet the wildlife biologist and TV presenter BBC/ANDREW CROWLEY

W

hen the lights go up at Soho Screening Rooms, they reveal a dozen shellshocked journalists. “Guess it’ll be salad for lunch today, then,” mutters the man from the TV listings mag.

Liz Bonnin has made a hard-hitting new documentary about at the impact on our planet of farming and eating meat. Bonnin,

seeing the final edit for the first time, looks as shell-shocked as the rest of us, despite having scaled a tree in the Amazon rainforest to film a harpy eagle nest, visited a 50,000-head Carolina feedlot and seen for herself the abandoned penguin chicks of the Western Cape.

And the images are shocking. This is what it looks like to clear a fifth of Brazil’s rainforests to farm beef. Here are

the waterways poisoned with farm slurry.

These are the hungry penguins whose fishmeal now feeds livestock. Here is the cow with the hole in its side, testing whether seaweed makes it burp less.

The facts are equally stark. Every year, we eat 65 billion animals. The US chews its way through 10 billion kilos of meat a year. The 1.5 billion cows on the planet will increase by 400 million by 2050. The number of chickens will increase fivefold. One cow emits as much greenhouse gas as burning 600 litres of petrol.

Bonnin’s documentary takes in the scale and impact of how livestock farming is taking up more land, using and contaminating more water. It documents how farming erodes the planet’s carbon sinks, how antibiotics and agrichemicals are killing pollinators and larger species.

We have lost a third of the world’s biodiversity to livestock farming.

The research draws on the EAT-Lancet Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other peer-reviewed reports. “I’m a scientist, and my remit is to inform and educate, using the scientific evidence and data and the consensus,” Bonnin tells The Environment.

“But my gosh, this was the most difficult project to date, because of the level of investigation this needed and because the science is so complex. It’s taken longer than any other programme I’ve worked on to cut through the noise to find a good, strong narrative.

“Our environmental impact and causal factors are complex. How one aspect of our behaviour affects the environment in itself is very complex. We had to try to give a balanced account of an issue that isn’t balanced, because of the impact [of livestock farming on the planet]. We had to report the scientific consensus.”

The film asks how livestock farming could be less destructive. Bonnin meets a Texas pig farmer turning slurry into biogas, scientists in San Francisco who grow meat in petri dishes, a British smallholder on first-name terms with the chickens that feed his family. A scientist working for the US livestock lobby tells her that human skills and ingenuity will find greener ways to farm. But Bonnin concludes that change will come only if consumers eat less meat.

Is it fair to hold the consumer responsible, though? Bonnin rarely eats

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INTERVIEW

red meat now. “Reports like EAT-Lancet show we should only eat two portions of meat a week,” she says.

“That consensus comes from 30 scientists from different countries, and points to a drastic change that needs to happen globally.

“As individuals, we all have our role.

Compared to climate emissions or to the plastics issue, there’s a very direct link between supply and what individuals do. If, as experts recommend, we eat less meat, the supply chain will be different.

In this case consumers can drive change much more immediately than with many other environmental issues.”

How should governments and industry drive change? “We need support from legislation and we need big-industry changes,” Bonnin says. “All sectors would benefit from taking a long, hard look at their environmental impact. But we have a chance [with meat farming] to make our voices heard, to mitigate this crisis, more quickly than in other areas.

“It’s clear, the more environmental programmes I make, that we will have no livelihoods long term, continue this ad_flyer.pdf 1 if we 03/12/2019 16:57

trajectory. Industry and livelihoods and our sustainable future will benefit if shift now, in the ways that the experts advise; if we transform how we run the world, how production and consumption work.

This is what it looks like to clear a fifth of Brazil’s rainforests to farm beef. Here are the waterways poisoned with farm slurry. These are the hungry penguins whose fishmeal now feeds livestock. Here is the cow with the hole in its side, testing whether seaweed makes it burp less “I don’t agree with the argument that because livelihoods will suffer now, we cannot change. Soon enough, there will be no soil to support what we need to survive unless we change the way we live on this planet.”

Before filming, Bonnin promised her production crew not to cry on camera.

Confronted with the scale of destruction,

she broke that promise. “I’m an emotional fish,” she says. “I blame my French and Latin American blood.

“On any given day, I can be hugely pessimistic about the future. On another, I can feel inspired and hopeful. The days I feel hopeful are days spent out in the field with the scientists working night and day to save our planet. Knowing we have the propensity to be such resourceful human beings gives me hope.

“David Attenborough and Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg – those people give me hope. The other thing that gives me hope is that CEOs of banks and people from big industry are beginning to talk about degrowth, rather than making economic gain and pandering to shareholders their priority.

“A change is beginning to happen, at industry level, in the way we talk about our relationship with the planet and ecosystem resource use. If we can crack things at that level, we can crack this.

“It’s just that we’re cutting it a little bit fine.” o You can watch Meat: a threat to our planet? on the BBC's iPlayer

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11 InterviewBonnin.indd 2

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SCOTTISH CITIES

GETTING AHEAD OF THE GAME IN FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE

SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Glasgow

At national and city level, Scotland is working to go further, faster than the rest of the UK in tackling its emissions.

Will it succeed?

L

ast spring the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) urged Scotland to go further, faster, arguing that the country has the UK’s best prospects to reach net zero emissions soonest.

Scotland’s advantages lie in renewables – it generates quarter of the UK’s green energy, mostly from offshore wind. Scottish Power sources all its electricity from renewables; it says the UK must quadruple its renewableenergy capacity and double its electricity generation to meet its net-zero targets.

In September, the Scottish government passed a new climate law setting a 2045 deadline to reach net-zero emissions, five years ahead of UK government targets.

It has pledged to cut emissions by 75 per cent by 2030, although it overruled a Green Party amendment to cut emissions by 80 per cent cut by 2030.

Scottish NGOs and climate-action groups wanted a tighter window. “What we do in the next decade is crucial,” says Friends of the Earth Scotland. “Any long-term target allows the government to continue to kick the can down the road

GLASGOW’S CLIMATEEMERGENCY WORKING GROUP WANTS: o D istrict heating systems o A strategy to tackle ageing homes’ low

energy efficiency o T o put all council budgets through climate-

impact assessments oM ore car-free zones outside schools and

other public spaces o A major tree-planting programme o G reen-economy apprenticeships o T o ban single-use plastic and declare

a plastic-free shopping zone o T o lead and inspire other city organisations

to reduce their emissions

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A N A LY S I S

and push more difficult decisions onto future generations.”

Greater ambition has emerged at city level. Glasgow and Edinburgh are front-runners to reach the zero-emissions target as early as 2030, potentially beating all other UK cities, well ahead of the Scottish government targets.

Over the past 15 years, Edinburgh has cut its carbon footprint by a third. It will have cut its emissions by 40 per cent by year-end. And, having declared a climate emergency in May, Glasgow City Council has drawn up an ambitious roadmap to 2030 to tackle climate change.

Glasgow’s Climate-Emergency Working Group represents the four governing political parties, the Chamber of Commerce and climate groups. It was formed after the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered the landmark November 2018 climate report that has triggered a tsunami of eco-activism worldwide.

Phasing out its own fossil-fuel fleet this decade, Glasgow council wants to source green hydrogen using energy from waste, to power its larger, heavier vehicles “Over the last year, we’ve seen the emergence of groups like Extinction Rebellion and more protests that have increased pressure on us to act,” says working-group leader Cllr Martha Wardrop, who represents Hillhead for the Scottish Green Party. “People were turning up outside the City Chambers every lunchtime, urging us to declare a climate emergency.”

Last year, the working group presented the city administration committee with 61 recommendations to reach net-zero carbon seven years early. Council leaders must respond by April. That response will set out the priorities, the costs and how to spend to deliver maximum impact, says Glasgow head of sustainability and SNP councillor Anna Richardson.

“This will translate our recommendations into what is feasible, and how,” she says. “These proposals bring together policy areas we’re already working on, but sharpen awareness of their carbon impacts – and clarify which bring the biggest carbon benefits. That will guide

how we allocate our resources. Many of these proposals are things we’ve started to do; the question will be to scale them up.”

One example is expanding the car-free schools programme from six Glasgow schools to 1,300. Another will be to scale up a plastic-free retail pilot project across the city. And tree planting offers multiple benefits; improving carbon capture, supporting flood protection and better air quality and mental health and making Glasgow more beautiful.

“We know what to do and how to do it,” Richardson says. “The question is the scale, rather than the principles. Nothing in our proposals represents a shift in policy position – it’s about getting our heads around the scale of acceleration that Glasgow needs.”

What role will the private sector play?

By pledging to phase out all tailpipepolluting vehicles from its own fleet by the end of 2019 and working with Scottish Power to expand its charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and decarbonise its heating, the council hopes to inspire the business community.

Making Glasgow’s ageing tenements and flats more energy efficient “will be a massive challenge”, Richardson admits.

Three-quarters of Glaswegians live in tenements, joint ownership adding to the technical and financial challenges.

Glasgow is working with Scottish Power to boost investment in the renewableenergy grid to promote greener energy.

Transport is a pressing problem.

“Glasgow transport emissions have gone up and up and up; there’s a complete lack of adequate walking and cycling infrastructure thanks to our post-war legacy of motorway networks,” says one environmental manager.

At the time of writing, Scottish Power was due to announce how it will expand Glasgow’s electric vehicle recharging infrastructure. Phasing out its own fossilfuel fleet this decade, Glasgow council wants to source green hydrogen using energy from waste, to power its larger, heavier vehicles.

Wardrop says engaging local walking and cycling campaigners will help to join up public transport and drive a modal shift across Glasgow and its suburbs. She also wants to ban heavy goods vehicles from Glasgow City Centre.

Another priority is integrated ticketing,

WHAT PRICE A JUST TRANSITION? FRIENDS OF THE EARTH Scotland has slammed Holyrood’s failure to Glasgow Cathedral give statutory powers to the new Just Transition Commission, set up to clarify the impact of government climate proposals and policies on employment in different sectors and regions, to report annually to parliament and to advise on creating green-sector opportunities.

Scotland passed a new climatechange act in September that gives the government six months to deliver a climate-change plan, setting out how to meet its targets.

Friends of the Earth and other campaign groups are pressing the government to give the commission powers to enforce its findings and prosecute bad behaviour.

Without such powers, Scotland’s Just-Transition Commission “is the dog that’s not yet barked”, says WBA head of policy Katherine Trebeck.

In Glasgow, the climate-change working group is pressing for local measures that will assess the city region’s concerns and monitor and ensure a just transition. Glasgow’s Greens have proposed a Green New Deal to the city authorities that includes just-transition proposals.

These relate to investing in better, more eco-friendly housing, how to create green jobs and planting communities to be healthier and more pleasant places to be.

“Glasgow has islands of poverty where all these issues are of great concern,” says Scottish Greens councillor Martha Wardrop. “A just transition is crucial, given how worried people are about the price of fuel, food and transport. The Scottish government has held a climate conversation – but that conversation needs to be ongoing.” o

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WE’RE KICKING THE CARBON HABIT To learn more about AECOM’s response to the climate emergency and get involved, email: sustainability.support@aecom.com

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similar to London’s Oyster Card system.

And one of the hottest topics is whether to return city buses to local-authority control.

“The transport bill going through the Scottish parliament sets out new franchising powers that could regulate the city’s bus network,” Wardrop says.

“We see an opportunity in First Bus Glasgow selling off its bus fleet and we’re looking at the business case of taking over that fleet or those services.”

Other recommendations include a roadmap towards a circular economy, working with Zero Waste Scotland to draw up a plan of action, and an urban kitchen-garden strategy. The working group also proposes to overhaul planning, so that all new developments set aside space to grow food, and to ask communities to nominate places to convert into gardens and allotments.

The group wants the council to produce a sustainable-food strategy within the next year, to promote plant-based diets and cut consumption of processed foods and meat.

That also means helping farmers to market their goods to sell closer to home. It wants procurement by public bodies – from schools to prisons to the NHS – to become more local and sustainable, too.

GLOBAL IMPACT Glasgow’s plans are long on ambition, but short – so far – on funding. Wardrop is urging the city to move its pension funds out of fossil fuels. “That’s the sort of radical action we need, to back up ambitious targets with real changes in the wider economy,” she says.

In November, the city hosts the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit.

That should raise the city’s profile and – local green campaigners hope – attract new investment.

“We’re also looking at best practice from Europe – especially places like The Netherlands,” Wardrop says.

“It’s critical to show that Glasgow is investor-ready, in terms of its carbonmanagement and green credentials.

Glasgow has some of the best highereducation institutions in Europe – a lot of high-calibre young people are attracted to studying here; there’s a lot of research and development going on.”

As Glasgow prepares to respond to the 61 recommendations, initiative has shifted to the ecological working

CLIMATE-READY CLYDE SCOTLAND HAS AMBITIOUS plans to adapt to climate change, preparing buildings, communities and land to cope with extreme rainfall, drought and storms. Climate-Ready Clyde brings together six local authorities across western Scotland, working with academics, transport agencies, the NHS and SEPA to identify risks from floods, drought, heat islands and other climate-linked threats.

In October, Climate-Ready Clyde published the most detailed study produced for any city region, showing that, come 2050, 1.8 million people will face heavy flooding in winter, summer heatwaves and powerful storms.

Climate change threatens vital roads, bridges, the West Highland rail line and hospitals, it concluded.

Unless the authorities prepare now to tackle these threats, the bill will run to “hundreds of millions” of pounds a year. The report says climate change will hit western Scotland’s poorest people hardest. The greatest climaterelated risks are to: o Poor communities in north/east Glasgow, from floods and heatwaves o The West Highland line to Fort William, from coastal erosion

o Royal Alexandria Hospital in Paisley, from surface water/river flooding o Erskine Bridge across the Clyde, from high winds o The M74 near Hamilton and M8 in Glasgow, from flooding.

Climate-Ready Clyde has proposed a five-year plan to improve the city region’s flood defences, improve air quality, plant more trees and invest in wind barriers and green roofs. It calls on government to grant councils new powers to issue bonds to cover the costs of climate adaptation.

Cost is concerning. The partnership is preparing a cost sheet for the Scottish government, listing which projects it sees as priorities to protect infrastructure, housing and businesses and to tackle emissions.

“Local authorities are strapped for cash – there are real worries about capacity and resources,” says one insider. “Yes, they can borrow, but there are real questions about how much more. And there really isn’t a lot of time to procure the services, recruit the staff and to deliver these projects.

If we leave it too late, our efforts to adapt will make no difference – and everything will only cost us more.” o

Glasgow: building resilience on the Clyde

group, which is drawing up priorities for conservation and carbon storage, to promote biodiversity and improve citizens’ health and wellbeing.

“This is all about nature-based solutions,” Wardrop says. “The city has secured Horizon 2020 funding to look at these kinds of approaches. It’s about connecting the green, the grey and the blue.”

“A cleaner, greener Glasgow will be a so much nicer place to live,” Richardson concludes. “That’s the message we need to get across to the public. So much of our work to tackle climate change will

mean an easier commute to work, a house that’s warmer and cheaper bills.

“We’ll have to deal with a lot more water falling from the sky, but we can do that in ways that are beautiful, through good SuDS schemes, more natural woodlands and by rewilding empty patches of grass.

“Climate change is scary; it feels disempowering to many people. But a green, carbon-neutral city will be somewhere people want to live, and raise their children – and where they know their children will have a future.” o

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DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION THE END OF THE RAINBOW? For all the talk of diversity and inclusion, is the water and environmental management industry doing enough to recruit, support and promote people of Black, Asian and other minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds? Karen Thomas reports

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ale, male and stale – that’s the charge often levelled at the water and environmental-management (WEM) industry. Look around any industry event – from conferences and exhibitions to project teams – and it’s hard to disagree. Audiences, speakers and participants are overwhelmingly white and male. As are WEM companies’ boards.

Mandatory gender pay-gap reporting is pushing many large employers to start to tackle gender inequalities. A revitalised climate movement is putting youth centrestage. But how does WEM fare when it comes to ethnic diversity?

Companies that have fielded brilliant women and young people to talk to The Environment don’t seem to want to talk about race and equality.

Asked to find a senior colleague to discuss BAME strategy, the PR for the large consultancy responded: “Thanks for the opportunity but on this occasion, given Xxxxxxx’s diversity focus is more on gender than BAME, they feel there is not much they can bring to the table.

Hope we can help on other things.”

WASTAGE In the UK, 13 per cent of people define their background as BAME. A recent Royal Academy of Engineering study found that 7.8 per cent of professional engineers come from BAME backgrounds – down sharply from 27 per cent of UK-domiciled engineering graduates. That suggests high drop-out rates among BAME graduates.

This report tried and failed to source WEM-specific data. But is our industry falling short in recruiting, supporting and promoting BAME talent? We asked six senior industry figures for their thoughts.

Climate-risk consultant Bevan Jones started out in the third sector, “which is far more diverse” than private WEM or utility firms. “[WEM] doesn’t try very hard to diversify its recruitment,” he says.

Recently, a devolved government authority approached him through a BAME-specialist recruitment agency to fill a senior climate role. “The job wasn’t right for me,” Jones recalls. “But in the end, they didn’t hire someone from a diverse ethnic background.

“We don’t operate positive discrimination in the UK – someone from my background cannot expect to be shortlisted because of their race. I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a good thing or not. But if, after all that, you don’t hire a Black or ethnic-minority person, maybe you should consider what structures you have in place.”

"You get offered the job, but not the pay that goes with it – that’s so common. Women of colour have it even worse" Greater London Authority senior policy officer Abby Crisotomo calls out “the myth of inclusivity” in WEM recruitment.

Proclaiming your D+I credentials is passive, she says. An active approach would look beyond the Russell Group universities, to seek talent from less privileged backgrounds.

Arcadis director for resilient cities Anusha Shah names a lack of board-level BAME role models to inspire and mentor young WEM talent, creating a vicious circle – even though the talent is out there. “We need to embrace change and champion BAME talent now,” she says.

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same universities, the same schools. “It’s about legacy systems,” he says.

“Listed companies draw their finance teams from the Big Four accountancy firms. Select only from certain firms, certain universities and certain schools, and that’s how these cultures evolve.

“We need to ask blunt questions about the discrimination this creates. We need a remutualisation of the WEM sector – more water and energy co-operatives.

Only this will rebalance our industry to reflect the background and needs of those it most affects.”

Nothing will change, as long as “we keep parachuting old, white men into board-level jobs”, Shah says.

She calls for positive discrimination – make sure half your intake is diverse; offer structured mentoring and support.

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need to unleash opportunities for all – so that everyone can benefit. It’s how we’ll make society better for everyone,” she says. But how?

Tokenism – having just the one very senior person of colour on the podium – doesn’t help, Crisotomo says. An active approach would seek out more BAME talent, lower down the career ladder.

Ex-banker and Green Party member Chidi Oti Obihara wants to tackle the WEM industry’s structural barriers.

Inequality starts with privatised water companies putting returns to shareholders before their responsibilities to customers and community, he says.

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STRUCTURES On entering the WEM industry, BAME workers hit new barriers. Bernard Tausu is project manager for flood-water management at London’s Haringey Council. He laughs wearily as he lists the structural barriers that confront people of colour working in WEM. One is a lack of champions, he agrees. Another is that industry teams and networks reflect senior management's own image – male, white, middle class – not those of the communities WEM serves. That reinforces barriers to diversity, Tausu says. It also excludes valuable cultural knowledge of conservation, planting and managing water.

WEM industry management values networking and soft skills above technical or work-based excellence, Tausu says. And so, when promoting, the typical industry manager again favours the candidate most like himself. That again excludes BAME colleagues.

“I see unbelievable levels of frustration in the BAME community,” Shah agrees.

“People are stuck doing the same thing – and doing it very well. But people who are brilliant at their jobs don’t progress because senior managers have decided they lack soft skills.”

It is particularly tricky to challenge bias that is obvious when you come up against it, to which the perpetrator is oblivious, Crisotomo says. At a recent international London summit, another speaker asked if she was in the green room to translate. “These things are rarely overt,” she says. “It’s death by a thousand cuts of micro-aggression.”

WEM needs better management training to tackle unconscious bias, says Mott MacDonald technical director flood risk Sun Yan Evans. Unconscious bias is bad for business, she says. If climate change threatens people of all cultures, communities and backgrounds, it will take diversity to tackle the problem. “We

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“That’s not blindly discriminating positively; it’s making sure we equip and create the frameworks to bring people from BAME backgrounds forward on merit. People need support to grasp opportunities,” she says.

MONEY Money is the elephant in the room. Tausu has interviewed for director-level jobs with major consultants who’ve offered him far less than his skills and experience merit.

“You get offered the job, but not the pay that goes with it – that’s so common,” he says.

“Women of colour have it even worse.”

A government consultation on the BAME pay gap closed last January. The ethnic minority pay gap is at least as entrenched as the gender pay gap, Jones says; firms should be made to disclose pay figures by ethnicity, too.

“Gender pay-gap reporting has offered a massive boost,” he says. “The rumour is, reporting the ethnic-minority pay gap is about to become mandatory. Companies won’t do anything until they have to. We are paid less in the sustainability sector – that’s a fact. But people don’t know it unless they are told.”

Employers and the media must highlight diverse success stories, Tausu says, to inspire young WEM professionals. And industry networks must become more diverse. WEM bosses stand to gain knowledge and valuable perspectives if they mix outside their usual circles, he says.

Obihara says industry structures must change. “People like me need to shout louder about these things. We try so hard to be helpful; we need to make our criticisms more explicit.”

WEM needs to “move beyond tokenism and identity politics and stop tiptoeing around” issues of race, he concludes.

“Structural racism is real. One, we need to identify it clearly. Two, we need to enforce the rules we have. Three, if necessary we need new rules.” o

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WHY ENGINEERING IS TOO MASCULINE A troubling new report has unearthed a mental health crisis among men in the engineering sector. It's a problem that stems from a harmful macho workplace culture that alienates women and asks too much of men, argues Mark McBride-Wright

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statement. This suggests men hold more negative opinions about themselves and their reputation than is fair.

However, there is a cross-gender consensus that recognises men are under pressure to behave in certain ways, and that society has unrealistic expectations of men. This may contribute to the mental health crisis among men that the Masculinity in Engineering report unearthed. Some of the most worrying findings include: o One in five engineers has lost a work colleague to suicide o Over a third of engineers – 37.2 per cent – say their mental health is fair/poor o More than a fifth have taken time off due to mental health problems o More than a fifth of engineers – 22.5 per cent – have considered suicide or self-harm, and, of these, men were 3.5 times more likely to have considered taking action o Barely a third of engineers – 32.3 per cent – feel their workplace culture is diverse o B arely a third of engineers – 31.2 per cent – feel included in their workplace culture.

Our industry’s expectations of gender clearly have a toxic impact. As one respondent told us: ”Masculinity is a prison and a prize, strictly required of men, still more heavily penalised in women.”

EqualEngineers based this report on the responses of 800 UK-based engineers.

The findings add up to a worrying trend.

All engineers say they are twice as likely

SOLUTIONS So, how do we tackle this? The Masculinity in Engineering report proposes giving men the space they need to define their own masculinity.

By focusing on the toxic in the notion of toxic masculinity, we can shift the conversation to the specific traits and behaviours associated with the macho culture that we need to address.

We can do this by making room for a healthy, diverse and inclusive work environment that benefits everyone.

Although one in four engineers feel discriminated against by diversity programmes, men are 3.7 times more likely than women to say so.

More than a fifth of engineers – 22.5 per cent – have considered suicide or self-harm, and, of these, men were 3.5 times more likely to have considered taking action Diversity brings positive workplace benefits; studies suggest it enables companies to outperform their competitors by up to 35 per cent. Opening up these benefits to everyone by creating a culture of inclusivity can have a positive impact.

Inclusivity has a direct effect on the

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ngineering is a male-led industry. According to Engineering UK 2019, although 21.7 per cent of the engineering workforce is female, just 9.7 per cent of engineers are women. That could explain why the industry’s culture is troublingly masculine.

EqualEngineers’ recent study, Masculinity in Engineering, revealed how one in four engineers believe that society expects men to be macho or ”displaying showily or aggressively masculine characteristics”. And more than a quarter of engineers believe their work culture is masculine, although female engineers are twice as likely to report this than their male counterparts.

These statistics show an awareness of the problem. More than threequarters of female engineers say society regards men in a positive light, but a larger proportion of men disagree than agree with this

to feel comfortable discussing problems with their physical rather than their mental health, highlighting that reported mental-health problems in our industry underplay their true extent. Furthermore, despite working in a male-dominated industry, fewer women engineers suffer from poor mental health and suicidal thoughts than their male counterparts.

This suggests that poor mental health is, overwhelmingly, a problem for men.

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culture and mental health of teams, enabling them to outperform their peers by 80 per cent. How? By listening to, hearing and sharing diverse perspectives, building trust and enabling innovation and creativity to flourish.

sectionally through their companies to embed positive mental wellbeing programmes and metrics to track their progress. This will empower the entire workforce and create a more inclusive culture around mental wellbeing.

INCLUSIVITY

FOCUS ON INCLUSION

The engineering industry needs to do so much more to foster safe, inclusive workplaces for everyone. The Masculinity in Engineering report found that less than a third of engineers feel included in their workplace environment – and a significant proportion of men feel excluded, even discriminated against, by equality, diversity and inclusion programmes.

The way to address this in a maledominated industry is to engage the majority by linking equality, diversity and inclusion to health, safety and wellbeing.

Encouraging men to be vulnerable and open about their mental health and the things that worry them – whatever they are – will foster empathetic learning through sharing individual experiences.

This will enable the male majority to understand what makes them different, encouraging discussion about the negative impact of gender stereotypes, how unconscious biases influence workplace culture, and how tackling these attitudes fosters understanding and leads to higher engagement and empathy for other people’s troubles.

These conclusions do not diminish the marginalised and under-represented groups that have had every reason to fight to be included. Ultimately, the report highlights how a lack of inclusivity creates health and safety problems in the workplace.

The Masculinity in Engineering report makes four recommendations:

Unconscious-bias training and employee networks have their place. But to be effective, they need the diversity and inclusion conversation to engage everyone. This means focusing more on being inclusive and creating a culture of belonging in which everyone can talk about whatever they are going through. Having this inclusive space will foster empathy.

TREAT PHYSICAL SAFETY AND MENTAL HEALTH AS EQUALLY IMPORTANT Most companies employ a health and safety department, which works with leaders to improve the environment of employees. However, H&S is tailored to physical safety and not to the psychological and emotional safety of the working environment.

We need appropriate resources to treat both in the same way. H&S departments need to work with leaders and cross-

ONE IN FOUR ENGINEERS

BELIEVES SOCIETY EXPECTS MEN TO BE MACHO

ONE IN THREE DESCRIBES THEIR MENTAL HEALTH AS FAIR OR POOR

OFFER FLEXIBLE WORKING Male and female engineers are equally likely to have caring responsibilities. Of those that have these responsibilities, 72.4 per cent work flexibly. A healthy work-life balance brings benefits for both the individual and their employer.

Offering flexible working to engineers of all backgrounds allows everyone to benefit from increased productivity, lower levels of stress, and overall job satisfaction.

ALLOW MEN TO DEFINE THEIR OWN MASCULINITY Men are pressured to behave in certain ways to fit in with society’s often-unrealistic expectations. By emboldening men to define their own masculinity with pride and rejecting the “toxic” in toxic masculinity, which causes men untold harm, we can shift the conversation to the specific traits and behaviours associated with the macho culture that we need to address.

By introducing these changes, companies can reap the rewards of diversity and inclusion. Engineers can benefit from open dialogue that creates more empathy between colleagues, helping to raise awareness of mental health problems and creating a culture that puts their physical and emotional wellbeing at its centre. o Mark McBride-Wright CEng MIChemE is founder and managing director of EqualEngineers.

Read the full Masculinity in Engineering report at http://bit.ly/ EqEngMasculinityReport2019

ONE IN FIVE

HAS TAKEN TIME OFF WORK BECAUSE OF THIS

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ONE IN FIVE ENGINEERS HAS LOST A WORK COLLEAGUE TO SUICIDE

89%

OF ENGINEERS WITH DISABILITIES HAVE A CONDITION NOT VISIBLE TO OTHERS

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COME ON FEEL THE NOISE Construction work, speeding traffic, city flight paths, workplace machinery, other people… we are all bombarded with noise as we go about our everyday business. But those extra decibels present more than an annoyance – there’s growing evidence that being exposed to noise can damage our physical and mental health

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s noise pollution the next big public-health crisis’ screamed a recent headline in The New Yorker magazine.

Certainly, noise pollution may well be the next big public-health concern. Noise has effects on health beyond sleep disturbance and damage to hearing that scientists are only starting to understand. When we are exposed to noise, our bodies release the stress hormone, cortisol, which damages our blood vessels.

Exposure to loud noise doesn’t just damage our hearing. It has been linked to everything from behavioural problems in children to adult cardiovascular disease, raising blood pressure and the risk of heart attacks, and contributing to coronary heart disease.

US studies rank noise pollution

second only to air pollution as a risk to public health. An estimated 40 million US adults have damaged hearing in one or both ears, having been exposed to noise. A 2017 study found a 64 per cent correlation between hearing loss and living in the world’s noisiest cities.

Levels of hearing loss were lowest in Vienna and highest in Delhi.

Half the people living in Europe’s largest cities endure levels of noise that damage their health and wellbeing. Research from the World Health Organisation concludes that western Europe loses more than a million healthy life-years annually to environmental noise.

A 2014 report by the European Environment Agency named noise pollution as a major threat to public health across the European Union.

It found that exposure to noise also affects distributions of wildlife, in our seas and on land.

Ornithological studies by Germany’s Max Planck Institute corroborate the

latter point, comparing aviary-dwelling zebra finches protected from and exposed to traffic noise. One study found accelerated loss of telomeres – which protect the ends of chromosomes – in young finches exposed to traffic noise, indicating a shorter life expectancy.

A second study found that finches exposed to traffic noise produced smaller chicks than those bred in quiet aviaries.

Once released from the noisy aviaries, the chicks caught up with those bred under quiet conditions.

Traffic noise “changes the physiology of birds and has consequences on their growth”, the study concluded. “Even bird species, which at first glance seem to be coping well in cities, may be affected by chronic traffic noise”.

NAMING IT Noise nuisance – the students next door playing techno at 4am, loft-extension drilling on bank holiday mornings – is an easier problem to identify than continual, low-level ambient noise. You can complain about irregular noise to the property owner or to your local council.

The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health publishes an annual noise survey in January, based on how many complaints local authorities receive.

The figure generally tops half a million complaints every year.

But researchers at Imperial College have looked at the health impacts on people exposed to environmental noise from road traffic. The study defined noise pollution as exposure to sounds louder than normal conversation, at around 60 decibels.

Researchers compared data on exposure to air pollution and traffic noise for 144,000 adults in Norway and The Netherlands.

Heavy traffic causes air and noise

HOW NOISE AFFECTS OUR HEALTH AND WELLBEING oW ithin the European Union, more than 125 million people are exposed to noise levels above 55 decibels,

mostly from road traffic o Environmental noise annoys 20 million European adults and disturbs the sleep of 8 million o Environmental noise causes at least 900,000 cases of high blood pressure a year o Noise pollution is to blame for 43,000 hospital admissions a year o Noisy environments are linked to at least 10,000 premature deaths a year SOURCE: EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL AGENCY, 2014

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THE IMPACTS OF NOISE Exposure to noise has costs for public health and biodiversity, according to the European Environment Agency.

The impacts include: COGNITIVE FUNCTION Studies suggest exposure to noise damages children’s learning ability – one report even suggests the closer the school to an airport, the lower the pupils’ reading ability.

CARDIOVASCULAR DAMAGE Exposure to noise can increase blood pressure and constrict the blood vessels. Prolonged exposure affects blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones, which accelerates ageing and can lead vulnerable people to develop heart disease and high blood pressure.

MENTAL HEALTH Even low levels of noise can disturb concentration, relaxation and sleep. WHO is calling for more research into the links between mental illness and noise, to confirm how it affects stress, anxiety, nausea, headaches, mood changes and sexual desire. Prolonged exposure to loud noise has been linked to anger, depression, anxiety and exhaustion.

DISTURBED SLEEP Uninterrupted sleep is critical for physical and mental health. Exposure to noise can prevent, interrupt and disturb patterns of sleep. Having less rapid-eye-movement sleep can constrict the blood vessels and raise blood pressure and heart rate, changing breathing and creating restlessness.

Secondary effects include raised cholesterol, fatigue, depression and being less productive.

BIODIVERSITY Noise affects animals, birds and marine animals, because many species rely on acoustics to find food or to mate. Exposure to anthropogenic noise affects population size and distribution of wildlife and breeding rates and can change species’ patterns of behaviour. Scientists have yet to fully understand what species need what kinds of protection from noise.

COSTS Back in the mid-1990s, the European Commission estimated that member states suffer annual economic damage from noise pollution, ranging between €13 million and €30 billion a year. Those costs include lower house prices, restrictions on land use, higher medical costs and lost productivity.

A separate study in 2011 estimated that noise from roads and railways alone costs the European Union €40 billion a year. A UK government report estimates that environmental noise costs England up to £10 billion a year. o

pollution, making it tricky for scientists to separate out their impacts. But this study concluded that noise has its own effects on cardio-vascular health.

It revealed that respondents’ bloodsugar levels were 0.3 per cent higher for respondents exposed to a five-decibel increase in noise levels than for those living in quieter neighbourhoods.

The team concluded that there is a link between environmental noise and “long-term impacts on health”, raising blood pressure, triggering release of stress hormones and contributing to heart disease in ways that need more detailed research.

An earlier study in Canada reports links between being exposed to traffic noise at home and diabetes, calling for more research from public bodies into the impact of noise on metabolic health.

Perhaps the science simply confirms what we know instinctively – air pollution is not the only reason why house prices are lower for homes on busy roads. The people who live in the poorest urban communities are most exposed to damaging levels of environmental noise.

Traffic noise “changes the physiology of birds and has consequences on their growth...Even bird species, which at first glance seem to be coping well in cities, may be affected by chronic traffic noise” As our cities become ever more crowded, peace and quiet will become a prized commodity. Short of moving to an isolated croft on a remote Scottish island, what can we do to reduce our everyday exposure to noise?

A recent Berlin-based study found no benefit to health and wellbeing to masking traffic sounds with birdsong.

Surrounding your home with soundmuffling greenery, turning down and turning off your appliances and investing in good earplugs may help.

The one thing researchers do agree on is that we need to know a lot more about the impacts on health of continual lowimpact noise – whether from local roads, railways or airports – to be able to tackle this hidden public-health problem. o

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TAKING CHARGE OF OUR OWN DESTINY Atkins sees strong messaging and industry commitment moving UK water and waste-water management on the right path towards net-zero carbon, from the path that the 2013-2019 CIWEM Blueprint sets out, and beyond

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he 2013 CIWEM Blueprint report identified clear priorities for action that would drive the industry to decarbonise 80 per cent by 2050.

Even at that time, the more progressive companies were comfortable

with this position – they were already on a pathway, recognised the actions and saw alignment with their own ambitions.

But six years later, has enough changed? Several recommendations have yet to be implemented, including: “Ofwat

should encourage greater investment in R&D on low-carbon solutions. Building regulations must be aggressive in encouraging low water use. Carbon emissions reduction should be more actively incentivised.”

The industry is under increasing pressure to separate its wholesale and retail operations within regulatory frameworks designed to increase competition. For example, sludge management may be separated out as

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a service, but the combined heat and power generated is often used only at the wastewater treatment works.

Severn Trent Water has delivered biogas to the national gas grid and there are numerous examples of power-togrid. But the real challenge of delivering net-zero carbon requires much greater efficiencies in infrastructure investment.

Net zero carbon is as much about the definition of the challenge as it is the decarbonisation of the functions that the water industry provide This challenge will become harder where parties have misaligned incentivisation or where the need to save money in the short term inhibits the longer-term R&D that a step-change

requires. This is not an argument against competition, rather an understanding that managing the economics and the carbon incentivisation increases regulatory complexity.

However, there is also cause for some optimism. Water companies are increasingly using their landholdings, processes and infrastructure to generate renewable energy. They are also providing education, advice and assistance to customers and communities on water and energy efficiency.

Positively, work has been done on “the dichotomy between highcarbon treatment solutions and local environmental regulations”. This might be considered regulatory carbon, as standards tighten and as advanced processes require more energy or chemicals while generating more sludge.

This concept becomes much more critical as the industry picks the low-hanging fruit from the path to zero carbon.

The Chemical Investigations Programme for UKWIR with Atkins, in partnership with the national environment agencies, Defra and Ofwat, demonstrates the economic and carbon costs of investing in end-of-pipe solutions to meet tighter emissions permits.

It demonstrates that measures to control domestic use of priority chemicals instead have the potential to deliver environmental standards and save billions in investment while reducing the carbon associated with further treatment.

Similarly, smarter work in catchments on softer solutions is already providing low-carbon solutions.

Atkins is managing a pilot for innovative natural flood management (NFM) at Narborough Bogs Nature Reserve to test new ways of managing flood waters. This will build the evidence for the effectiveness of different types of NFM interventions at a catchment scale as a more sustainable alternative to hard flood barriers, pumps and storage, as well as cost saving.

We can offer a range of catchmentmanagement solutions and digital tools for flooding, water quality – either to protect drinking-water sources, to offset discharges into the environment, or to deliver resilience – and sustainable drainage, to reduce flow into sewers and so reduce overflow spills.

With Thames Water, we are working closely with farmers and landowners on no-till farming using the Evenlode catchment as a test-bed that will

develop best-practice knowledge on agricultural measures or NFM schemes, transforming how the UK can deliver environmental outcomes.

The water industry comprises different water-only and water and waste service companies or organisations, but a more strategic, collaborative approach is developing. Indicative of this is the UKWIR’s Big Questions approach to meet both customer and regulator expectations by 2050.

Water companies are increasingly using their landholdings, processes and infrastructure to generate renewable energy. They are also providing education, advice and assistance to customers and communities on water and energy efficiency For example, the relationship between the customer-focused outcomes is phrased as: “How do we ensure that the regulatory framework incentivises efficient delivery of the right outcomes for customers and the environment?”.

These recognises that the path to net zero carbon is as much about the definition of the challenge as it is the decarbonisation of the functions that the water industry provide.

Looking ahead, Ofwat has recently undertaken consultation to explore options for customer-funded interventions designed to drive innovation to benefit customers in the longer-term. For example up to £200 million could be made available for innovation activities in AMP7, through an innovation competition or end-of-period roll-out reward.

There is no doubt that the water industry has the desire to do more building on carbon accounting and action that predates plans from many other sectors. It is also clear that the path to net zero needs new approaches, learning from recent innovations and pilot studies.

The changing language the water industry is adopting, especially with respect to defining the right outcomes for customers and the environment.

This, coupled with strong messaging about removing more carbon than we emit, ie, achieving negative carbon emissions by 2050, demonstrates an industry that has positioned itself to be in charge of its own destiny. o

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WHAT’S FLOOD GOT TO DO WITH IT? Are we setting the right tone and using the right language, when we talk to people and communities about the flood risks they face? Phiala Mehring reports

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And when it rained, my stress levels went through the roof.

I set up a flood group, then a flood partnership, not just to manage my flood risk but because it was the only control I had. Flooding robs you of control. I got involved in developing the Floods Act. I scrutinised flood-risk assessments for local developments, I joined committees.

I read policies. So many fellow floodies have done likewise. Goodness knows how many consultations I completed.

Flooding didn’t just flood my close, it flooded my life.

Seventeen years after that first incident, flooding is still central to my life. I hear stories like mine all the time, as a vice-chair of the National Flood Forum and as a part-time PhD, researching the impacts of floods.

Recently, I interviewed a woman diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder – it’s distressing how common PTSD is amongst floodies. I asked whether her husband was similarly impacted.

By not engaging with the community, a simple, nondiscursive visit triggered conspiracy theories that only added to people’s stress. Which is the last thing flood communities need

York flooding, 2015

I

’M ONE OF the lucky ones. When flooding hit my area, the water didn’t enter my home. It lapped at the garage door but never quite got high enough to ooze under the front door or seep into the air bricks.

But although the flood water didn’t damage my home it left its mark on me; an enduring psychological imprint. After the flood, it felt like my life folded in around flooding – or rather, not flooding.

Checking weather forecasts and river levels became a daily ritual. I know a floodie – that’s what we call someone who lives at risk of flooding – who has 23 weather-related apps on his phone, just to make sure. At the weekends, I would walk to check local flood assets.

“Well,” she said. “Not so much. But if it rains at night, I often find him sitting by our bedroom window checking conditions outside. He’ll do it all night if there’s very heavy rain. If fact, we now have a rota so both of us can have at least some sleep.”

Imagine living like that.

Another interviewee has a militarystyle procedure before going on holiday, prepping the house and enlisting friends and neighbours for a round-the-clock vigil. Once he’s on holiday, he checks his weather apps and, if he sees that rain is forecast, he sends the enlisted to check the local flood assets and to monitor the river and the water coming off a new local development, with instructions to report back. With photos.

Flooding even floods his holiday.

Flooding is clearly not just about water. In fact, flood water is only the

start of flooding. Floodies experience flooding throughout their everyday lives.

That impact goes on for years and years and years.

CROSS-PURPOSES This begs the question: what does flooding mean to the risk-management authorities (RMAs)? What I’ve learned from my interviews is that RMAs construct flooding around return periods, heights, cost-benefit ratios and residual risk.

One RMA interviewee lamented that they fail “to talk about the impact of flooding”, and focus instead on the numbers. This is a very literal construction, which of course makes sense in the context of having to evaluate flood-risk management so that limited funding is wisely spent.

It does rather strip out our humanity.

So if flooding means different things to different people, doesn’t that make communicating a tad difficult? And that gets in the way of engagement.

So many #floodwords hinder communication. Even “engagement” is fraught with double meanings. Flood communities lament that their local flood authorities don’t engage with them. Talk to the flood authorities, and they insist they do engage. There’s lots and lots of engagement.

Flood authorities often run events to help the community become more “resilient” – we’ll come to that #floodword later – and arrange huge letter drops to urge people to sign up to flood warnings.

They even knock on doors to ask people to sign up to those warnings or to distribute information packs about householders’ riparian responsibilities.

My interviewees have a lot to say about “engagement”.

To many flood communities, it just isn’t engagement. To them, engagement equals partnerships with the RMAs that allow everyone to work together to reduce flood risk. That would mean the flood authorities tapping local knowledge to augment models, developing relationships that build trust.

For floodies, engagement means “time, trust, two-way communication” in working with the flood authorities to reduce their risk of flooding. That engagement has to be equitable and mutual; it cannot put all the onus on the

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TRUST Resilience is another #floodword. A #floodword with the power to destroy trust. Too often, it creates a them-and-us approach to flood-risk management that undermines engagement.

Of course, resilience is one of the most important elements of flood-risk management. But flood communities interpret the message as “you flood because you are not resilient”. One interviewee describes this as “being foisted upon the very people who don’t have the facilities to deal with [resilience]”.

Resilience is gaining a second negative connotation. More and more members of the flood community suspect that property flood resilience (PFR) is the means by which the flood authorities “wash their hands” of properly managing flooding, as one interviewee put it.

That leads to the conclusion that, if you get a PFR grant, you cannot expect your flood risk to be managed properly, long term, creating “a Catch-22 situation: if you accept PFRs, that’s them dusted and gone”.

And so resilience is little more than “a sticking plaster”, in lieu of flood-risk management. In today’s world of climate change, is this the message we want to communicate, whether we mean to or not?

There are many, many other #floodwords; protection, consultation, partnership working... For me, trust is the word that matters. As flood risk increases, many communities are unaware that this includes them.

Engaging with these communities, connecting them to flooding is a

November storms brought flooding to Sprotbrough in Doncaster

challenge. So many RMAs say they cannot get the local community to trust them and their expertise. RMAs frame trust around the information and the models they use. But how can a community trust expertise that doesn’t resonate with their experiences and their local knowledge?

Imagine having lived in your home for three decades, to have a complete stranger knock on your door to say you are at risk of flooding “because the flood model says so” Imagine having lived in your home for three decades, to have a complete stranger knock on your door to say you are at risk of flooding “because the flood model says so”. What do you believe; a model that simulates the area – or your lived experience of more than 30 years?

My research shows that what matters is trust in people – not models or expertise. My RMA interviews show you get a lot further discussing flooding if you build on a pre-existing relationship with that community, which creates communications based on trust.

But what I also hear is that RMAs struggle to establish these critical relationships – and that becomes harder still when an official rocks up in RMA livery.

Fifty interviews in, I hear time and time again the plea for a neutral intermediary.

The official entering a community representing the Environment Agency or Lead Local Flood authority will come up

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flood communities. That last point is a common refrain among floodies.

One of my interviewees described a flood authority team entering their village, wandering around taking photos, measuring things then leaving. Without saying a word to the community, leaving them with no idea what was going on. Did it mean they would get a flood-alleviation scheme or would the evidence make a case against such a scheme, instead pushing property flood resilience? By not engaging with the community, a simple, non-discursive visit triggered conspiracy theories that added to people’s stress.

And that's the last thing flood communities need.

against a lot of unconscious prejudice, that may or may not be based on what their organisation has or hasn’t done in the past. Politics and the organisations’ paymasters play their part here, however well-intentioned the individual.

All of this creates barriers. So why not bring in organisations such as the National Flood Forum to act as a neutral broker between flood communities and flood authorities, to build relationships between the various groups that, in time, will establish trust? Better still, if an RMA finds itself working in an area with no flood group, have the neutral facilitator set one up. Imagine the work that would save.

By now, you’ve probably worked out what my research has concluded. If #floodwords mean different things to different people, the only way round this problem is to develop a joint understanding of flooding and its impacts. That means talking, listening and working with flood communities.

What’s flood got to do with it? Not as much as you would think. What have people and relationships got to do with it? Everything. o By day, Phiala Mehring is research director for a global research agency.

By night, she is half way through a PhD, Get your water out of my lounge, that aims to understand the differing constructions of flooding and flood-risk management among flood communities and flood authorities. Mehring is vicechair of the National Flood Forum, an intendant member of the Thames RFCC and a member of London Catchment Partnership (CaBA)

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HOLDING BACK THE WAVES A PLAN FOR NORTH WALES North Wales is vulnerable to flood risk – but the government also sees this deprived region as a priority area for new housing and economic development. How can Wales create new jobs and better housing while protecting its citizens from threats linked to climate change? Reagan Duff reports North Wales, may become unsustainable if extremes and frequency of flood continue to increase, threatening vulnerable holiday homes. And the Welsh government wants tourism to drive economic growth.

The latest National Development Framework for Wales names the coast between Caernarfon and Deeside a key development region. The framework aims to develop northeast industry and services, to drive growth in North Wales.

But the northeast faces significant flood risk from its coastal location and rivers such as the Dee and the Clwyd.

Vulnerable infrastructure here includes the North Wales Expressway and the coastal railway, both linking the UK to Ireland. Being designated a flood-risk area could hinder new infrastructure, stunting the region’s growth.

Any development that falls within Flood Zone C will need to factor in flood risk for planning decisions. That could create problems permitting new projects within designated development zones; planning policy requires acknowledgement and mitigation of flood risk. It will cost more to

MAP KEY

ZONE A ZONE B ZONE C1 ZONE C2

SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES WALES

F

rom the epic of Gilgamesh to Hopi tales of sailing into the Fourth World, many ancient cultures have flood myths, stories that pre-date the Neolithic era, that tell of communities lost to or born from rising seas.

In Wales, the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod tells of a sunken kingdom beneath Cardigan Bay. This folk tale about a drowned world provides a cautionary tale for modern Wales. Today, 220,000 properties in Wales are at risk and 65,000 at significant risk of flooding from rivers or sea, a figure that will only increase as climate change brings heavier rain and stormier seas.

As a hub for tourism earning £2.5 billion annually – one of the country’s largest industries – the North Wales coast is particularly vulnerable. Sealevel rise will increase the threat of tidal flooding, expected to account for 70 per cent of flooding in Wales by 2080, up from half in 2002.

Flooding already costs Wales more than £200 million a year. North Wales is one of the UK’s most flood-prone regions.

When MoneySupermarket studied 1.25 million flooding cases, it named Victorian holiday resort Llandudno the fifth most likely UK town to flood. As Natural Resource Wales’ Flood Development Advice Map shows, the whole coastal region faces a marked flood risk, see map.

Forecasts suggest that Wales faces an 18fold increase in annual economic damage from flooding by 2080. More coastal flooding means more erosion and damage, which threatens economic development and tourism, as well as prospects for sustainable growth in northeast Wales.

Coastal tourism, a major employer in

build inside these flood zones, requiring additional flood risk and consequences assessments, mitigation measures, planning-application fees and other bureaucratic requirements.

The National Development Framework must factor flood risk into its planning policy to ensure that infrastructure supports resilient, sustainable development and does not put lives at risk. The framework sees these regions’ significant risk of flooding as a major challenge for regional development and regeneration. It seeks to co-ordinate strategic decisions on flood management and related investment.

In October, the Welsh government opened Technical Advice Note 15 (Tan 15) to consultation. Produced in 2004, Tan 15 supported the flood risk and development component of the Technical Advice Notes that shape planning policy in Wales.

The consultation suggests that highly vulnerable developments, including housing, should not be proposed within Flood Zone 3 on grounds of flood risk. It wants highly/less vulnerable development within Flood Zone 2 to face flood-consequences assessments and other strict tests based on proximity to effective flood defences.

Although this may not alter the original Tan 15 guidance, this could make it harder for developers and local

Coastal flooding threatens swathes of North Wales

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Defences have limited effectiveness in managing current risks of flooding and coastal erosion. The way climate change reshapes sea levels, precipitation and rates of coastal erosion will make these defences even less effective

councils to find suitable locations to develop to support the framework.

Welsh government estimates suggest that North Wales will need 19,400 more homes by 2038. Given that so much of North Wales is exposed to flood risk, the country may struggle to meet that target.

Flood defences along the Welsh coastline protect 28 per cent of the coast and some £8 billion of assets.

However, these defences have limited effectiveness in managing current risks of flooding and coastal erosion.

The way climate change reshapes sea levels, precipitation and rates of coastal erosion will make these defences even less effective.

The Welsh government says it will struggle to build new defences due to constraints on – and competing demands for – public money. But if investment in managing flood risk continues at its present rate, the number of properties in Wales that face significant risk of flooding will increase by more than 75 per cent by 2035.

Funding would need to triple by then to protect the same number of properties from flooding. The figures highlight the scale of the challenge that Wales faces, even to maintain its flood-risk defences and in making existing infrastructure, businesses and communities resilient to climate change.

Wales has already done a lot to tackle flood risk in the north. The Flood and Coastal Erosion Management Programme

has allocated £56 million to improve flood defences across Wales. It has identified where best to improve flood defences, including areas in North Wales, having taken a holistic approach to consider the likelihood and impact of flooding, the number of properties that will benefit and the ecological and recreation benefits.

Thanks to this programme, flood defences have been upgraded in Rhyl and Llandudno, which both lie within the coastal-development region. Rhyl’s £27.5 million flood defence comprises rock armour to raise the existing sea wall, protecting up to 1,650 homes.

There are other instances across North Wales where local councils have recognised that they need to improve their sea defences. Recent projects across Anglesey, Gwynedd, Denbighshire, Conwy and Flintshire aim to make the coastal region more robust.

These are the kinds of defences that will be vital if the Welsh government is to build the additional 19,400 houses it needs to meet demand in North Wales by 2038 and the 114,000 homes needed across Wales.

North Wales is a deprived area; 51 per cent of new housing needs to be affordable – 10,000 new homes by 2038.

StatsWales lists 13,000 affordable housing submissions granted across Wales; less than half have been delivered.

North Wales’ poorest communities are also most vulnerable to coastal

flood risk. Areas within the designated development zones have official unemployment rates of 4.4 per cent, against a UK average of 3.9 per cent. The area has high seasonal unemployment.

More than quarter of people in North Wales are over 65, indicating greater need for healthcare and transport. They need affordable, resilient housing.

Last year, the government published its Draft National Strategy for Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management in Wales, for which the consultation period closed in September. The strategy aims to address flood risk across Wales through five main objectives: o Improving our understanding and communication of risk o Preparedness and building resilience o Prioritising investment to the most atrisk communities o Preventing more people becoming exposed to risk o Providing an effective and sustained response to events.

The strategy aims to manage flood risk while acknowledging the region’s need for redevelopment and growth set out in the development framework. To ensure that growth takes place without increasing the region’s flood risk, the strategy aims to apply these objectives by: o Creating a Flood and Coastal Erosion Committee to establish the scope and consider the new legislation to clarify or improve flood and coastal erosion risk management in Wales by 2021.

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Wales is working on new flood-risk maps

oD elivering annual topographic surveys

by Wales Coastal Monitoring Centre to enable coastal groups to measure change in the areas most at risk oH aving Natural Resources Wales publish new Flood Risk Assessment Wales maps online by end of 2019 oH aving Natural Resources Wales provide annual data from all sources, to show how many homes and businesses face high, medium and low risks of flooding oU pdating Tan 15 by 2020, recognising the flood risk information now

available to local planning authorities.

The document is currently in a consultation process o Taking a joint approach – Welsh government, coastal groups and Natural Resources Wales – to develop coastal-adaptation guidance for publication by 2021.

All of this highlights the Welsh government’s determination to provide a well-researched, well-communicated approach to managing flood risk in Wales, that balances flood risk’s environmental demands against the

THE PLANNING FRAMEWORK THE NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Framework for Wales sets the country’s direction for development from 2020 to 2040, covering how to address the social, economic, political and environmental facets of development.

The framework does not aim to eliminate policy making, which creates tensions, but rather provides a basis for policy and informed decision making. The Framework aims to address issues and challenges “including energy supply, transport, the natural environment, housing and industrial development”.

It seeks to achieve sustainable development throughout Wales,

balancing consideration for the environmental impacts of climate change against suitable and effective national planning policies. The government plans to revisit the framework every five years, altering and adding to it following new consultations.

Regional policy will be paramount across all decision making and policy implementation, based on understanding local opportunities and challenges. Designating the coastal areas from Caernarfon to Deeside should enhance holistic development.

The framework says this region will “play an important role within the region, providing jobs, leisure and retail,

country’s growth needs. Forthcoming publications, including the Coastal Adaptation Guidance and the updated Tan 15, will identify how to manage flood risk within the development framework’s ambitions.

All of this highlights the role flood risk plays in development planning.

As sea levels rise, and as storms become more frequent due to the impacts of climate change, Wales will have to acknowledge and make more allowances for flood risk for its development plans to succeed. o

cultural opportunities, education, health and services”. It says regeneration, based on managed growth, will be key to achieving these goals.

Introducing the framework, First Minister Mark Drakeford noted that the government consulted the 2015 Wellbeing of Future Generations Act of 2015 in developing the framework, to create “another building block in making Wales a fair, green and prosperous place”.

Wales’ minister for housing and local government Julie James adds that the framework provides the foundation for an economy and a society that are resilient and sustainable. She points to the role of regional development, with bespoke development strategies supporting local characteristics, to underpin growth.o

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COME HELL AND HIGH WATER

T Storyteller: SL Shanth Kumar

he photo essay you see here comes from an assignment that sent India-based SL Shanth Kumar around Mumbai and Tamil Nadu on a mission to document how climate change is raising sea levels and driving more frequent storm surges.

Shanth visited some of India's poorest settlements to document the ways in which climate change and rising seas are reshaping coastal communities’ daily lives. “I had learned that the sea was coming more inland every year flooding people’s homes, which used to never happen before,” he says.

“So I came to Bandra during a high tide to witness and document what the people said. The sea was raging, the

waves big enough to sweep a man into the ocean. I was fighting the current, looking out for my safety while making these pictures.”

Mumbai-based Shanth is a photojournalist with a leading national newspaper. Last year, CIWEM recognised his tireless work documenting the impact on India of climate change and rising seas, naming him our environmental photographer of the year.

Having started young, Shanth learned photography the hard way, from the ground up, starting out as a pantry boy in a photographic studio. He particularly enjoyed working in the darkroom and persuaded the photographers to take him on as a technician, to wash and develop

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their films, before becoming an assistant in the studio.

Documenting daily life in general – and the impact that climate change is having – is his passion.

“As the debate rages on climate change I believe through photography we can show people that it’s real,” Shanth says.

“There are effects and it is affecting real people, destroying livelihoods and changing topography.

“I believe that, through images, we can rally people to come together as a community and to make small changes

to reverse the process of climate change.

Photography is a visual story-telling tool.

It shows people the truth in the most graphic way possible.”

It takes smart technical choices to deliver a spontaneous-looking, cannily composed photograph. So what are the secrets to a strong action shot?

“In times like this I shoot in aperture priority, letting the camera calculate the exposure while I concentrate on getting the right moment and telling the story as it happens,” Shanth says.

More than anything, it’s the human

story behind the images that gives this series its emotional punch – these photos show the resilience of this hard-pressed fishing community, and highlight how few choices people have.

“In India, life goes on,” Shanth concludes. “People adapt, accept their circumstances, write off their losses and continue life as if nothing happened. We call it the Spirit of Mumbai.

“The people living on the coast have nowhere to go… so they continue living there, risking their lives, adapting and surviving to make a living.” o

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URBAN WATER SHORTAGES

IS GROUNDWATER THE ANSWER? As more of our cities face critical water shortages, the pressure is on urban water utilities and other authorities to rethink their drought resilience. Stephen Foster, Michael Eichholz, Ricardo Hirata and Mohammad Faiz Alam report

R

ECENT water-supply crises in Cape Town, Chennai and Sao Paulo are increasing pressure on urban water utilities and other stakeholders to interrogate their supply’s resilience to drought.

Climate change will bring more frequent droughts, increase evaporation from surface waterbodies, and create more intense rainfall that causes flooding and flashy streamflow, especially in semi-arid climatic zones. Better water storage will be critical for the future security of water supply – and having a major aquifer near the urban area in

question will enhance supply resilience.

Groundwater offers sustainable, decentralised, cost-effective solutions for climate-change adaptation. Aquifers are a natural buffer against variable river flow, storing large volumes of groundwater, protected from evapotranspiration and less vulnerable to pollution than surface water. Aquifers are an important indicator of physical water-resource security for a given city and its catchment area.

Four criteria assess what role a groundwater system can play, alongside local surface water, in climate-change adaptation, and how much management

it requires to fulfill this role; storage availability, supply productivity, natural quality and pollution vulnerability.

In some hydrogeologic settings local aquifers do not have large enough storage or sufficient production potential to support water-utility water wells. However, they often support large numbers of private self-supply water wells.

There are questions, too, about the natural resilience to climate change of groundwater reserves in shallow aquifers, where soil compaction from global warming may reduce recharge from rainfall, although other factors may counterbalance this effect.

MANAGEMENT MEASURES To support climate-change adaptation, groundwater systems need proper management and protection:

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POPULATION & TOTAL WATER USE

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TYPICAL EVOLUTION OF GROUNDWATER USE AND DEPENDENCY WITH URBAN POPULATION GROWTH

PRIVATE IN-SITU GROUNDWATER SUPPLY (varying with utility water availability and tariffs)

IMPORTED SURFACE WATER RESOURCES and/or GROUNDWATER FROM EXTERNAL WELLFIELDS (depending on feasibility and relative cost)

UTILITY GROUNDWATER SUPPLY FROM WITHIN URBAN AREA TYPICALLY 50 YEARS

The Cantareira reservoir during a severe drought in the state of Sao Paulo

o Demand-side management to ensure that groundwater withdrawals align with realistic assessments of average renewable resources of the local aquifer, conserving some environmental discharge supported by groundwater o Supply-side management, promoting recharge-enhancement such as roof and road drainage soakaways and permeable pavements, that factor in changes in rainfall patterns and protect water quality o Protection against pollution, building sound waterwells, declaring protection zones around important groundwater sources and noting that anthropogenic pressures on groundwater quality may intensify under climate change.

We must also establish, maintain and improve groundwater levels and quality-

monitoring networks to generate data that will guide the adaptation of waterresource policy and land-use management for groundwater sustainability.

That requires significant financial investment and stakeholder contributions; the funding allocated to manage natural infrastructure is almost always inadequate. Urban water utilities must participate as the major stakeholder in groundwater as a drinking-water source.

So far, few cities have implemented conjunctive and adaptive groundwater management in any practical sense and the result is numerous recent urban water-supply crises. We must foster a resource culture within developing cities’ water utilities to promote a more balanced approach on long-­term watersupply security.

COMPLICATIONS Growing numbers of private urban water wells only complicate matters. Globally, the urban population is growing at a rate without precedent. But in many developing cities, the coverage and reliability of utility water supplies is inadequate.

That leads people to find other ways to meet their water needs. Private selfsupply, using in-situ water wells – which includes all types of bore hole, bore well, tube well and dug well – is booming, especially in cities in south Asia, tropical Africa and Brazil. Sinking urban selfsupply water wells begins as a coping strategy on the part of those who can afford it – and it typically costs anything between US$2,000-US$20,000 according

ADVANCING TIME

to hydrogeologic setting. But all too often, it continues in perpetuity as a costreduction strategy, as the operating costs are lower than full-rate water-utility tariff charges and as users see these wells as more reliable.

Off-grid supply from urban water wells is poorly documented; in many cities, it is not considered in public-policy terms.

It can contribute to water contamination and it greatly reduces much-needed water-utility revenue – even though it also relieves resource pressure on waterutility supplies.

Public policy urgently needs waterutility planning and operation to reflect the economic and technical impacts of private self-supply water wells, to be able to regulate to cut public health risks and to optimise private investment against that of urban utility water and wastewater services.

It will take effective public communication programmes to alert private groundwater users to their obligation to regularise their wells, along with a regulatory regime that offers advantages – an element of resource conservation and quality evaluation – rather than simply issue penalties.

Government departments require user collaboration and enhanced investment in improved GPS and inspection capacity to better integrate private investment in urban water-supply provision.

BARRIERS Water utilities’ response and contribution to sustainable groundwater management

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has been patchy, with a few notable exceptions. The impediments to a more proactive position appear to be: o The water-utility functioning under a time-limited, action-specific concession within a public body such as a municipal department or national ministry, in which development and protection of new groundwater sources falls outside their remit as their actions are limited to mains leakage and wastage reduction o The water utility’s operations must conform with defined local geopolitical boundaries, as prescribed under its municipal concession, which constrains its ability to manage groundwater o The water utility and the area it covers are too small to protect and manage groundwater resources.

Sometimes, the utility assumes that another national or local organisation – such as the environment agency, the ministry for water resources or the basin authority – is responsible for managing groundwater resources. It may assume that the prevailing regulatory regime requires it to provide a wholesome, safe drinkingwater supply – which it can only guarantee through advanced water treatment, passing the cost on to the water user.

Misunderstandings like these demand an urgent institutional diagnostic, looking at whether: o Do governance factors, such as variable water-utility remit and regulation, and access to financial investment, constrain these organisations’ groundwater management? o Do water utilities have adequate professional awareness of and training that covers the role of groundwater resources and what it takes to manage and protect them?

Often, urban water-utilities that are responsible for water supply and for sewerage and drainage services can act more effectively to promote groundwater management and protection. They do this by prioritising: o Installing mains sewerage and eliminating high-density, in-situ sanitation to protect areas that have good quality, shallow groundwater o Enhancing aquifer recharge, using drainage soakaways from roofs and paved areas, and using permeable

WATER SCARCITY: A TALE OF THREE CITIES CHENNAI, INDIA CHENNAI IS THE fourthlargest metropolitan area in India. Its 8.6 million people faced an acute water crisis last year. Its four main reservoirs and lakes almost dried up due to persistent drought. By June, their combined surface-water reserves had shrunk to 0.1 per cent of total storage capacity and the water utility could supply only 525 Ml/d of the city’s 830 Ml/d demand. Parts of the city came to depend on groundwater, abstracted within and outside the city limits.

Chennai has more than 420,000 private wells, but the water table has fallen, due to long-term overexploitation and limited recharge during recent poor monsoons. As a result, many wells have dried up and contamination from seawater has reduced groundwater quality.

These pressures forced Chennai to deploy more than 5,000 tankers able to carry up to 9,000 litres of water, making five or six trips, to supply groundwater from the surrounding rural areas for the water utility and private operators at a total rate of 200-300 Ml/d.

Chennai’s history of poor groundwater management has fuelled conflict over access to water between city dwellers and villagers.

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL SÃO PAULO IS South America’s largest metropolitan region, home to 21.5 million people.

Its 39 municipalities cover 7,946 km2 and have a combined annual GDP of US$237 billion.

Some 95 per cent of the population sources its water from public supply, mainly by a complex surfacewater system that produces 5,270 Ml/d, 1 per cent of it from groundwater. More than 13,000 private water wells extract 950 Ml/d – or 18 per cent of the public supply, at a cost five to eight times lower.

Private wells’ contribution increased to 25 per cent during the last major water crisis of 2013-2015.

Although private self-supply increased water-supply security, large-scale uncontrolled water-well drilling

pavement to reduce land-surface impermeabilisation o Enhancing urban aquifer recharge with appropriately treated wastewater, paying careful attention to its chemical and biological quality. o Stephen Foster is chair of the International Water Association’s

has caused problems, lowering water-table levels, creating conflict between users and increasing the risk of pollution. Few private sources undergo regular chemical analysis.

Studies attribute Sao Paulo’s failure to manage groundwater resources to a failure to understand how important this is for water-supply security or to understand conflicts between users. Because the water-management agencies face little pressure to improve matters, there is no incentive to regulate the city’s thousands of private water wells.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA CAPE TOWN HAS a population of about 3.8 million that requires the public water authorities to supply about 900 Ml/d. Cape Town faced an extreme water crisis in 2017-2018, that prompted the city’s Water and Sanitation Department to impose severe water-supply restrictions – even though it had cut its distributionsystem leakage losses to just 14 per cent.

The crisis stemmed from the 2015-2017 drought, when total annual rainfall fell to less than 250mm, compared to a long-term average of more than 600mm. In June 2017, when storage in Cape Town’s largest surface-water reservoirs fell to below 15 per cent, piped per capita supply fell to 100 lpd, then to 80 lpd, then to 50 lpd. Soon scientists were predicting Day Zero. The crisis saw people forced to queue to collect a daily ration of 25 lpd per head from 150 collection points. But thanks to heavy rain that month, Cape Town narrowly averted a crisis.

Western Cape Province’s public water supply relies almost exclusively on surface-water reservoirs that hold a maximum 900 million sq m a year, of which 70 per cent is held in Theewaterskloof and Voelviel dams. The province made a serious policy error in not diversifying its water sources, particularly given that Western Cape groundwater systems – the Cape Flats, Table Mountain and Atlantis aquifers – have significant yield potential.

These sources urgently need to be assessed and better managed. In theory, at least, they could provide Cape Town with a public water supply reserve for drought of more than 200 Ml/d. o

Groundwater Management Group.

Michael Eichholz of Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, Ricardo Hirata of Sao Paulo’s Instituto de Geociencias and Mohammad Faiz Alam from the International Water-Management Institute in Delhi are steeringcommittee members of the group

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ENGINEERING A RESILIENT NEW ORLEANS New Orleans has some of the world’s most sophisticated systems to manage storm water. But the city is sinking because these systems prevent groundwater recharging. Could a more natural approach tackle both problems while making the city more resilient to climate change?

Dan Grandal reports

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rowing numbers of coastal cities are becoming all too familiar with flooding and the negative impacts associated with climate change. Changes in precipitation patterns have had a significant impact on our low-lying, coastal communities.

These changes, combined with ageing, undersized, and overworked infrastructure, have created increasingly soggy communities. Building resilient, adaptive systems that account for existing and future demand is a difficult challenge – but will be critical to the future of New Orleans.

Resilience is often defined as the capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to maintain or recover functionality

in the face of stress or disturbance. More plainly stated, resilience often means the ability and strength to bounce back after a disturbance or an interruption.

For New Orleans, resilience is built through improvements to the stormwater management and drainage systems, but also through addressing New Orleans’ social resilience. Successful urban watermanagement strategies that promote resilient and adaptive design require us to open our minds, to a new norm, treating water as a resource instead of a nuisance or threat.

The traditional approach focuses on collecting stormwater in a pipe network and conveying – or pumping – it away from a developed area to be managed elsewhere.

In New Orleans, stormwater is collected in pipes during wet weather, pumped into canal systems, and discharged over levees to Lake Pontchartrain.

Over the years, in reaction to flooding, the city’s water-management system has been improved with higher levees and with increased pumping capacity to get the water out of the city as fast as possible. Even though New Orleans has some of the largest stormwater systems in the world, these powerful systems are often overwhelmed by storms that, due to climate change, are becoming more intense and frequent.

Unfortunately, the unintended consequence is to prevent groundwater recharge, drying out the organic soils,

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A R E A R E P O RT

which increases rates of subsidence.

New Orleans is sinking.

To address these concerns, the city has launched Living with Water, which aims to manage stormwater where it falls, using infiltration-based practices and strategic storage systems. This approach demands unique resident partnerships and community education since these innovative stormwater-management practices are often placed within the public right of way.

At its core, Living with Water means safeguarding an area from flooding by introducing natural methods of water management, at the same time beautifying the neighbourhood, which creates a spark for redevelopment. This allows residents to reconnect with water, making it a resource and amenity for them to enjoy.

A NEW COURSE In 2015, the City of New Orleans submitted a proposal to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) to create the city’s first resilience district. The competition required the city authorities to identify the biggest threats, risks, and vulnerabilities and to present opportunities to enhance resilience.

The city landed more than US$141 million worth of funding through the NDRC, supplementing previously allocated investments funded through FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Programme.

The Blue and Green Corridor project is the backbone of Gentilly Resilience District, aiming to reduce flood risk, slow land subsidence, and revitalise the neighbourhood. The project creates a network of canals, recreational parks, complete streets, walkways, bike paths, and community spaces along eight linear miles of arterial roadways and right of ways.

Surrounded by water, New Orleans was founded due to its proximity to the Mississippi river and Gulf of Mexico.

Today, however, most residents live behind levees and flood walls and have lost that connection with water. That creates one of the toughest tasks for the city; convincing generations of residents to reverse their received wisdom, that water needs to be removed and kept out of the city, and that they should now keep it in.

Since these projects were announced in 2018, the city and the public have been building a relationship of trust and mutual learning. These infrastructure projects are like nothing residents have seen before, making it critical to explain the networks’ benefits.

Throughout the design phase, community organisations and residents have discussed environmental concerns and community needs to guide the project. The unique perspective about their neighbourhoods and streets creates a consultant-community partnership that centres and improves the end product.

TRANSFORMATION Many areas of Gentilly are low- and moderate-income communities that have been de-prioritised since Hurricane Katrina. They have ageing infrastructure and lack community amenities. This project will invest heavily in the community to create vibrant, attractive public spaces. It will enhance and beautify the area and spur reinvestment into the neighbourhood – eventually improving quality of life, job creation, increased economic conditions and higher property values.

Living with Water means safeguarding an area from flooding by introducing natural methods of water management, at the same time beautifying the neighbourhood Along the streets slated as blue corridors, the city will construct open recreational waterways within the wide neutral grounds, or medians, between vehicle travel lanes to receive and store runoff, and relieve stress on the pumping system, allowing it to catch up. On an average day, the waterway functions as a recreational amenity alongside a welcoming, park-like space. During storms it acts as strategic storage for the drainage system.

Along the streets slated as green corridors, the city will construct several green infrastructure features – such as bioswales and permeable pavement – to store stormwater runoff, allowing it to seep slowly back into the ground. Where possible, the project proposes road diets

to reduce impervious cover, beautify the neighbourhood with landscaping and calm traffic, but also to build complete streets for safe walking and biking.

This project aims to create safe and functional streets by re-assessing the wide pavements and numerous traffic lanes. Road diets, pavement reductions, and correctly sized travel lanes will create traffic calming features and the opportunity to increase green space.

The reclaimed roadway areas are being designed to include rain gardens and community parks.

Another focus for Living with Water is to integrate street designs. These streets will be adapted to increase walking, bicycling, and/or transit trips within the Gentilly Resilience District through creative wayfinding, multimodal facilities, and improved access to jobs, educational opportunities, commercial areas, and recreational destinations.

Creating a vision that frames blue and green corridors is one thing; implementing a transformational community-based project that can deliver, measure and celebrate broad benefits is another. Living with Water wants every resident to feel as though they have a park outside their own front door.

By creating an interconnected, linear district that offers local people every amenity within walking distance, residents will spend more time enjoying their community, building strong ties with their neighbours. Interactive activities will bring the neighbourhood together, using public art and education to reflect New Orleans’ unique natural history and culture.

The people of the Gentilly and New Orleans have proved to be resilient. The Blue and Green Corridors project has designed a dynamic urban landscape that revitalises the neighbourhood and reduces flood risk by adapting to the changing environment through innovative techniques.

This project serves as a model for urban adaptation in New Orleans and for delta communities around the world. It’s a vision for resilience, grounded in reality. o Daniel Grandal is vice-president water and senior project manager with Stantec in New Orleans, where he leads the Blue-Green Corridors project

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CIWEM News POLICY

STAND, NOW DELIVER December brought the UK its first climate election – now the new Conservative government must deliver urgent climate action. Alastair Chisholm reports SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

IN THE RUN-UP to the general election CIWEM published a manifesto tracker.

This illustrated, looking back to 2017, just how much the parties had turned up the dial on climate and ecological issues.

In the last year, the penny seems to have dropped with politicians that this omnicrisis is so stark as to be unignorable – but also that pledges of ambitious action are actually vote winners.

Many people, especially the young, listed action on the environment – particularly climate change, but also things like air quality – in the top three issues that would inform their vote

LIV OEIAN / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Many people, especially the young, listed action on the environment – particularly climate change, but also things like air quality – in the top three issues that would inform their vote. Brexit, health and crime, maybe education, were the other priorities.

‘Climate emergency’ was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2019, the year the issue went mainstream.

OED defines its word of the year as “a word or words that reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance”.

Having not previously featured in the list of popular modifiers for the word emergency, use increased by approaching 11,000 per cent, reflecting a change in how people characterise the urgency of climate change in everyday speech.

Undoubtedly in the UK, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have had a profound impact on the public and thence political consciousness.

Thunberg, in particular, has transformed something on the horizon of our societal

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worry-scope – abstract, sciencey and too often perceived to lack consensus – into something visceral and, above all, moral.

Thunberg uses simple, pointed language to cut through the fudge.

Humanity is facing an existential crisis, adults are to blame, the young will be the biggest victims and adults are doing nothing meaningful to address it. Our house is on fire. We can’t be bothered to put it out. How dare we? Left hook, right hook, uppercut, perfectly landed.

LIV OEIAN / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

DELIVERY And so, an update to the Climate Change Act followed spring and summer mass public protest to put net zero by 2050 into UK law. Hundreds of organisations, public and private, made emergency declarations recognising the climate as well as ecological crises.

Some mainstream media outlets have committed to reporting the issues with stronger language and climate-related topics now feature almost daily on major news channels.

December’s general election was the latest test of progress on this front and many manifestos featured ambitious pledges on decarbonising housing and the wider economy, delivering nature recovery, reforestation and investing more on flood risk management, and other more varied policies.

It felt mildly disorienting to see a raft of measures that environmentalists have pushed for decades offered up on a plate as newfound vote winners.

We had the worldfirst of a televised leaders’ debate explicitly discussing the climate emergency. And even if two were notably absent, the debate left the impression of engaged Summer 2019: Greta Thunberg protests outside parliament in Stockholm

and – largely – well-informed party leaders expressing clear concern and commitment to act.

In 2020 we need to maintain that election fervour. The IPCC warned in its 2018 report on limiting global warming to 1.5oC that we have little more than a decade to decisively act to keep temperatures below that level.

Our new government may well be in power for half that time. Promises for action which may well have been easy to splash across a manifesto document must now be translated into strong, robust policy irrespective of the distraction of Brexit.

SPOTLIGHT Reasons for optimism come no lesser than the UK hosting COP26 in Glasgow in November. The eyes of the world will be on us. By that point it should already be clear how keen the government is to act quickly and to change up a gear to deliver against net-zero aligned carbon budgets, plan adaptation and overhaul land-use policies to deliver nature recovery.

It won’t look good, by the time we have nine years left to act, if we are dragging our feet, if prolonged trade negotiations allow those ambitious environmental pledges to drift.

Reasons for concern relate to fears about honesty, misinformation and distorted truth that surfaced time and time again during the election. If this indicates a trend in British politics, how many manifesto promises will be fudged, obfuscated, greenwashed or dropped?

One side-effect of growing voter awareness of environmental issues is the way that greenwash is spreading. As public demands for action grow, brands realise the benefits of being associated with environmental friendliness – which means we must apply scrutiny and a health does of scepticism when presented with such claims.

Sustainability campaign body Hubbub warns that companies are banking immediate PR wins from presenting flawed solutions and using the language of sustainability, to dress greenwash in “more sophisticated clothing”. Law firm ClientEarth has complained about BP’s latest advertising campaign on exactly these grounds.

Are we likely to see governments follow that approach? We need to call out inaction or distraction, strongly and consistently. The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation will be to adopt underhand tactics. We absolutely must not allow COP26 to be greenwashed.

Other risks include cliff-edge fatigue.

The premise has been since 2016 that the closer we got to a no-deal Brexit the sharper the pencils and the clearer the focus on securing – and passing – a good deal. That fallacy led to both political impasse and to December’s election.

The notion of “delivering” a May or Johnson Brexit in whatever short timeframe applied at the time meant such claims were always bunkum. We know we need as much time as possible to lead the world by example towards a 1.5oC or even a 2oC warming ceiling, if that’s our ambition, and we know we have precious little of it.

Staring down that cliff edge won’t work, either for sharpening focus or hoping that climate change will get delayed. We must oppose any political attempts to leave matters for some later government to sort out.

We need to call out inaction or distraction, strongly and consistently. The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation will be to adopt underhand tactics. We absolutely must not allow COP26 to be greenwashed So back to optimism: 2019 marked a cultural turning point. Climate change isn’t going anywhere and will be in our faces repeatedly this year, reminding us we can’t have any more dither and delay, to coin a phrase.

Politicians demonstrated in the election they’ve taken on board the kinds of measures needed to tackle it. Parliament should be more informed on an issue now firmly in the mainstream. And the young won’t let the adults fudge it or forget it. o Alastair Chisholm is CIWEM’s director of policy

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CIWEM News CIWEM BUYS FLOOD AND COAST

TRAINING www.ciwem.org/training Forthcoming learning and development training

09

ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS

LOCATION: London

MAR Delegates flock to Telford for Flood and Coast 2019

FLOOD AND COAST has long been a highlight of CIWEM’s calendar, writes Rebecca Sells. So when its previous owners approached us at the end of the summer to sound out our interest in acquiring the event it felt like a natural match.

Working together to shape the content with our Environment Agency partners, we believe that Flood and Coast 2020 presents a real opportunity to advance the global debate on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) in a changing climate.

Never has this topic been so critical.

At this time of climate and ecological emergency, we are committed to ensuring that it is a sustainable conference that feeds in to the critical debates set to take place at COP26 in November in Glasgow.

Through a range of engaging discussions, presentations and workshops which draw on international experience, Flood and Coast showcases innovative ways to adapt to climate change.

The event brings together over 5,000 key stakeholders in the FCERM community including government bodies, risk-management authorities,

academics, engineering consultants and contractors, business, major infrastructure providers, asset managers, affected communities and charities.

We also provide a forum for young professionals and the Women in the FCERM community to convene interactive programmes, which are open to all.

Our trade show and exhibition offer delegates unrivalled networking opportunities, a place to demonstrate new and innovative technologies and a space for service and product providers to engage effectively with contractors, consultants and project owners.

Delegates are invited to join our prestigious Project Excellence awards dinner showcasing some of the UK’s most cutting-edge FCERM projects.

Flood and Coast 2020 promises to bring people from different sectors and backgrounds together to make a real difference to the future of flood risk management. We look forward to welcoming you. o To register, exhibit or view our programme visit floodandcoast.com or email info@floodandcoast.com.

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MAY

LOCATION: London

CIWEM ONLINE 10-20 WEEK TRAINING MODULES

Fast track to chartership mentor training

Visit our website for dates and to register your interest

EVENTS

CIWEM – GET TOGETHER, GET INVOLVED www.ciwem.org/events

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MAY

CIWEM ANNUAL DINNER 2020

Celebrating 125 years shaping the environment for our future LOCATION: Drapers’ Hall, Throgmorton St, London EC2N 2DQ Individuals from £240 Corporate tables from £2,200 Book now at ciwem.org/events

Register and find out more: ciwem.org/events. To discuss sponsorship opportunities please contact Rebecca Sells; rebecca.sells@ciwem.org

DRINKING WATER INSPECTORATE MARCHES FOR ITS 30TH THE DRINKING WATER Inspectorate is celebrating its 30th anniversary by taking part in WaterAid’s March for Water on March 26.

DWI staff will carry water for 6km to highlight the average distance that one

in nine people around the world walk to fetch water, to raise funds for WaterAid. In many parts of the world it falls to women and girls to make long and difficult journeys to collect this basic necessity. Children fall sick every year

from drinking contaminated water.

The inspectorate welcomes all its stakeholders to take part. o To donate or join in, please visit www.dwi.gov.uk for details

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MEET THE TEAM Jack and Barbara

I cherish being around those who share these or that I can engage with in conversation. It has also brought me back to the city I love, with its ample opportunities.

IN MY SPARE TIME YOU’LL FIND ME… Playing video games, lip-syncing for my life and complaining about the weather.

Connect with Jack at: linkedin.com/in/ jackpoole3993

JACK POOLE TELL US WHAT YOU’RE DOING AT CIWEM

BARBARA ORTH

As a membership and professional standards executive, I assist new, current and prospective members with queries and applications.

TELL US WHAT YOU’RE DOING AT CIWEM I am a membership and professional standards executive

TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND: I graduated from UCL in 2016 with an MSci in biodiversity and conservation; in less fluffy terms, my background is in biology. After university, I interned with the Borneo Nature Foundation, studying Hylobates albibarbis, the Bornean whitebearded gibbon.

I witnessed first-hand the detrimental effects of forest fires and climate change on the planet. After that incredible experience with the gibbons and orang-utans, I wanted to work for an environmental NGO, to contribute to a better, sustainable environment.

WHO INSPIRES YOU? Naturally Sir David Attenborough and Dame Jane Goodall. But I’ll start with the woman who nurtured my interest in biology and science; my GCSE teacher Mrs Hardy, one of the best teachers I had, who encouraged me to explore areas of biology that interested me.

Then, there’s BNF gibbon director Dr Susan M Cheyne, who gave me – after months of me persevering – the opportunity to go to Borneo. Her passion for the environment and gibbons was infectious.

Lastly, a little wild card; I have huge admiration for Steven Gerrard. He embodies dedication, responsibility and hard work – and I was practically born wearing a Liverpool FC shirt.

WHY DO YOU ENJOY WORKING FOR CIWEM? As someone with strong liberal values

I’m a Transylvanian girl who moved to the UK aged 18 and liked it so much I decided to stay. I have a BA in politics and am a Master of Law (LLM), specialising in environmental and human rights law. Before joining CIWEM I worked as a translator for the German ministry for the environment.

WHO INSPIRES YOU? I am inspired by every person who informs themselves about the environmental challenges we are facing and who makes even the smallest effort to be a bit more aware of the impact they are having on the environment. And JK Rowling, who is incredible in every way.

WHY DO YOU ENJOY WORKING FOR CIWEM? When I was job hunting, I made a pact with myself that I would only work for organisations that make me feel good about what I do. CIWEM definitely ticks that box. I also really like the people – everyone is so friendly and kooky in their own way; there’s a really nice atmosphere in the office.

DAVID BELLAMY CIWEM IS SORRY to learn of the passing of Honorary Fellow Professor David Bellamy in December, writes Terry Fuller.

David came to wide public attention in 1969, having been consulted after the Torrey Canyon oil spill. His unique and energetic style of communication inspired people to take an interest in our natural world – to marvel at, understand and value it.

In 1982, David Bellamy founded The Conservation Foundation with David Shreeve, a member of CIWEM’s faiths and environment network. We were delighted to jointly convene the inaugural David Bellamy Lecture at Buckingham Palace in March 2013, hosted by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh.

The lecture was given by Professor Chris Baines, who paid tribute to David Bellamy’s ability to engage with people of all ages about the responsibility we have to conserve the natural world.

Now that we face an ecological emergency on this planet, it is plain to see what a visionary David Bellamy was.

He has inspired individuals to act and organisations to form and, despite the dangers we still face, we are in a better state because of him. o Professor David Bellamy OBE, BSc PhD.Hon, DSc.D.Univ, FLS, HonFCIWEM, 1933-2019

IN MY SPARE TIME, YOU’LL FIND ME….?

In my spare time you’ll probably find me performing in a Polish folk-dance show, making jewellery or playing board games.

Random fact: I recorded a Christmas album, available on iTunes and Spotify. I also enjoy classical music and going to the theatre.

Connect with Barbara on LinkedIn at: Barbara Orth o

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L AST W O R D

BELIEVING IN BETTER CIWEM is delighted to have taken the ownership of the Flood and Coast conference and to be working in partnership with the Environment Agency and other industry leaders to shape this gathering of the world’s best flood and coastal risk managers, writes Terry Fuller M BARRATT / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Flooding in York

F

lood and Coast has been running in its current guise since 2016.

However, it is widely regarded as the successor to MAFF conference, which became the Defra conference.

It has been a feature on my professional landscape as far back as I remember.

I recall my first experience of it, being inspired to one day be a speaker. I have forged many professional relationships through the event, integral to my continuing professional development.

Flood and Coast always has been the conference to be at. The term flood family was used at the conference two years ago but the event always had that feeling. Its content is created by an advisory group of accomplished professionals from across the flood and coastal world. You will not find more contemporaneous or better-quality learning in any other event in the calendar.

CIWEM respects this heritage, which underpins our ambition to work with our members and partners to take this to new heights. As I write, we are in the early stages of preparation but the ambitions are clear.

The event must be an exemplar of

sustainable practice including carbon efficiency. CIWEM has declared a climate and ecological emergency, which is driving all our operations. This event allows us to progress our seven pledges.

The conference will continue the theme of climate change. We expect the Environment Agency to publish its flood and coast strategy before the conference and we already know that climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience are

CIWEM has declared a climate and ecological emergency, which is driving all our operations.

This event allows us to progress our seven pledges central to this. The UK hosts COP26 in November, and we want Flood and Coast to inform that conference’s programme.

We are determined that acquiring this event creates opportunities and benefits for our members. It complements the activities of our Rivers and Coastal and Urban Drainage groups and our new Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk specialist panel.

We want Flood and Coast to grow as an international conference but not all our members will be able to travel to Telford, especially those in 90 countries outside the UK. We must also consider our carbon challenge, balancing it with our corporate objective to make CIWEM more accessible.

So we will use video linkage and digital media to open live access to activities and record on-demand video and podcasts.

What themes will enable us to progress contemporary initiatives and policy, including the new Environment Agency FCERM strategy, Defra policy and the 25-year environment plan? The themes include a nation ready for – and resilient to – climate change, delivering together, a green and sustainable future and skills and tools for the future.

Several broad threads run through these themes, including community, zero carbon, research, international best practice and youth viewpoints. Coupled with the flood risk management community’s very best people and ideas, this will be a powerful event.

We plan sessions that are free to enter and to make available key outputs through video and podcasts. That way, key messages and learning points from our flood-risk community will inform global leaders’ discussions during COP26.

It is a privilege for CIWEM to be Flood and Coast’s producer and to work with the Environment Agency and the flood-risk community to create an event that builds on the past and takes bold steps into the future.

We face immense challenges from a changing climate and ecology and have a duty to mitigate the human impacts. The public and decision makers are becoming more aware of this all the time. They are looking for solutions and inspiration, and hope we have the wherewithal to meet these challenges.

My single wish is that the flood-risk family comes out of this conference having strengthened the belief that it can deliver on these expectations. o Terry Fuller is chief executive of CIWEM

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