Southsea Coastal Scheme: Sub-Frontage 1 (UK)
Locally Manufactured
WINNER
SUSTAINABILITY AWARDS
Living Ports Project, Port of Vigo (Spain)
Validated Core Technology Meets Marine Construction Standards Enhancing Marine Biodiversity
WINNER
WINNER
Mackley delivered urgent works to Ventnor frontage after a catastrophic failure of the seawall and promenade. This collaborative project reused timber from our Bournemouth groyne building programme, creating a more sustainable solution.
Mackley is a civil engineering contractor with 90 years’ experience of innovative engineering for our core business sectors.
Working in the water environment is not for the faint hearted. Nevertheless, with our skills in construction, ECI, design management, environmental mitigation and stakeholder management, Mackley has been tackling challenging projects, alongside our clients, ranging from construction management of programmes to emergency rapid response, across all our specialist sectors, for almost 100 years.
We deliver as a Tier 1 lead contractor or as a Tier 2 supply chain partner including design & build services. Our teams’ engineering capabilities help tailor designs and construction methods for buildability, and to build resilience and adaptation to climate change. Our objective is always to deliver low carbon solutions and construction methods to deliver biodiversity net gain and nature based solutions.
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Management
AS SPEAKERS AND delegates ready themselves for the annual Flood & Coast conference and exhibition in Telford this month, this issue of The Environment explores the dual challenges of flooding and coastal erosion.
We speak to the Environment Agency’s Caroline Douglass ahead of the session she’s chairing at Flood & Coast about how the agency (our partner for the event, along with The Rivers Trust) is building resilience in the face of climate crisis, and helping the public to do so too.
Douglass calls for a “systems approach to a systems problem”, with the EA, other flood and coastal erosion risk management authorities (RMAs) and private owners rising to the challenge using a wide range of solutions.
Natural flood management will be a key piece of that puzzle – Mark Lloyd, CEO of The Rivers Trust takes us through how projects like wetland creation and tree planting can help slow the flow, as well as benefitting biodiversity and local communities.
That’s not to say that traditional flood and coastal erosion risk management assets have had their day – rather that they need to work in partnership with naturebased solutions. Maintaining grey infrastructure is an ongoing challenge for RMAs, particularly in the current financial climate, but partnership working and innovative technology have the potential to ease this burden.
With extreme weather events becoming more frequent, and our population continuing to grow, there’s no time to lose when it comes to planning for the future, whether that’s trialing new ways of adapting to coastal erosion, implementing legislation to address the risk of surface water flooding or looking back and learning from responses to past challenges. We explore all three approaches in this issue.
Whatever the route we take, it’s going to require us all to work together – agencies, charities, consultancies, academics and community groups – with CIWEM members and partners playing a key role as always.
Leading the way, as of last month, is our new CEO, Anna Daroy, who is looking forward to helping deliver essential changes needed across industry and within government. We offer her a warm welcome to the CIWEM family.
Jo Caird Editor, The Environment @jocaird
Writer and conservationist Isabella Tree on creating resilient landscapes through rewilding at the Knepp Estate in Sussex, and the new illustrated edition of her bestselling book
It was nearly 25 years ago that Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell made the difficult decision to stop farming at Knepp, the 3,500-acre estate that Burrell had inherited from his grandparents. Unable to turn a profit, they sold their dairy herds and farm machinery and put their arable land out to contract. Free, finally, to be able to think “objectively and creatively about what was right” for their land, the couple began by restoring 350 acres of parkland at the centre of Knepp. Then, inspired by the work of the Dutch ecologist Dr Frans Vera,
they started the process of rewilding the rest of the estate – it continues to this day. Tree wrote about it – from introducing free-roaming herbivores, to restoring the river Adur – in her 2018 book Wilding – The Return of Nature to a British Farm. It has sold over 300,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into eight languages. Tree followed up in 2023 with The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small, and in March she published a book for younger readers, Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back – An Illustrated Guide
WHAT’S THE THINKING BEHIND THE NEW ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF WILDING?
We had so many people asking, ‘Do you have anything for children to explain the whole thing?” Angela Hardy’s illustrations are so moody and evocative. Children will love it but their parents will have fun too.
HOW HAS REWILDING IMPACTED WATER QUALITY AT KNEPP?
Our water courses used to be very polluted. Water is still coming on to Knepp from farms around us that are conventionally farmed with chemical inputs; from roads; from industrial areas. But almost every stretch of standing water is fantastic water quality now –and there’s a lot of it, having created ponds, lakes and scrapes, let water to sit where it always wanted to sit, and rewetted the floodplain around the Adur.
“From
a nature restoration point of view, river catchments are such an obvious place
to focus because you’ve got that matrix of habitats”
We’ve got lots of indicator species that are coming back because of that improved water quality: invertebrates like the scarce chaser dragonfly, aquatic plants like water violet.
Our restored soils, now that they’re chemical free, are functioning as part of the ecosystem, and all that above-ground vegetation is acting as a filter. So we know that we can start cleaning our rivers if we start restoring our floodplains.
YOU SUCCESSFULLY RELEASED BEAVERS AT KNEPP IN 2022 – WHAT SORT OF CHANGES HAVE YOU SEEN SINCE THEN?
We haven’t got the full results yet of our beaver impact studies but we know from lots of other studies done in the UK that polluted water, once it’s passed through the settling tanks that the beavers create behind their dams, comes out clean. That’s a really big ecosystem service.
There’s also the big flood mitigation effect – the beavers alone are holding back about five acres of standing water in their six-acre pen. It’s incredible to see what happens with big rains – the
floodplain just rises, you can see it; the old moat around the 12th-century castle, that all fills up again.
TELL US ABOUT WEALD TO WAVES, WHICH CONNECTS A 160KM NATURE CORRIDOR FROM THE HIGH WEALD TO THE SUSSEX COAST
From a nature restoration point of view, river catchments are such an obvious place to focus. Because you’ve got that matrix of habitats – wetland and all the different degrees of wet and dry that you get around floodplains – which is fantastic for biodiversity. But also we need to clean our rivers, and having the three rivers – the Arun, the Adur and the Ouse – in the Weald to Waves project is focusing on exactly that. Not just increasing biodiversity, but also flood mitigation and water purification.
HOW CAN REWILDING HELP CREATE MORE CLIMATE RESILIENT LANDSCAPES?
What we’ve been noticing at Knepp is how resilient the land now is to drought. When we were farming, our heavy clay would just crack – you could literally put your hand into a crack up to your shoulder. It doesn’t do that anymore. You see it in the farmland around us, but you don’t see it at Knepp. In a healthy ecosystem, there is much more resilience
to temperature fluctuations than there is in a degraded, dysfunctional landscape.
HOW WOULD YOU CHARACTERISE ATTITUDES TO REWILDING AMONG FARMERS?
The media really enjoys polarising the argument and pitting farmers against rewilding, as if you can only have either nature restoration or farming – that’s not helpful at all. Rewilding is the life support system of farming. You can’t have one without the other. Rewilding provides the webbing that can run through even our intensively farmed areas to help support and increase yields – because you get more pollinating insects, you get natural pest control, soil structure is better.
If you leave the decision making to farmers themselves, they know their land better than anyone and quite often the ideas are much more radical than you could imagine. Farmers want to be able to do this kind of thing but they don’t want to be preached at.
It’s important that coming from government we have policy and legislation that holds polluters to account and, to a certain degree, financial incentives for switching to naturefriendly forms of farming. But government
is never going to have the will or the cash to do it in the dramatic way that it needs to be done. The cavalry is coming in the form of the private sector: companies being held to account for their environmental impact and needing to either offset their carbon and their biodiversity impacts, or just do the right thing and be seen to be investing in the future of the planet by releasing money for nature restoration. So there’s a lot of money now sloshing around for rewilding projects, which is incredibly exciting.
There’s always dreams of what could come next but really our sights now are on connectivity; how we can heal our landscape by holding hands with farmers, landowners and gardeners around us. We’ve got over 500 private gardens in the Weald to Waves project – communities too, school yards and playing fields – coming together to work with nature to create resilient and naturally beautiful gardens. Everybody can play a part in stitching together the tapestry of our landscape again. o
Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife BackAn Illustrated Guide, by Isabella Tree and illustrated by Angela Harding, is published by Macmillan
Gearing up for an exceptional event
Flood & Coast is the leading conference and exhibition dedicated to innovative solutions for Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM).
In parallel to this years conference sub-theme of Innovation and Skills, our specific themes for each day will reflect the impact we aim to have for the Flood and Coast community through the content of that day. Working closely with the strategic partners for the respective days we will focus on:
• Day One: Flood and Coast Futures
• Day Two: Water and Us; Charting our Course to Success
• Day Three: Collaborating to Deliver Better Surface Water Management
Strategic Partners Register now
Thank you to our Sponsors and Exhibitors
Over 1,000 homes will be lost to erosion in North Norfolk over the next 100 years – Rob Goodliffe, coastal transition manager at Coastwise, stands defiantly at the cliff edge
Coastwise is part of the Coastal Transition Accelerator Programme (CTAP), funded by DEFRA and the Environment Agency. Rob
Goodliffe has spent the past 20 years working for North Norfolk District Council (NNDC) – engaged in activities such as delivering the UK’s first ‘sandscaping’ scheme, in preparation for climate-accelerated coastal erosion. CTAP is a government initiative designed to explore innovative methods for adapting to the impacts of climate change on coastlines. Launched in 2022, it focuses on working with communities in the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Norfolk. CTAP aligns with the National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England, aiming to build a nation resilient to flooding and coastal change throughout the 21st century.
WHY IS CTAP SO IMPORTANT?
England’s coastlines are eroding at some of the fastest rates in Europe. While erosion is a natural process, rising sea levels due to climate change are accelerating this phenomenon in certain areas. Traditional methods of coastal protection may no longer be a viable solution in these locations.
With these heightened risks, CTAP aims to explore proactive solutions. The programme investigates how local authorities can collaborate with and support communities living, working and utilising coastlines that are no longer sustainably defendable.
WHY ARE COASTAL RISK MANAGEMENT STRUCTURES NOT ALWAYS SUITABLE?
Coastal risk management structures are often a preferred choice for many, however it’s not always that straightforward. In some locations it can be technically very challenging to prevent erosion, whether driven by coastal process or by geomorphological processes such as groundwater in cliffs.
If there are technical solutions, these also need to take into account environmental factors. For example: will they have negative impacts on nationally designated sites or will they exacerbate erosion elsewhere?
Finally, if risk management structures are technically possible while also being environmentally acceptable, can they be economically feasible? Funding for schemes can be sought from government, but they need to meet the funding criteria (which include aspects such as numbers of households at risk), and often additional funds are required from elsewhere. This can be a significant challenge.
With this in mind, if risk management structures aren’t possible, there should and could be other options available to assist with managing an eroding coast, so that people’s wellbeing, and a community’s vibrancy, can continue.
Through
working with communities,
those impacted
by coastal change
and
wider stakeholders
we will shine a
light on what is possible
HOW CAN THIS PROGRAMME INFLUENCE NATIONAL POLICY APPROACH?
At present there are very few options for anyone impacted by erosion, or for Risk Management Authorities (RMAs) who have limited opportunities, or powers, to take action. This is where Coastwise is seeking to help.
As well as seeking to prepare communities through transition planning and practical actions, a key objective is to learn what does and what does not work when seeking to adapt to our changing coast.
Through working with communities, those impacted by coastal change and wider stakeholders we will shine a light on what is possible and showcase opportunities where government could consider support. Through leadership,
policy, legislation and funding we will create a ‘transition space’ where RMAs are able to facilitate coastal transition. Working with infrastructure providers, communities and individuals will ensure that everyone is better informed and therefore better able to adapt.
TELL US ABOUT THE EAST RIDING PROJECT
Changing Coasts East Riding is a sister project to Coastwise, but there are new younger siblings too in Cornwall and Dorset, and cousins in the Flood and Coast Resilience Innovation Programme. We are all seeking to explore innovative approaches that can solve some of the tricky and emotive erosion and flood issues we face. East Riding and North Norfolk are completing separate programmes of work that fit with our respective organisations and seek to meet the local coastal change needs.
That said, there are areas which do overlap: in some case we are intentionally taking different approaches in order to learn different lessons; on others we are collaborating where we believe the greatest benefit for the programme and the nation can be gained. An example is that we are funding a role in the national Environment Agency team to support our work on innovating long-term sustainable funding and financing mechanisms for coastal transition. This is one of the underpinning needs if we are to ensure we can continue to transition in the future. o
The EA’s executive director of flood and coastal risk management talks to Jo Caird ahead of Flood & Coast 2024, where she will be chairing a session on creating a nation more resilient to flooding and coastal change
It’s just over a week since strong southerly winds and large waves caused parts of the south coast to experience their highest ever tides.
Many coastal roads were inundated, trains were unable to run in some places, and firefighters helped residents escape from dozens of flooded homes.
A fitting time to be interviewing Caroline Douglass, the Environment Agency’s (EA) executive director of flood and coastal risk management, you might think. But then, flood and storm events seem to be hitting the UK so frequently these days that it would be hard to find a time that wouldn’t be fitting.
“We are seeing the impacts of climate change now,” says Douglass, who visited sites in West Sussex last week to see the damage for herself. She reels off a list of other recent events that are likely to be a consequence of human-made global warming, including the wettest ever October-March period on record for England, and river level records broken on the Trent, the Thames, the Severn and the Avon.
“Climate change is continuing to happen,” Douglass goes on. “It comes
back to us to understand how we are managing those risks, helping people to understand them and making sure those climate change impacts are included in that risk assessment.”
She flags the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan, which sets out a vision for the estuary’s future in the context of rising sea levels, bigger, more frequent storms in the North Sea, and a growing local population.
“The public can’t always see the natural flood management solution upstream of them”
“We’ve got a fantastic Thames Barrier and flood walls now, but how are they going to adapt to climate change out to 2100? What do we need to do to be resilient in the future?”, asks Douglass. The plan includes considering locations for a new barrier to take over after the current one reaches the end of its design life in 2070, and assessing the resilience of existing defences throughout the estuary. Key, she adds, is updating the plan every
10 years, “based on the latest climate science, which is changing all the time”.
The Thames Barrier may be the second largest retractable flood barrier in the world, protecting one of the most populous cities in Europe, but it’s just one of thousands of flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) assets – both in the EA’s portfolio and owned by other risk management authorities and private owners – that will be under increasing pressure over the coming decades due to climate change.
Maintaining these assets, which protect millions of homes and businesses, as well as essential infrastructure and agricultural land, is already a matter of “hard choices”, given the funding available, says Douglass (see High maintenance, pp. 20-22).
Those choices are not going to get any easier as increasing numbers of assets near the end of their design lives. “The challenge for us is that there’s no one right solution,” Douglass acknowledges. “We’re working in a really complex system and if you’re working in a system, you need systems-based solutions.
“It might be walls, barriers, naturebased solutions (NBS), decommissioning and rebuilding, helping communities help themselves, planning. All of that is part of the puzzle that we’re trying to put together to be overall more resilient for the future. We know there’s an increasing risk from floods so what are we doing about it in all those different areas?”
Nature-based solutions will be a key piece of that puzzle, with the EA increasingly looking to include natural flood management (NFM) schemes alongside grey assets. “In the past we probably have looked at more fixed flood defences as the answer. Going forward, we’re going to need a combination,” says Douglass.
“Nature-based solutions are fantastic for the environment, fantastic for reducing flood risk. You’re slowing the flow using salt marshes or tidal areas, for example. It means you won’t have to increase the size of the fixed assets as much as you would have.”
In February the agency announced that 40 natural flood management projects around the country will benefit from a new £25 million funding pot that runs from now until March 2027 (see Nature’s way, pp. 16-19). It builds on the EA’s £15 million natural flood management pilot programme, which ran until 2021 – it created the equivalent of 1.6 million cubic metres of water storage and reduced flood risk to 15,000 homes.
“We are putting some good investment into nature-based solutions and developing some really strong evidence for their effectiveness,” says Douglass. Alongside rolling out more of these sorts of schemes, however, the EA has another job on its hands: communicating their value to those at risk of flooding.
“The public can’t always see the natural flood management solution that is upstream of them,” Douglass explains, pointing to Slowing the Flow at Pickering, an ongoing project to help tackle flooding in Pickering, North Yorkshire. Measures include constructing low-level bunds, planting trees, especially along streamsides and in the floodplain, restoring woody debris dams in small streams, and restoring wetlands.
“That work has had a huge impact,” Douglass goes on, “but local communities don’t see it because it’s not a wall in front of them. At the same time, people can be lulled into a false sense of security that the wall is going to protect them, when we know with climate change, traditional defences can and will be overwhelmed.”
Where new or replacement hard infrastructure is required in combination with NBS – Douglass stresses that “it’s always going to be a blend and that blend is going to change over time and vary according to location and we’ve got to stay open to that”– close attention must be paid to the carbon footprint of those assets.
Since 2019, the EA has had an organisational commitment to stop contributing to climate change through its own operational emissions. Having originally stated an aim to become a net zero organisation by 2030, in January the agency pushed that back to between 2045 and 2050, citing less reliance on offsetting and changes around where
offsetting will take place. As part of the drive to net zero, low carbon concrete is now a minimum requirement where it meets the EA’s specification, and business cases for any new flood schemes need to contain a carbon assessment.
“We need to make sure that we’re reducing our impact on climate,” says Douglass. “It’s the here and now as well as the longer-term view.”
The here and now is a key concern for another element of climate resilience: very short-range, geographically specific rainfall and flood forecasting, aka ‘nowcasting’. It’s an area that the EA is currently partnering with the Met Office on, developing and trialling models for this type of weather event.
“People can be lulled into a false sense of security that walls are going to protect them, when we know traditional defences can and will be overwhelmed”
“We know that thunderstorms can come about with as little as a couple of hours heads up, and it’s those storms that cause so much of the damage from a surface water perspective,” Douglass explains. “Nowcasting is about giving us a very short lead into what’s happening in the establishment of those thunderstorm events. That information then feeds into the Met Office’s weather warnings and our flood warning system.”
This work is helping the EA respond faster and more effectively to flood events, but it’s just as essential for members of the public, whom the agency wants to equip with the tools to manage their own flood risk. This is just one of the ways that the EA is trying to foster a wider culture of resilience, along with its annual Flood Awareness Week and targeted campaigns in previously flooded towns including Grimsby.
“It’s an ongoing challenge for people to be aware of their flood risk, to know what to do when it is flooding and to take action when they get a warning,” says Douglass. “There are local communities which have flood action groups who do an amazing job of helping communities
CAROLINE DOUGLASS JOINED the Environment Agency in 2013, taking up the role of executive director for flood and coastal risk management in 2021. Prior operational and strategic roles at the EA include director of incident management and resilience and area manager for Hertfordshire and North London.
In her native Australia Douglass worked with the state government in Victoria, holding senior roles in land, catchment and natural resource management, as well as leading and supporting bushfire and emergency response. She holds degrees and diplomas from the University of New England (Australia), the University of Wollongong, the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and the London Business School.
to understand what their risk is, but it’s something we need to work more on.
“We have over 5.5 billion properties at risk from flooding from rivers, sea and surface water and only 1.6 million properties have signed up to flood warnings.”
In this age of climate crisis, flooding events like those that hit the south coast last week are not going anywhere. Only by pulling together – with members of the public doing their bit alongside the important work of bodies like the EA – will we find our way through the coming storm. o
THIS FOOTBALL, COVERED in goose barnacles, was found washed up on a beach in Dorset after making its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Photographer Ryan Stalker then returned it to the sea to take this striking image, which judges selected as the overall winner of the British Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards 2024. Goose barnacles are not native to the UK but wash up on the south and south-west coast after big Atlantic storms. This photo, while beautiful, flags the worrying issue of the risks associated with invasive species arriving on our shores and disrupting native wildlife – it’s not only our coastal infrastructure that’s at risk as climate change causes storm events to increase in strength and frequency.
As a global leader in sustainable design and engineering, Stantec helps clients reshape the world with flood alleviation and environmental resilience projects that redefine what’s possible for communities. With more than 30,000 people worldwide, our teams create transformational solutions that add value for people and the planet. At this year’s Flood and Coast event, we will be showcasing our work within integrated partnerships in the UK’s flood and coastal resilience sector, as well as shedding light on our global expertise.
In coastal Louisiana and the City of New Orleans, for instance, we work to deliver projects driven on a state, community, and federal level, supporting flood alleviation, community resilience, and ecosystem restoration on an incredible scale.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the US Government needed to take immediate and significant steps to repair the damage, improve resiliency and reduce the risks from future hurricane weather events. The US Army Corps of Engineers embarked on the $14.6 billion (£11.7 billion) Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction system. The final piece of this system was the $731 million Permanent Canal Closures and Pumps (PCCP) design-build project, which saw Stantec take on the role of lead design engineer and architect.
The PCCP project solution improves internal drainage resilience of the New Orleans flood control system, pumping water from three main drainage outfall canals with 18-foot high barrier gates into Lake Pontchartrain.
The massive pumps have a combined capacity of 24,300 cubic feet per second (688 cumecs) – enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than 4 seconds. While providing a long-term solution against a once in a hundred year storm event, this solution minimises acoustic and visual impacts for surrounding neighbourhoods.
Inside the city, however, water is still a huge part of New Orleans, as a city built on reclaimed marshland that has been continually drained of its water to make it habitable. Stantec’s landscape architects, engineers, hydrologists and urban planners are working with the City of New Orleans to think differently about how it can manage water as an asset.
The Blue and Green Corridors project is a network of eight miles of linear green infrastructure in the form of bioswales, linear wetlands, and floodable parks. The corridors receive flood waters, allowing them space in the neighbourhood to delay peak flood and mitigate impacts from the most frequent storms in the city. These long systems make the movement of water visible and act as beautiful
park-like connectors, linking recreational activities and inviting the community to move, play and socialise.
We are also working with the wider state of Louisiana and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to deliver one of the largest nature-based solutions projects in the world.
Historically, sediment-rich water overflowed the banks of the Mississippi River and moved through coastal Louisiana, nourishing healthy coastal wetlands. However, the construction of levees along the lower Mississippi River has since prevented those regenerative flows. Resulting subsidence, combined with several other factors, results in the loss of a football pitch of land every 100 minutes. The purpose of the Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion project is to restore natural deltaic processes and again divert the sediment-laden Mississippi River waters back into the Breton Sound Basin.
A gated diversion system is being designed to divert approximately 50,000 cubic feet of water per second (1,414 cumecs), or 5 per cent of the Mississippi River during high flows, through existing levees to the Breton Sound. This project is considered key to reversing coastal land loss, improving flood risk resilience and helping ensure the health of Louisiana’s working coast.
BACK HERE IN the UK, collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and spearheading more integrated approaches in flood resilience help us shape programmes so they always have a meaningful impact. Here are a few water management partnerships we’re proud to be supporting across the country.
Hull and Haltemprice’s basin-like landscape impounds run-off, triggering regular flooding. To create true flood resilience and prepare and adapt to climate change, a collaborative, longterm vision was required, in the form of the Living with Water plan.
This plan required comprehensive consultation and collaboration between The Environment Agency, Hull City Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council, community members, Yorkshire Water, academics, and experts across a variety of specialisms. As the lead engineers on the project, Stantec supported the strategic phase, employing a range of digital engagement and analysis tools and technology.
We have since developed flood resilience and innovative water management methods. Focusing on prioritising blue-green infrastructure, Nature-based Solutions and SuDS, we are helping create better places to live and work and reducing future flood risk.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), EA and United Utilities formed a forward-thinking
partnership to manage water differently. Taking a holistic and collaborative approach to water management, the partnership created an integrated water management plan (IWMP) and engaged Stantec to help.
With our partnership knowledge and experience and industry-recognised methodologies, we helped build a vision supporting objectives and created a series of seven workstreams to support the development of the IWMP. Through this collaboration, the partnership delivers progressive improvements in sustainable water management, enhancing the natural environment.
Enabling improved decision making, the plan will guide all future interventions to consider water neutrality, flood resilience and water quality, and build in climate adaptation. It aims to increase multifunctional blue-green infrastructure, restore natural function and water landscapes, as well as promote the protection and value of biodiversity and the water environment – for the benefit of everyone.
Further north, we are supporting the Northumbria Integrated Drainage Partnership (NIDP) – an award-winning collaborative stakeholder group set up between Northumbrian Water Group, the EA and 14 North East local councils. The partnership collectively addresses flooding and collaboratively minimises drainage issues by sharing resource and knowledge.
Each of the partnership’s schemes, of which Stantec is involved in
many, looks beyond a single source or responsibility, going above best practice to support a more resilient and sustainable region. These include bluegreen infrastructure through surface water separation, attenuation basins, wetlands, swales, bunds, daylighting watercourses, de-paving, rain gardens, source control, system optimisation and below ground storage. NIDP stands out in the industry by encompassing all of the North East, not just one city or area, having a record of successful delivery, and an ongoing plan that will deliver more in the years to come. The NIDP has already reduced flood risk to over 5,000 properties. o
JOIN US AT FLOOD & COAST WHERE WE’LL BE TALKING ABOUT OUR INVOLVEMENT IN THESE PARTNERSHIPS AND PROJECTS VIA A PANEL TALK. WE’LL ALSO BE ON STAND E39
Key services
o Flood mitigation and river basin management
o Nature-based solutions
o Reservoirs, dams and levees
o Pump stations and control structures
o Navigation structures
o Water resources and supply
o Wastewater recycling and water management
o Water quality, nutrient neutrality and bathing waters
o Coastal storm risk management
o Ecosystem restoration/living shores
o Blue carbon
o Offshore renewables
o Ports and harbours
o Coastal and marine servies
o Stormwater and urban drainage
Nature-based solutions, from leaky dams to treeplanting schemes, will be key to creating resilient ecosystems and communities, says Mark Lloyd, CEO of The Rivers Trust – if we can find a route to rolling them out on a wider scale
At a time when both public and private purses are tight, nature-based solutions (NBS) deliver multiple benefits and serve the interests of many different stakeholders.
They use natural features to address socio-environmental problems and are especially important in the context of water management. Interventions such as tree or hedge planting, leaky dams, wetlands, riparian buffers or floodplain reconnection help to restore or mimic the natural flow of water through the landscape. This alleviates the risk of flooding and droughts as well as filtering out pollutants and increasing biodiversity. With more than 65 local trusts across the UK and Ireland, the Rivers Trust
movement has decades of experience in getting boots on the ground – or wellies in the water – to protect, restore, and enhance our water environment. Our people are in their natural habitat when working outdoors, whether wading through the Wye or dipping in the Don. When we are working on solutions, we always aim to work with nature to restore
“Our precious rivers are currently blighted by pollution, altered from their natural state and often buried underground, with many species in decline and the wider landscape facing an increasing risk of both flooding and drought”
the most natural processes that will deliver long-term, integrated solutions for our rivers and catchments.
Nature-based solutions can also complement hard engineering to extend the lifespan of grey infrastructure, and make water treatment and flood defenses more efficient and cost-effective. In some cases they can even replace the need for chemical treatment and carbonhungry concrete solutions. They enable sustainable housing development, help businesses to reach their ESG goals and allow citizens to enjoy, and benefit from, a healthier environment.
A fantastic example of NBS at work is in South Norfolk, where the River Waveney Trust has worked with partners on a natural flood management (NFM) scheme. After the village of Gissing experienced terrible flooding in 2020, members of the public approached the trust about reconnecting a local stream to its historic floodplain. With support from Norfolk Rivers Trust, WWF, Aviva, the Environment Agency, and Essex & Suffolk Water, the team lowered the
stream banks in strategic places, as well as installing leaky dams and shallow scrapes to store water in Gissing and the surrounding area upstream of the village. Work was completed in September 2023, shortly before the arrival of Storm Babet and seven other named storms over the course of the winter.
“We weren’t expecting this work to be put to the test so quickly,” says Emily Winter, catchment officer at the River Waveney Trust, “but we’re really pleased to see it functioning as we’d hoped. This has been a fantastic example of a relatively simple and low-cost project that will have far-reaching, positive impacts for the local community.”
As well as protecting properties from flooding, these measures will store water and release it back into the environment slowly, mitigating the impacts of prolonged dry spells or drought in one of England’s most water-stressed areas.
“Nature-based
solutions can complement hard engineering to extend the lifespan of grey infrastructure and make water treatment and flood defenses
more efficient and cost-effective”
Further north, The Rivers Trust has also been involved with a pioneering NFM pilot project in Lancashire’s Wyre catchment. Between 2020 and 2022, partners from the Wyre NFM Investment Readiness project developed an innovative new financial model, blending public and private finance. This will see multiple beneficiary organisations such as local businesses repaid for their upfront investment in NBS through the sale of ecosystem services. More than 1,000 separate NBS interventions will take place throughout the catchment over nine years in order to reduce flood risk in the village of Churchtown, with the funds managed by a newly formed community interest company.
This project was a pilot for the Government’s Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF). It was truly the first of its kind and is being used as a blueprint for how to attract private sector capital to finance natural
flood management. We are building on what we learned and innovating with new models of funding in locations across the country in a variety of catchments including the Cumbrian Glenderamackin above Keswick and the Yorkshire Aire upstream of Leeds. Although different in scale, the two projects in Norfolk and Lancashire
WHILE SOME NATURE-based solutions might only be suitable for a rural environment, plenty of these measures can – and should – be rolled out in cities and towns globally to address societal challenges including climate adaptation, food and water security, and biodiversity loss. With 55 per cent of the global population currently living in cities and urbanisation growing at an unprecendented rate, it’s vital that we factor in NBS when building and adapting the cities of tomorrow. Sustainable urban drainage systems, green corridors, roof gardens, river restoration, bioretention basins for storm water management, tree planting and more can all be part of the mix, depending on the specifics of the location.
demonstrate how the Rivers Trust movement is at the heart of delivering NBS, and I was delighted that each of them will now continue thanks to funding from Defra’s £25m NFM programme, announced in February.
The River Waveney Trust will build on its work to alleviate surface water and fluvial flood risk in Gissing by completing further NFM interventions within the Frenze Beck, Dickleburgh Stream and Stuston Beck catchments. Collaboration with the local community, landowners and parish council will be key as the measures include reconnection of an historic river channel, as well as further floodplain meadows, leaky dams and scrapes. While in Lancashire, the Wyre Rivers Trust will expand upon the learnings of the Wyre NFM pilot project by developing the Wyre Catchment Resilience programme. This will deliver a suite of targeted measures to further alleviate flood risk. Wetlands, ponds, riparian buffer strips and soil management measures will all be used, and are designed to ensure that all interventions maximise flood risk reduction while restoring natural processes. The local ecosystem will benefit from increased biodiversity and carbon storage, and local communities will enjoy increased climate resilience and amenities. These are just two of more than 20 projects led by local rivers trusts to
Businesses and organisations of all kinds must evolve to contribute to the global transition to a
A partnership with CIWEM is a powerful demonstration of this commitment.
marieke.muller@ciwem.org www.ciwem.org/business-partners
benefit from Defra’s NFM funding, but we need much more input, financially and politically, if we are to meet the challenges facing our environment. The £25m fund announced in September 2023 was hugely oversubscribed – funding could increase tenfold and there would still be plenty of initiatives to spend it on.
The urgency and scale with which we need to realise the potential of natural solutions is laid bare in our recently updated State of Our Rivers Report 2024 Our precious rivers are currently blighted by pollution, altered from their natural state and often buried underground, with many iconic species in decline and the wider landscape facing an increasing risk of both flooding and drought. Scant monitoring, weak regulation and enforcement, a lack of consideration for water in land management, and of course climate change are further exacerbating those pressures.
The Rivers Trust has long championed the integration of NBS on a large scale and we have the knowledge and skills to make it happen – but we can’t do it alone. And the trouble is that myriad hurdles stand in the way of organisations and landowners joining us.
“The Rivers Trust has long championed nature-based solutions on a large scale and we have the knowledge and skills to make it happen – but we can’t do it alone”
From the lack of standardised approaches and coordinated, consistent monitoring, to the need for more balanced permitting regimes for the water sector; from limited incentives for buyers and sellers of ecosystem services, to the absence of a cohesive market framework for these solutions, the many willing parties are currently struggling to deliver fully integrated solutions at the pace and scale we need.
That’s why we’re now ramping up our work through the Ofwat Innovation Fund’s mainstreaming nature-based solutions project, which we lead with United Utilities, Jacobs and Mott MacDonald. The aim of the project is
to remove the barriers to the adoption of NBS and develop new enabling mechanisms. There are five priority areas to unlock the opportunity to really embed NBS in land and water management:
● Working with regulators and policymakers to enable policy and regulation for NBS – engaging with the likes of the Environment Agency, Ofwat and DAERA in Northern Ireland to test fit-for-purpose regulatory requirements for NBS that will also drive greater value;
● Investment mechanisms for NBS – assessing and testing models and mechanisms that incentivise joinedup funding, planning and delivery, as well as creating a multi-million pound investment pipeline for the water industry to deliver better value for customers and beneficiaries;
● Standardisation and integration –standardised and consolidated tools and processes for designing, building, managing, monitoring, validating and verifying NBS, along with standardised
data and evidence for reporting on their impacts, to help to reduce the risk currently associated with NBS compared to the reliability of hard engineered solutions.
● Making NBS relevant and tangible –by using real-life or ongoing planned NBS, we’ll test our hypotheses, develop solutions, consolidate learnings, create joined up action plans and deliver greater value work, quicker.
● Coordination, steer and collaboration at national scale – pulling all workstreams into one coherent flow through continuous dissemination of learnings to further break down existing siloes in delivery of NBS.
These conversations and partnerships are finally starting to move the dial on nature-based solutions and make them a mainstream aspect of planning and infrastructure. We’re delighted to be joining CIWEM at the Flood & Coast Conference once again in June to keep up the momentum and ignite even more opportunity. o
As a triple whammy of aging, demographic change and climate change take their toll on our flood and coastal erosion risk management assets, many in the sector are concerned about our ability to respond to the maintenance burden, reports Jo Caird
It’s hardly surprising that there are around 6.1 million UK properties at risk of flooding. After all, most of our settlements are where they are because of their proximity to water.
The essentials of our relationship with water haven’t changed much over the 10,000 or so years since we abandoned our hunter-gatherer ways and embraced a settler lifestyle. But the demands that
we make on this precious resource, the complexity of the infrastructure that supports those demands, and our tolerance for discomfort and inconvenience in the face of flood events, certainly have.
The result is a network of hundreds of thousands of flood and coastal risk management (FCERM) assets spread across our nations and regions. There are around 256,000 of these assets in
England alone, 90,000 of which are owned and maintained directly by the Environment Agency (EA). The others are the responsibility of other parties including risk management authorities (RMAs) such as local authorities, lead local flood authorities, internal drainage boards, and water and sewerage companies, as well as private owners.
From sea walls to sluice gates, detention reservoirs to dams, these hard
assets are tasked with keeping water where we want it, whether that’s out of our homes, businesses and critical infrastructure, or off the agricultural land that’s yielding the food we eat. Thanks to anthropogenic climate change – which is seeing sea level rises and an increase in storm frequency and intensity – and population growth –which is leading to more development on our flood plains – these assets are
under greater pressure than ever before. It doesn’t help that many of them are coming to the end of their design lives. Their ability to do their job in these trying circumstances depends on us: large or small, coastal or fluvial, assets will only perform properly if they are maintained properly. There is concern in many parts that this is not happening. That despite the government investing a record £5.2 billion in new FCERM projects between 2021 and 2027, a lack of maintenance is seeing some assets deteriorate faster than would be expected, making them more likely to fail, endangering lives and property.
“From sea walls to sluice gates, detention reservoirs to dams, hard assets are tasked with keeping water where we want it, whether that’s out of our homes, businesses and critical infrastructure, or off agricultural land”
“That is more money than ever flowing in to build the new assets,” says Dr Andy Pearce, engineering team manager at Coastal Partners, which manages coastal flood and erosion risk across five local authorities on the south coast. “It’s the frustration of building them and watching them suffer from a lack of maintenance.”
The figures are important when it comes to understanding the scale of the challenge. According to Defra, of the approximately 36,000 FCERM assets owned by the EA that are classified as “high consequence”, around 94 per cent were at or above the required condition, as of October 2023 (prior to storms Babet and Ciarán). The figure for the approximately 27,000 high consequence assets owned by other parties was 90 per cent. Both figures fall well below the EA’s target of 98 per cent.
“We weren’t given enough money to meet that target,” says Caroline Douglass, the EA’s executive director for FCERM, citing inflationary pressures as well as increased costs associated with the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.
“Our role is to try and do the best we can with the money that we have,” she
goes on. “Our high consequence assets are our priority: they’re protecting the most people and property. Then we scale back from there in terms of what we can do. There’s a risk in that –you can’t repair as many as you would like.”
Those choices are even starker for local authorities. While the EA receives funding from Defra to maintain its FCERM assets (£349.4 million a year in 2021/22), on top of that allocated for new capital projects, local authorities must pay for maintenance out of their general budgets. These budgets, of course, are under extreme pressure, with half of council leaders and chief executives in England surveyed by the Local Government Association in December 2023 saying they were not confident they will have enough funding to fulfil their legal duties in 2024/25.
And because all powers relating to flooding are permissive, explains Leslie Smith (not their real name), who works in flood strategy for a combined local authority, “when budgets are being squeezed, something that you don’t legally have to do is something quite easy to cut the money for”.
“Treatment wetlands are just one of many nature-based solutions that the sector could look to when it comes to bringing greater resilience to the FCERM ecosystem”
For many local and lead local flood authorities (LLFAs) a lack of funding and low public sector pay also contribute to a skills shortage in the field of FCERM asset maintenance. That only adds to the challenge of keeping assets in good condition.
While some are arguing for a reform of the funding for asset maintenance that would enable RMAs to draw, as the EA does, on a pot of central government funding, others are embracing ways to make current funding go further under the current system.
“If we work together we can pool our funding and deliver greater benefits for
less,” says Jonathan Glerum, head of sustainable growth at Anglian Water.
That might be through working with other RMAs, or it could mean partnering with charities like the Norfolk Rivers Trust, which operates and maintains several rural treatment wetlands on behalf of Anglian Water.
Treatment wetlands are just one of many nature-based solutions (NBS; see Nature’s Way, pp. 16-19) that the sector could look to when it comes to bringing greater resilience to the FCERM ecosystem. Natural flood management (NFM) will not be a silver bullet – NBS require long-term maintenance just as hard assets do, and will work alongside hard assets, rather than instead of them. But the interdisciplinary collaboration that NBS require offers “seeds of hope” for how FCERM assets might be maintained in future, argues Jonathan Simm, technical director for flood and water management at HR Wallingford.
The flood asset management system nationwide is complicated, with different bodies responsible for assets depending on their location, role, ownership, strategic importance and quirk of historic legislation. It’s simpler in some places – in Northern Ireland, for example, all FCERM assets fall under the remit of the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) or its arms-length bodies.
“We are fortunate because that does enable effective decision making on investment priorities,” says Andrew Hitchenor from DfI Rivers. He is quick to point out however that such a centralised approach would likely be more unruly in a larger or more populous area.
There is an awareness among the powers that be that the complexity of the current system could be improved upon. Defra is currently undertaking a review of statutory powers and responsibilities associated with FCREM assets with a view to providing a “robust evidence base and targeted findings to strengthen FCERM resilience through enhanced asset management”. It is due to be published later this year.
Whatever the findings of the review, more data sharing between RMAs will be
essential in terms of getting a handle on the work required to reduce flood risk. Decades of siloed working has led to the creation of multiple different systems of monitoring, classifying and maintaining FCERM assets. Such a system makes strategic investment very difficult and risks wasting resources on lower priority assets.
“New technologies – remote monitoring and machine learning – will make evidence gathering easier and cheaper”
Promising work is currently ongoing at both regional and national level, however, that will help to streamline these processes, from local authorities adopting evidence-based FCERM asset monitoring in line with that of the EA, to the development of a national register for coastal assets by the National Network of Regional Coastal Monitoring Programmes. New technologies – including remote sensing and monitoring, and the use of machine learning to spot patterns in data sets – will make this evidence gathering easier and cheaper. Some of this technology is already in use –heat-sensing drones to spot leaks, for example – but we’re not seeing huge scale change yet, argues Alex Jones (not their real name), who works in FCERM asset operations in the northwest.
“There’s a lot of talk about this within the industry, but we’re not in a position where we can say for definite that there are tools out there that can significantly streamline or be more cost effective,” they say.
But while technology, data sharing, partnership working, NBS and wide-scale systems reform all have the potential to bring meaningful change in this space, perhaps there’s something more fundamental that needs addressing here: our disconnect, as a society, from the water courses and bodies that enable our very existence.
As the climate crisis makes its presence felt ever more forcibly in our landscapes, flooding is going to get worse, and not better, no matter how much we throw at the problem. As a species, our reliance on water meant we had to find ways to live with flooding in the past; is it time for an honest discussion of how to start doing so again? o
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Ridgeway Rockbags® have many unique features – preparation of the product is a short process that requires reduced labour and machinery. Furthermore, in relation to installation, the one-point lifting ring allows fast and accurate placement, meaning that overall the system significantly reduces carbon emissions when compared to traditional waterway engineering methods. This is in addition to the co2 savings made using rPET. It is a highly flexible solution, making Kyowa Filter Unit Rockbags® very adaptable to complex marine projects.
Due to their porous nature Ridgeway Rockbags® are designed to withstand high velocities of flow, making them an ideal solution for protecting river embankments during flooding events and repairing damaged embankments post-flooding. They work by absorbing the energy and not deflecting or amplifying flows, which would result in scouring being pushed further downstream. Their porous nature also offers a great boost to the benthic and aquatic life within rivers. Flora and fauna, including small marine insects, build up on the surface of the Kyowa Filter Unit Rockbags® and in between the stone crevices, encouraging growth in the marine habitat.
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SDelivering lasting value to communities affected by storm overflow discharges will require significant investment and smarter solutions, argues Michael Rowlatt, a technical director at RPS, a Tetra Tech company which specialises in delivering wastewater services to the water industry and local authorities
torm overflow discharges from our sewerage systems to rivers, lakes and seas can impact water quality, reduce amenity value and prevent valuable human contact with our natural environment.
This is an issue which is high on the public agenda, with continued media coverage of the potential impact of storm overflow discharges. Water companies are now under pressure to deliver improvements.
The Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan (SODRP), first published in August 2022, sets out headline targets
to protect the environment and public health, and ensure storm overflows operate only in unusually heavy rainfall events. Based on the rainfall target alone, according to the SODRP, “an estimated 80 per cent reduction in the number of spills is anticipated by 2050, relative to a 2020 baseline. This equates to a reduction of over 300,000 storm overflow discharges per year”.
With the mandated targets driving reductions in storm overflow discharges on an unprecedented scale, investment is also coming into the industry on an unprecedented scale. We are facing a
huge challenge, now and in the future, to deliver the system improvements required to meet targets and create enhanced natural capital for our communities.
So how do we ensure this investment is spent wisely? How do we ensure our communities receive robust and resilient solutions that deliver lasting value?
THE INVESTMENT REQUIRED
Whilst most people agree that the significant investment required to make change on such a scale is necessary, it will have to be paid for somehow, and this will in part be through increased
water bills for customers. As an industry, we therefore have a duty to do the right thing for our communities, by delivering maximum value from investment.
The development and reduced cost of remote sensing technology, analytical tools, and communication and data storage systems means we now have more data and greater understanding of the sewerage systems that serve our communities, allowing us to tackle this challenge in a smarter way.
“With targets driving reductions in storm overflow discharges on an unprecedented scale, investment is also coming into the industry on an unprecedented scale”
Every five years the water industry – along with the regulator Ofwat – goes through the price review process. This effectively sets out the investment available to water companies over the following five years. During the last price review, PR24, water companies estimated the types of interventions required to reduce storm overflow discharges in line with the targets in the SODRP, and the costs associated with these interventions went into their business plans for consideration by Ofwat. The final determinations from Ofwat are expected in December 2024, but work has already started to deliver interventions.
Whilst the interventions proposed in the business plans were as accurate as possible given the time and resources available to estimate them, there was not time to fully understand each issue in detail and devise solutions that would deliver greatest value overall. If we were to deliver the solutions as laid out in the business plans, therefore, we would not deliver best value to customers.
Whilst there is already pressure to start delivering solutions that have an immediate impact, the value of upfront planning must be recognised. Our sewerage networks are highly complex systems, with many factors that cannot easily be disaggregated from one another without intelligence and experience. If we can step back and take time to
PR24: BUILDING A BETTER FUTURE
Our methodology for PR24 sets out how we will drive companies to deliver more for customers and the environment. The methodology reflects our four key ambitions for the review:-
devise smarter solutions and optimise programmes of work, we will deliver much greater value and lasting benefits to communities.
Smarter solutions include:
● Identifying opportunities for shared benefit (ie, a solution at one location having benefit at other locations). This is done through understanding and modelling systems at catchmentscale; long-term planning; and considering multi-capital benefits, such as amenity value, biodiversity,
RPS/TETRA TECH was recently awarded a £100 million singleaward framework to support the improvement of river health across the north-west of England. Under this 10-year framework, engineers and scientists will drive programme optimisation; develop solutions; select preferred options based on best value, lowest carbon and cost; and provide design services to deliver reductions in storm overflow discharges.
carbon and public health, including mental health and wellbeing.
● Heavy emphasis on surface water runoff removal and sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), which help to reduce the need to create or supplement underground systems that have a high carbon cost and finite capacity, thereby delivering more sustainable solutions.
“Our sewerage networks are highly complex systems with many factors that cannot easily be disaggregated from one another without intelligence and experience”
● Public education campaigns – to explain why interventions are required or highlight the benefits of SuDS, for example – are an important part of these solutions, mitigating poor public perception and reputational damage to the industry.
● Solutions that are resilient and adaptable to the increases in rainfall intensity that are expected with climate change.
● Catchment-wide interventions, thinking outside the box (eg, catchment-wide reduction of surface water runoff through the adoption of SuDS at
community level, interceptor tunnels that avoid difficult site constraints and deliver a more efficient solution by allowing the problem to be dealt with in one place).
● Operational optimisation, through system understanding and collaboration with operators. This could be by making use of spare capacity available in our systems through proactive maintenance or smart network controls.
● Standardised solutions and components that reduce time taken to design and deliver solutions and help to de-risk programmes.
● Monitoring of interventions to ensure the required level of performance is achieved and maintained, providing the opportunity for proactive operation intervention if necessary.
At a programme level, we can deliver greater value by optimising the way in which solutions are delivered. Each solution will have its own drivers, such as the requirement to reduce spills or flooding, or the constraints that come with discharging to a bathing water, for example. But there are opportunities to coordinate delivery of solutions and employ adaptive planning to deliver benefits in an efficient way. We can do this by understanding drivers now and in the future – the visibility of long-term planning objectives
“A blurry line between client and consultant may be uncomfortable at first but has the potential to be a powerful relationship”
is therefore essential. This approach also allows ‘quick wins’ to be identified, as well as solutions that are independent of any other to be delivered as early as possible, meaning that communities feel the benefits sooner.
To deliver this kind of resilient
community infrastructure in an efficient manner we need intelligent, experienced and well-rounded staff in the industry, people who are empowered and motivated to do what’s best for the communities in which we work (regrettably, this has not always been the case). Buy-in from stakeholders is also required to give the agility and flexibility required for programme optimisation and make space for the necessary innovation to develop smarter solutions.
A move away from the traditional client/consultant relationship will also be beneficial. There is a huge amount of work to do and a collaborative ‘one-team’ approach means we can understand and make best use of the knowledge, skills and technology available to us. By doing so, we will be able to deliver most effectively for communities. Whilst this blurry line between client and consultant may be uncomfortable at first, it has the potential to be a powerful relationship if we get it right.
It would be easy to be daunted by the challenge at hand, but we have a real opportunity here to evolve and improve the way we work as an industry. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
One thing’s for sure: improving our environment and facilitating greater access to nature for our communities is essential, now and for generations to come. o
BThe soon-to-report London Climate Resilience Review highlights the many challenges facing the UK’s capital – and sets out what’s needed to tackle them. This isn’t the first time that London has overcome threats to its environment, writes Nick Higham, author of The Mercenary River
y modern standards the water which London’s early water companies supplied from the Thames and the River Lea was filthy, and for decades grew ever filthier. Not surprisingly, people noticed: London’s water became a frequent butt of satirists.
In A Description of a City Shower in 1710 Jonathan Swift had identified the contents of the sewers feeding the Thames: Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
One of Swift’s contemporaries described Thames water itself as “foetido-cabbageous, dead-dogitious, dead-catitious, Fish-street-bilious”. And this was what most Londoners were forced to drink and wash with.
There were several reasons why the water was so dirty but by the early 19th century the most important was the growing popularity of the flushing water-closet.
For much of the city’s history, Londoners had been emptying their privies and chamber pots into bricklined cesspits under their property. They were periodically emptied by nightsoil men who loaded the fruits of their work onto carts or barges and took them out to the countryside to be sold to market gardeners as fertiliser.
The water-closet was not a new invention. Elizabeth I had one installed at Richmond Palace. There are references to them in the 17th and 18th centuries in the houses of the aristocracy. Then in 1778 a cabinet maker called Joseph Bramah took out a patent for an improved device, and by the 1820s water closets were in widespread use.
In 1847 almost half the houses in the parish of St Anne’s in Soho had a WC, and two-thirds in the more prosperous parish of St James’s in Westminster. Though you could turn that statistic round and marvel at the fact that a third, even in wealthy St James’s, still made do without a flushing loo.
“The most important reason why 19th-century Thames water was so dirty was the growing popularity of the flushing water-closet”
No doubt these WCs improved the quality of life for individual homeowners, but for the city as a whole they were a disaster.
The problem was that all that dirty water and faeces had to go somewhere, and traditional cesspits could not cope with the extra load. So people diverted the flow into the city’s sewers, which
had been designed merely to carry rainwater run-off, and emptied straight into the river.
Meanwhile the city was growing relentlessly: its population more than doubled to over two million between 1800 and 1850. The result was a tidal wave of effluent daily discharging into London’s rivers. It would, wrote The Builder in 1858, be “an act of insanity” to dip a mug into the Thames and drink the contents. Yet that, in effect, was what Londoners had been doing for years, courtesy of the city’s water companies. By the 1820s a new breed of consumer campaigners had emerged to tackle the problem. In 1827 an anonymous pamphlet targeted one company in particular among the eight serving the metropolis, the Grand Junction Waterworks.
At its launch in 1811 the Grand Junction had initially promised a supply of water from “the pure ethereal streams” of the rivers Colne and Brent to the west, brought to London via the Grand Junction canal. When the canal
company found there wasn’t enough water for both householders and boats, and customers complained that it was dirty, the intake had been switched to the Thames next to Chelsea Hospital. Unfortunately the intake pipe sat opposite the outlet of the Ranelagh sewer, which had started life as the River Westbourne but which by the 1820s had become heavily polluted.
The pamphlet conjured a nightmare vision of the company’s product, drawn as it was from near the sewer’s mouth, and led to the establishment of one of the first 19th-century royal commissions. There were three commissioners, including the distinguished engineer Thomas Telford, and some of the evidence they heard was stomach-churning.
One witness, whose home overlooked the tidal Thames, told of watching the carcasses of dead dogs float up and down with the tide. Dutch eel fishermen coming to London to sell their produce told of meeting the “bad water” as they came up the river – they knew it by the scum on the surface, and it killed up to two-thirds of their cargoes, which they kept alive in baskets slung over the side of their boats. Witnesses claimed to have found leeches, “shrimplike, skipping animalcules”, “oily scum”, a “stinking black deposit” and “little round black things, like juniper berries” in their water cisterns.
The campaigners called for government legislation to force the water companies to act. It was, said one, “the bounden duty of government, who ought to watch over the health of the people, to see that the town was plentifully supplied with good water”. Some went even further, demanding the water companies be taken into public ownership since water supply was obviously far too important to be left in the hands of private companies, who would prioritise their shareholders’ profits and dividends over their customers’ interests.
But that was going too far. Even legislation was looked at askance. Early 19th-century politicians of all stripes were wedded to the idea that private property was sacrosanct: governments had no business interfering with property owners’ freedom, and since shares in water companies were private property,
the government should stay well clear. And “interference” with the water companies would involve a dramatic widening of the role of government to include responsibility for public health. The Tory home secretary, Robert Peel, was aghast at the implications: government might end up responsible not just for water but for the gas and the lighting and the paving of streets.
“Hassall’s water samples were swarming with microscopic life: clusters of tiny cells, hairy globules, tangled filaments, all wonderful and fascinating, provided you didn’t have to drink them”
It took 30 years of campaigning and lobbying to bring about a shift in attitudes. Scientific investigation played a part. In 1850 a physician and botanist called Arthur Hassall published A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London and Surrounding Districts. The book
caused a sensation.
Hassall displayed his findings graphically in a circular frame, as if seen through the lens of the microscope. His samples of company water were swarming with microscopic life and the illustrations showed what they looked like: clusters of tiny cells, hairy globules, tangled filaments, all wonderful and fascinating, provided you didn’t have to drink them. Sewage pollution in the river showed up too, in the form of potato cells, wheat husks and fragments of muscular fibre. These, Hassall wrote, came from “faecal matter”. “It is thus beyond dispute,” he concluded, “that according to the present system of London’s water supply a portion of the inhabitants of the metropolis are made to consume, in some form or other, a portion of their own excrement, and moreover to pay for the privilege.”
After all this, even a reluctant government was forced to bow to pressure. In 1852 it passed a Metropolis Water Act. Almost all the water companies had been getting their water from the tidal stretches of the Thames
and Lea, where sewage surged backwards and forwards with every tide.
The new act required the companies to move their intakes to cleaner water much further upriver. It also told them to purify their product by passing it through filter beds and then to store it in covered reservoirs to prevent recontamination. The companies grumbled, but there was nothing they could do – and in any case London’s astonishingly rapid growth meant they were soon able to recoup the extra costs involved in making the changes by signing up new customers, and maintain a flow of dividends to their shareholders.
The river itself was finally cleansed following the Great Stink of 1858, when the hottest summer on record produced an unbearable stench and finally persuaded politicians (whose workplace sat right next to the fetid river) to fund Joseph Bazalgette’s system of intercepting sewers, then one of the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken. For the most part it prevented raw sewage entering the river in the centre of the city, discharging it well downstream of the built-up area.
By that stage the pioneering epidemiologist John Snow had also demonstrated conclusively that at least one fatal disease, cholera, was carried in water contaminated with human faeces. His scientific peers initially rejected (and in some cases ridiculed) his findings, however, and it wasn’t until well after his death in 1858 that scientists and public health experts finally accepted that he had been right.
“The Metropolis Water Act 1852 required companies to move intakes to cleaner water further upriver”
A second Metropolis Water Act in 1871 trespassed even further on the freedom of the water company proprietors by establishing the first water regulators. These were a government inspector to oversee quality and a government auditor to make sure the companies didn’t cook the books.
And in 1904, after almost a century of campaigning, London’s water supply was finally taken into public ownership with the establishment of the Metropolitan Water Board.
LESSONS LEARNT?
The story shows that environmental collapse can be averted thanks to the work of campaigners and lobbyists, firm government intervention and effective regulation.
But all the water companies in Britain were privatised once more in 1989. Today, with many protesting the shocking state of Britain’s streams and beaches thanks to often unauthorised discharges of untreated sewage, the water industry stands accused of diverting billions of pounds which might have been spent on improving infrastructure into dividends to shareholders. History, it seems, is repeating itself. o
Nick Higham’s book, The Mercenary River: Private Greed, Public Good – A History of London’s Water, is published by Hachette
FOLLOWING FLASH FLOODING in 2021 and the 40-degree heatwave in 2022, the Mayor of London commissioned an independent review to take stock and make recommendations to guide London’s preparations for more extreme weather. The review gathered evidence from individuals, communities and organisations including the NHS, Transport for London, London Fire Brigade, the Metropolitan Police, local authorities, the GLA, UK government, NGOs, the financial services sector, sports and cultural institutions as well as representatives of vulnerable groups. The full report is to be published later in the year but the interim report, which came out in January, made urgent and strategic recommendations including that London should conduct a multiagency exercise to test the city’s preparedness for a period of extreme heat; that Whitehall should give councils more funding and powers to adapt their communities for climate change, instead of making local authorities compete for limited central money; and that action is needed now to prevent major flooding damage to London.
An interview with SYSTRA’s Marc Stedman
Marc Stedman is Discipline Lead for Water Resources & Climate Resilience at influential sustainable infrastructure business SYSTRA. The company provides world-leading specialist engineering and consultancy services that support a nature positive and climate resilient future. SYSTRA has more than 1,000 employees throughout the UK & Ireland, and nearly 11,000 globally. With more than 100 environmental specialists, SYSTRA is well-placed to support both the public and private sector’s climate, flooding and water pollution commitments.
An engineer with more than 25 years of experience leading and managing challenging environmental projects, Marc says climate change is impacting faster than we had ever anticipated. “Thirty years ago we were talking about the impact of acid rain, today it’s about our massive average rainfall increases which are causing regular flooding events and devastating property, livelihoods and natural habitats – right here in the UK. These floods are not only an issue in themselves, but have repercussions in wastewater treatment and the quality of our rivers and seas as well.
Marc is leading some of the first overflow sewer designs to address The Environment Act 2021 requirements for the water sector. The Act requires water companies to continuously monitor the quality of the water upstream and downstream of their treatment assets to allow meaningful assessments on relevant local watercourses. With severe weather events happening more regularly, water companies are increasingly in the spotlight to make improvements and protect our built and natural environments. Marc is keen to point out that “it is not only important, but necessary for wastewater infrastructure to be fit for purpose.”
Marc’s team is also currently delivering several complex water management solutions for the HS2 route near Birmingham, part of the Balfour Beatty Vinci Joint Venture contract in which SYSTRA is lead designer. Specifically, the HS2 route meant diverting parts of local rivers in Warwickshire at Water Orton and improving the riverbanks and wetland biodiversity.
Marc is optimistic about the future, pointing out that “the climate challenge is huge, but the rewards are bigger still.” His experience of working in both the public and private sectors mean that he instinctively sees the benefits each can bring towards delivering on climate change.
Marc is an advocate of supplementing public funding with private sector investment which he says “will act as a catalyst to innovation and bring about new tech including AI to improve practice.
“Private sector involvement can help spread the risks associated with climate change, adaptation, and mitigation measures. By diversifying ownership and responsibility, the burden of addressing climate-related challenges can be shared more effectively.”
SYSTRA offers a one-stop environmental service, encompassing advice, design and engineering support for sustainable transport, infrastructure and development projects in many sectors.
Our environment and sustainability experts work in partnership with clients and wider project teams to deliver high-quality, innovative and responsive solutions to meet specific environmental challenges and project priorities. We take responsibility for managing environmental risks and developing and implementing sustainable solutions on projects ranging from high-speed rail infrastructure and urban mobility schemes to flood resilience, energy-from-waste facilities and clean air initiatives.
Marc Stedman Discipline Lead for Water Resources & Climate Resilience SYSTRA mstedman@systra.com
Our Signature Team has the passion and the expertise to help clients tackle the greatest challenges facing society and our planet. Our integrated environmental services help to address sustainability, biodiversity, water quality, flood resilience and climate change issues for all projects, regardless of scale.
At SYSTRA our experts work side by side to create nature positive practical solutions for complex climate-related water challenges for major infrastructure projects.
Every day our teams are working on projects to enhance local river environments, protect river verges and create wetlands for improved biodiversity. Our specialists understand river catchments systems and are experienced river engineers, ecologists and project managers.
We are ready to help you assess the interactions between rainfall for water resources and drought management to understand flood risk and provide forecasting, management and technology options.
Meet us at CIWEM’s Flood & Coast Conference and Exhibition - Stand G19 4-6 June 2024
Telford International Centre, UK
Come and speak to our Signature Team to find out more about our services, solutions and expertise.
Dr Ana Togridou Nature Positive Discipline Lead SYSTRA atogridou@systra.com
Mohsen Ebrahimi Principal River Engineer SYSTRA mebrahimi@systra.com
Josh Braithwaite Assistant Consultant Flood Risk SYSTRA jbraithwaite@systra.com
Could technology for purifying water on the Moon help address water scarcity here on Earth? Jo Caird reports on the UK Space Agency’s Aqualunar Challenge, which aims to find out
Picture the scene: it’s 2044 and the Moon is a hive of activity.
Automated mining operations extract valuable resources from Lunar regolith – the layer of debris that covers the Moon’s surface – while huge solar arrays capture energy from the sun. The products of both processes are used in the manufacture of components and structures for spacecraft, Lunar dwellings and other infrastructure. Microgreens, algae and mushrooms are among the crops being harvested by robot pickers from within enclosed farm modules, while human scientists take
advantage of the low-gravity environment for innovative experiments across all manner of academic disciplines.
Before any of this crazy dream can be realised, however, one essential element is required. If humanity is ever to colonise the Moon, we’re going to need to be able to make clean water there first.
Which is where the Aqualunar Challenge comes in. A collaboration between the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), this public competition aims to spark the development of innovative technologies to purify water on our nearest galactic
neighbour. Prizes worth £1.2 million will be shared between 10 finalists (announced in June) and one winner and two runners up (announced in March 2025) who can come up with a detailed design and proofof-concept for technology that will take dirty ice extracted from the Lunar regolith and reliably produce at least one litre per hour of clean drinking water.
So-0called in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) – the collecting and utilising of locally available resources in space, for space – will be essential when it comes
physicist at Concordia research station in Antarctica, so has personal experience of water purification in remote environments.
“The thing that that we can learn from previous systems, especially on the International Space Station (ISS), is using this closed loop: purifying, recycling, purifying, recycling,” she says. “But a lot of things would need to change for [this technology] to be used on the Moon.”
to making the Moon viable as a place for permanent human settlement because it reduces the need for resupply missions.
Water is an important first target for ISRU not just because people will need it for drinking, food preparation, hygiene and as a source of oxygen on the Moon, but also because propellants for rockets
“Multiple Lunar missions, including orbiters and probes, have indicated the presence of water-ice on the Lunar surface”
can be made by splitting hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis.
It’s unclear at this stage how much water is up there, where it might be, and in what state. But multiple Lunar missions, including orbiters and probes, have indicated the presence of water-ice on the Lunar surface – it’s this that applicants to the Aqualunar Challenge have been asked to figure out a way to purify.
The logistics of flying their equipment to the Moon and getting the dirty ice out of the Lunar regolith isn’t applicants’ concern – it’s just the treatment process itself that the competition judges are interested in, with applicants needing to remove a list of eight contaminants that includes hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and some solid regolith particles left over from extraction.
Constraints to consider include the low and fluctuating temperatures on the Moon (from 54C to -203C depending on location), the presence of highly abrasive regolith particles, low gravity (1/6th of that on Earth) and the lack of atmospheric pressure. The technology also needs to be fully remote operable, not too energy demanding, small enough that it doesn’t take up much space on a lunar lander, and robust enough to withstand G forces in launch and landing.
Meganne Christian, reserve astronaut and exploration commercialisation lead for the UKSA, and one of the competition judges, is “really excited to see the range of innovative solutions that people will come up with”. She spent a winter working as an atmospheric
Some ‘challenge prizes’ (see box) require finalists to produce a prototype as part of the development process, but that’s not the case here, says Olivier Usher, head of research at Challenge Works, the organisation delivering the competition.
“I’m open to being surprised but probably you’re not looking at viable, market ready stuff coming out the end of this, not least because hardware is hard,” he explains. “But you are probably looking at triggering some more earlystage technology developments which may then go on to do good stuff later. That’s what we’re targeting here.”
Among the “good stuff” that Challenge Works is hoping to trigger is water purification technology for use much closer to home. “There’s a long-term application in a Lunar environment but there’s a nearer term application here on Earth”, says Caroline Wadsworth, director of strategic partnerships at Isle Utilities, which is partnering with Challenge Works to offer water sector expertise to finalists as they develop their proposals. “We might not have quite the same rugged, harsh environment but the drivers for those technologies are the same.”
The sorts of water treatment solutions that will be suitable for use on the Moon – small, low-energy consumption, autonomous, low maintenance, and built with circularity in mind – will be ever more sought after as the impacts of anthropogenic climate change are felt around the world. More frequent drought and flooding will see us turning to new sources of raw water that are unconnected to existing infrastructure.
“You’re moving towards more pockets of decentralisation to be able to adapt to the changing scenarios,” Wadsworth explains. “You think about all the challenges we’ve
got around climate change exacerbating the pollution problem but it’s also exacerbating the need for low energy or even positive energy solutions. Creating treatment trains for that Lunar scenario gives us nice transferability of the solutions back to Earth.”
Such technologies could be a huge boon for already water-scarce communities in the developing world, in particular, where infrastructure is lacking. “Why not leverage all of this space investment to help us bring up the standard of living?” suggests Wadsworth.
But even in the developed world, novel water purification technologies offer the promise of greater efficiencies and improved safety, including helping us meet the challenge of emerging contaminants such as PFAS and microplastics. “A lot of these systems are in unsafe environments. If we can take people out of that maintenance regime, we can apply them in other areas and make the service better in other ways,” Wadsworth says.
How quickly we’ll see novel technologies in operation off the back of the Aqualunar Challenge is hard to say at this stage – “it really depends on the maturity of the solutions that come out the other end”, says Wadsworth – but she’s in no doubt as to the potential of such endeavours.
“The water sector is naturally very risk averse, but the space sector is structured differently and has a lot more investment,” she explains. “So the advantage for us is not only cross pollination of those innovation ecosystems, growth in the innovation culture and acceleration of adoption potential. It’s also that we can leverage funding that’s going into space and benefit from that on Earth.”
IN 2020 OFWAT launched a £200 million Innovation Fund to support innovative initiatives which deliver significant benefits for water customers, society and the environment. During the pilot phase of the fund, £63 million was awarded to projects via three competitions. The newest competition, the Water Discovery Challenge, announced 10 winners in February, with £4.5 million awarded to technologies including the use of “lightning in a jar” as an alternative to chlorine in disinfecting drinking water, and analysing water quality incident reports using AI.
Christian agrees, pointing to the many innovations in use in industrial and consumer contexts today that have come out of NASA programmes alone: “Space is a real accelerator for solving technological challenges.”
“The water sector is naturally very risk averse, but the space sector is structured very differently and has a lot more investment into it”
Innovating in this arena has other, more philosophical, potential benefits too. In 1990, the sight of the Earth captured by NASA’s Voyager I space probe, at a distance of 6 billion km, inspired the astronomer Carl Sagan to describe our home planet as a “pale blue dot” in the “great enveloping cosmic dark”.
“To my mind”, he wrote, “there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Lunar water is a hugely precious resource. Perhaps the Aqualunar Challenge, by prompting discussion of the need to use it wisely and sparingly, might help humanity understand the preciousness of water here on Earth too. o
Biodegradable bags and liners enabling the hand placement of concrete in and around watercourses.
The real savings are not in material costs, but in the time saved in having a ready-toinstall product, and not having to dewater the watercourse to place the bagwork.
SoluForm MSE Bagwork is supplied pre-filled with a high quality sand rich topsoil, supplied in a form that is ready to use and assemble on site once it arrives.
It aims to establish and promote vegetation growth on, and inside the bagwork, giving the bagwork structure an improved appearance.
Just over a year on from the devastating floods that hit New Zealand in early 2023, Alex Cartwright, technical director of resilience and emergency management at environmental and engineering consultancy firm Tonkin + Taylor, reflects on next steps for flood preparedness
Waiho i te toipoto, kaua i te toiroa | Let us keep close together, not wide apart
It’s Friday 27 January 2023, the height of summer in Auckland, New Zealand. The city is buzzing in anticipation of the long Auckland Anniversary weekend, including an Elton John concert for nearly 50,000 fans. Then, at 7pm, less than 30 minutes before the concert is due to start, organisers call off the event due to significant rainfall.
Twenty-four hours later, four people are dead. Auckland has experienced its wettest day on record. Damaged infrastructure is littered across New Zealand’s largest city. Auckland International Airport is shut due to significant flooding. Flood water on motorways could be measured in metres. Many houses are uninhabitable, essential services disrupted.
The building assessments that followed revealed 277 properties issued red placards (unsafe to enter), 1,615 issued yellow placards (restricted access), and 2,566 issued white placards (minor damage). Roads were strewn with flooded cars, buses and other vehicles. Over 57,000 insurance claims and 1,300 injury claims were filed relating to the floods. Reviews that followed would reveal that the warning system designed to alert communities had failed –warnings were either issued after people were already flooding, or not at all.
Rainfall significantly exceeded the usual design standards for flood protection and wider infrastructure (the 100-year event, more accurately depicted as a flood with a 1 per cent chance of occurring in any one year). More rain fell on that single January Friday than was expected for the entire month for Auckland. All 1.7 million people in the region, a third of New Zealand’s
population, had experienced an extreme weather event. Worse was to yet come.
Two weeks later, Cyclone Gabrielle hit the top of New Zealand’s North Island, killing 11 people and causing widespread damage. Over 10,000 people were estimated to have been displaced, and over 225,000 homes lost power. This was more than January’s flooding after heavy rain: it was land movement across critical infrastructure, impacting roads, utilities and communities. Over 140,000 landslides were mapped following the cyclone, isolating communities for far longer than flood waters.
“More rain fell on that day than was expected for the entire month for Auckland – all 1.7 million people in the region had experienced an extreme weather event”
Hawke’s Bay, world famous for its wine and fruit, was one of the hardest hit areas. Homes, orchards and wider productive farmland were covered in thick silt. For some, escaping their properties was only possible from rooftops. In Tairāwhiti Gisborne, the cyclone caused 50,000 landslides across an area of 8,000 sq km, 3 per cent of New Zealand’s total land area. Auckland did not escape unscathed, with Gabrielle causing havoc and destruction here too.
Less than 50 days into 2023, the death toll stood at 15, hundreds of thousands of people had been impacted, and 115,000 insurance claims had been made. The insured losses for New Zealand from
these weather events was costed near NZ$4 billion (£1.9 billion) by mid-2023.
A country usually known for its earthquakes, New Zealand was hitting the headlines globally for extreme weather. Flooding is New Zealand’s number one hazard by losses, but is not always front of mind, thanks to the fact that we are the second most at risk country globally for natural hazards.
The scale of the 2023 severe weather events was 10 times larger than previous recorded losses. Were these events and outcomes foreseeable or even preventable? What lessons can be learned here and abroad?
There is no single flood management statute in New Zealand. Responsibilities are devolved locally, with reforms from 1987 to the early 1990s leading the shift away from central government in policysetting and funding.
While the Resource Management Act 1991 enables central government to provide national direction on managing flood risk for local government, no statements, standards or guidelines have been provided since the shift began in 1987. The various acts covering flood management are administered through regional and territorial authorities who set regional and local policy through long-term plans, regional policy statements, and regional/ local plans.
In many parts of New Zealand there is ambiguity over the jurisdiction on land drainage and wider flood management. This can lead to inconsistencies in applications of key acts, statutes and responsibility across different hazards. Inconsistency can also occur within a
region as different types of flood hazard are administered by differing agencies.
New Zealand has an outdated and fragmented policy landscape for flood hazard management. We’ve long known this to be case, and the events of 2023 further exposed the scale of the challenge. The need to reconsider how flood risk management is delivered is critical on many levels – from economic and financial to social and community safety.
In 2007, the UK was hit with devastating floods that cost 13 lives. The response was the largest peacetime rescue operation in British history and the widest-ranging policy reviews ever conducted in the UK.
The Pitt Review found flood risk management lacked coordination and structure, and paved the way for the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which provided a new framework for managing flood risk, including greater
clarity on roles and responsibilities. This included improved coordination across agencies and requirements to improve public awareness of flood risk.
New Zealand’s population at the time of the 2023 floods was one tenth of the UK’s in 2007, yet we saw comparable deaths, with insured losses two thirds of those amassed by the UK in 2007. The lessons identified in the Pitt Review may be 15 years old but they are just as applicable in New Zealand today as they were in the UK in 2010.
New Zealand is making steps toward recovery. The establishment of the land categorisation process has helped support homeowners in making decisions around properties identified as at risk. This process focuses on establishing whether land and property is exposed to intolerable risk and, if so, enables a financial buy-out.
Although not a legislated act or policy, signs of a managed retreat process are emerging – where action is taken to permanently relocate people, property and infrastructure to lower risk areas . While this process helps manage existing risk, controls have not, as yet, been implemented on new development areas: land and property still covered in silt have neighbouring sites consented for development, against the advice of hazard specialists.
“New Zealand has an outdated policy landscape for flood management – the events of 2023 exposed the scale of the challenge”
New Zealand has recovered from major events in the past and continues to showcase expertise and leadership in recovery. The Transport Rebuild East Coast
Alliance has been established to plan, organise and deliver much of the highway and railway recovery and rebuild work. The pace and scale is impressive: 420 sites have so far been identified for recovery, with over 30 per cent completed through design and construction.
It is easy in hindsight to reflect on decisions made in minutes. That said, there is clear opportunity to learn from 2023 and previous events. One question is whether there is value on increased investment in prevention, readiness and response to help reduce the need for recovery efforts.
“By engaging people early and often, and communicating risk to them about the risks they face, we can influence outcomes before, during and after flood events”
Current funding mechanisms default costs of disasters to local authorities, meaning that it is the people locally who are paying through their council tax. There are opportunities to seek support from central government, but with no contributions guaranteed. A big
AS WE TALK about the physical impacts of climate change, many will be thinking about the efforts being made toward transition to a lower climate economy. The hope here is that the more investment in climate mitigation, the less physical impact climate change will make. For New Zealand, the investment needed to meet our climate targets is in the billions of dollars but a quick glance at New Zealand Treasury’s Fiscal Strategy Model gives no clue as to where those billions will come from. This is a challenge that the previous climate change minister targeted during his tenure – it remains unresolved today.
disaster brings attention and focus, as well as looser purse strings. The result is a funding system that tends towards managing flood events after they occur, rather than trying to prevent them.
We can focus on the differences between jurisdictions, weather characteristics, response efforts and funding mechanisms. But one consistent factor persists – our communities remain at risk. So how does a country at risk of nearly every natural hazard event effectively prepare for and manage those risks?
By engaging people early and often, and communicating risk to them about the risks they face, we can influence outcomes before, during and after events caused by natural hazards. Communities invested in prevention and wider risk management can help focus and drive policy and legislative changes.
While lack of funding is always listed as a reason for inaction – whether around community engagement or any other flood preparedness measures – it is time we look beyond this to establish ways to learn from identified lessons, locally and internationally.
It is too early to say whether the 2023 events will be the flood of change New Zealand needs. However, as practitioners and interested parties within CIWEM, there is a responsibility for each of us to push for positive change that enables communities to thrive. o
Ahead of our upcoming report on coastal change, CIWEM invited reflections from coastal flood and erosion practitioners – policy and engagement manager Catherine Moncrieff dives through the mail bag to offer a taste of what’s to come
BRITAIN’S COAST IS remarkable – from the formidable white cliffs of Dover, to the jagged coastline of the west country, to the vast beaches of Northumberland.
And when it comes to coastlines, Britain punches above its weight. It has a relatively high coast-to-area ratio, with a more broken, and therefore longer, coastline than similar-sized countries. Nowhere is more than about 70 miles from the coast, and around 3 million people (approximately 5 per cent of the population) live in coastal areas.
Steeped in history and culture, the British coastline is an important place for many to escape to on holiday or connect with nature. We also rely on the coast for essential infrastructure that future proofs our water and power supplies, such as power stations, hydrogen hubs, desalination and wastewater treatment plants. Meanwhile ports provide hubs for offshore green energy and marine transport.
Yet with climate change biting, the
talking about the odd cottage crumbling into the sea, but changes that affect millions of people: coastal communities but also businesses, holiday makers and all that rely on essential infrastructure.
The diversity of Britain’s coastline means that there are many different manifestations of this change. Ahead of CIWEM’s upcoming report on coastal change – which will present recommendations for what government should do to support the necessary transition – we’ve invited reflections, or ‘postcards’, from coastal flood and erosion practitioners. Here’s a taster of what’s to come…
The UK Climate Change Committee’s 2018 report, Managing the Coast in a Changing Climate indicated that by the 2080s, up to 1.5 million properties may be in areas with a 0.5 per cent or greater annual risk of flooding, and that over 100,000 properties may be at risk from
coastal erosion. The report concluded that the risks were not being confronted with the required urgency or transparency, particularly around realistic approaches to coastal management.
Five years on, the committee’s report to the UK, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland governments found insufficient data and monitoring on coastal adaptation.
A ‘postcard’ from a coastal scientist based on the south coast discusses the uncertainty around storm patterns, storm surges, tidal ranges and waves – all exacerbated by climate change. Coastal sediment pathways are unpredictable anyway, let alone with climate change potentially altering key characteristics such as wave direction. This uncertainty poses immediate challenges to coastal practitioners in terms of design and scheme life of coastal defences. Furthermore, it presents “an uneasy reality” over decisions such as the commissioning of new defences or implementing radical strategies to realign the coast.
There is also the looming reality of the next big storm. They ask: “Is this ever-present concern for coastal practitioners able to be balanced effectively with an active and strategic vision around change?” Analysis of past storm events helps reflect on the trajectory of coastal management. Indeed, coastal storms are often a wake-up call for change. Our postcards from the French Caribbean and New Zealand (see After the flood, pp. 39-41) reference Storm Xynthia (2010) and Cyclone Gabrielle (2023) respectively
as pivotal in moving away from coastal strategies based solely on protection.
The ‘postcard’ from the south coast talks of the vicious cycle of coastlines that have been developed over centuries and are now highly defended with sea walls and cliff stabilisation.
Many of these defences have reached – or are reaching – the end of their effective design life, requiring ever more maintenance. Budgets for maintenance are stretched and so there is a growing risk of sudden, catastrophic failure during storms (see High Maintenance, pp. 20-22). Coastal defences have cut off the natural supply of sediment along the shore, leading to narrowing and lowering beaches which then require larger hard structures or a regular supply of sediment from distant sources.
The presence of defences and land reclamation has led to ‘coastal squeeze’, the reduction of inter-tidal habitats, such as salt marsh in the south coast’s estuaries. This is reducing their ecological function as well as reducing their ability to act as a natural wave buffer, reducing flood and erosion risk.
Reinstating natural assets should be a key part of future coastal management, particularly where nature-based solutions (NBS) such as restoring salt marsh and beach nourishment can bring amenity value. But a concern from a storm perspective, is, “How do we balance the decent moral positions of encouraging less waste, reducing emissions and looking to NBS whilst not losing sight of the priorities of here and now?”
A ‘postcard’ focusing on coastal waste management highlights the alarming issue of the more than 1,000 historic landfill sites which are at risk of leaching pollutants and even crumbling into coastal habitats. The cumulative impacts on wildlife, water quality and health are unknown and potentially huge. Yet there has been no political will or dedicated funding to address this pressing issue.
Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs) are a subject of another ‘postcard’. The foundation of coastal management for nearly 30 years in England and Wales, they take a comprehensive look at coastal
processes, land use, development, natural environment and community viewpoints across regional stretches of coastline. They aim to determine the most suitable coastal management strategy for the next 100 years. They are deemed to be the bedrock of coastal decision making in the UK and are often revered internationally.
But do they actually deliver? SMPs are non-statutory policy documents and have little influence in planning decisions. Moreover, even though they are adopted by the local authority and approved by the Environment Agency and Defra, they come with no guarantee of funding for delivery. So SMPs are really just providing an evidence-based, long-term vision for more sustainable coastal management.
Funding rears its head as a challenge in several ‘postcards’. A key issue seems to be that current funding arrangements focus on a narrow band of outcome measures for coastal flooding and erosion. Communities that could be made resilient if a broader range of factors were considered are currently unable to access central government funding.
“With climate change biting, the coast is changing, and fast”
And despite the considerable increase in FCERM funding for the 2021-2027 period to £5.2 billion, local authorities are required to attract additional funding via partnerships and the private sector. This is not always easy.
In many places, continued investment in maintaining current shoreline positions is unlikely to be practical or justifiable in the future. Certainly, the postcards from New Zealand and France indicate evolving approaches, with increased recognition that protection is not the only viable response; there’s a need to consider relocation, managed retreat of the coastline and adaptive planning. But in both countries, how such an approach should be financed remains a big question.
In England and Wales, this evolution is reflected in a transition from policies of ‘hold the line’ to those of ‘no active intervention’ or ‘managed realignment’ in SMPs. For those communities on the front line, there is a pressing need for investment
in adaptation or transition plans. Yet there is no clear guidance or funding pathway available for local authorities; current funding policy rewards protecting homes, not moving them out of at-risk areas.
Our ‘postcard’ from the crumbling East Anglian coast cites rural communities in Suffolk and Norfolk that cannot access funding to transition to ‘managed realignment’ or ‘no active intervention’. It is hoped that Defra’s flood and coastal innovation programme will bring a new era of coastal management that allows for ‘adaptive resilience’, where those at most risk from erosion can be supported to move away from high-risk areas into new relocation zones with meaningful support packages.
The ‘postcard’ from the East Anglian coast raises the issue of multiple eroding towns. As each town is impacted there is a gradual reduction in the benefits the coastline as a whole has to offer. “Is the ongoing and growing loss to the nation of this disappearing coastline being properly considered?”, the postcard asks.
Coastal towns drive tourism, energy and port economies, and the stewardship of the coastal environment so we can all continue to enjoy it. Beaches and natural habitats offer locals and visitors the chance to connect with the landscape and environment, bringing benefits to mental health and wellbeing in ways that have not yet been fully measured. There is a feeling that the multifaced, shared value offered by our coasts is not properly accounted for in decisions about funding. As expressed by the ‘postcard’ from the east, we need an evidence base that considers new valuations of the coastal economy, society and environment, so that funds flow from those benefiting. Our coasts are clearly of great value to us as a nation, but this is failing to translate into how we manage their inevitable transition. Thinking ahead to a ‘postcard from the coast’ of 2030, let’s hope that the efforts to champion this value will shine through. o
CIWEM’s specialist FCERM panel are currently convening to develop recommendations for the government to tackle our changing coast. Standby, Defra, for your personal postcard!
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A simple, low-cost flow control ideal for controlling flows at sites with generous discharge consents.
A long-awaited consultation on Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 has been promised by Defra – it’s just one of many drivers of a growing focus on surface water management as pivotal to the fortunes of water health and resilience, writes CIWEM’s head of policy, Alastair Chisholm
THERE’S A SPINE-tingling jeopardy that comes with writing an opinion piece in the same timeframe an important government document is due to break cover, when the piece itself won’t break cover until later. So much scope to make you look like a chump, especially when said consultation is a year or so overdue.
But this is the way with so many government policies of late; casualties of the merry-go-round of environment secretaries and wider government ministers that’s at least mirrored that of prime ministers.
Schedule 3 is, of course, the currently un-commenced bit of 2010 legislation that would make sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) mandatory in new development, setting out statutory design standards and adoption and maintenance provisions. A piece of red tape anathema to governments since the departure of Labour, it has only been
taken seriously since the sewage scandal revealed that, yes, actually, SuDS could make a multi-beneficial contribution to a range of mounting policy challenges. Following arm-twisting of the then water minister Rebecca Pow and environment secretary George Eustice, it was announced that Schedule 3 would finally be implemented in 2024.
“There
are weighty arguments
that government needs to up its surface water game – the issue is getting traction, but not enough”
The consultation on scope, threshold and process has been due since last summer. So confidence in an April 2024 publication date can only be moderate at best. Especially when housing minister Lee Rowley seems to want to
stick with the widely-panned planningled approach to SuDS delivery.
RECOGNITION OF THE PROBLEM
There are differing views amongst practitioners over whether or not Schedule 3 – led by lead local flood authorities – is the right approach. But there’s little doubt that in the years since 2010, as climate change has marched on, sewage spills are a political headache exacerbated by how we do development.
Another thing that’s advanced is the breadth of recognition that we have to manage water far better where it falls: at the surface. And that means everywhere from the uplands to coastal towns and cities; rural and urban. Surface water management isn’t just a concrete jungle thing.
There’s been a plethora of weighty arguments over the past year or so that government needs to up its surface
water game. The issue is getting traction, but arguably not as near to the top of government as advisors and scrutiny bodies consider necessary.
The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) – the government’s formal advisor on major infrastructure challenges – saw enough of an issue in surface water flooding to warrant a focused study on it. It concluded that a lack of join up and planning between various responsible bodies, allied to disparate funding streams, was hampering scope to keep pace with the impacts of climate change and urbanisation. Action was needed on all these fronts.
The government’s response set out a range of activities both dating back several years and ongoing or imminent: a new National Flood Risk Assessment (NAFRA 2); long-term investment scenarios; support for local authority surface water mapping; improved asset data capture and more. The NIC, while recognising this, said, “government’s plan of action does not meet the scale of the challenge, and lacks the urgency required to meet the threat”.
The government’s independent spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), published two reports – on resilience to flooding and resilience to extreme weather. These reports concluded that extreme weather impacts – including surface water flooding – are increasing, but government doesn’t know how much it is spending on preparing for them.
The NAO warned that government must do more to understand these challenges, set appropriate visions and targets, and build resilience in a prioritised way, with an emphasis on prevention and preparedness. But there are multiple challenges: in the lack of data; forecasting surface water flood risk and issuing warnings; planning for the long-term and funding across multiple risk management authorities; and providing clarity to the public on where to turn when flooding occurs.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) gave consistent signals in its assessment of the latest National Adaptation
Programme (NAP3). The outspoken government climate advisor said that the NAP3 “falls far short of what is needed”, lacking both pace and ambition to cope with climate change. It said the whole NAP process wasn’t working and was sorely in need of a governance refresh in the next parliament, and that without appropriate monitoring and evaluation – of the kind flagged by the NIC and NAO – assessing progress wasn’t possible. The issue of the lack of a vision of resilience was flagged again, as was the need for improved cross-government planning and delivery.
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) reported in Resilience to Flooding, further to the NAO’s assessments, that: “The risks from surface water flooding are increasing, but Defra is not providing the necessary leadership and support for local authorities on how this will be addressed.” The PAC also noted that local government department DLUHC needed to support on skills and resources, especially when it comes to implementing Schedule 3.
The London Climate Resilience Review’s interim report identified surface water flood risk as a “lethal risk to Londoners”. It urged government to implement Schedule 3, remove the automatic right for developers to connect surface water to sewers, and create a ‘Strategic Surface Water Authority for London’.
Greater Manchester’s Integrated Water Management Plan recognised the benefits inherent in a more collaborative approach to design, delivery and funding water management interventions that unlock a raft of benefits, including surface water flood risk.
And our own assessment, here at CIWEM, pointed to a range of actions that could unlock opportunities for better surface water management.
Meanwhile, further upstream, the Environment Agency announced 40 projects to benefit from its natural flood management fund aimed at slowing and storing surface water runoff in landscapes above flood risk communities.
Defra announced increases in payment rates for Sustainable Farming Incentive and Catchment Stewardship measures, including on runoff management and storage for flood resilience, and promoted the slow-the-flow benefits of beavers.
Most of these reports pointed to the prominent role that water companies have to play in surface water management. Yes, to reduce flood risk, but also increasingly to get surface water out of overloaded combined sewers.
“Effective surface water management is increasingly positioned as central to unlocking progress on crucial environmental policy fronts”
A raft of drainage and wastewater management plans were produced setting out strategic priorities for improvement, including through SuDS. Water UK’s National Storm Overflows Plan for England argued that 25 per cent of measures being put forward by water companies to reduce storm overflows over the next five years could be delivered though nature-based solutions such as SuDS.
CAN GOVERNMENT DELIVER?
Who knows whether Schedule 3 will be implemented in 2024. It feels unlikely in an election year when policy implementation will soon grind to a halt, with much detail still to be worked through. But effective surface water management in varying spatial contexts, and through everything from soil management to SuDS, is increasingly positioned as central to unlocking progress on crucial environmental policy fronts. That’s everything from heat and flood resilience, to storm overflow and agricultural runoff pollution, to placemaking and nature recovery.
What many of these reports tell us though, is that while there are extensive wins to be had, they need stronger ambition from the apex of government. This must be backed up by clear longterm vision which feeds through the various responsible departments and agencies, putting surface water at the heart of their policies and delivery. o
SSilt shouldn’t be overlooked when carrying out works near or in water, says Leela O’Dea C.WEM, co-founder and technical director at Frog Environmental
ilt and clay are fractions of our soils which cause environmental damage when in water. When silty water enters a watercourse, lake or reservoir, it causes pollution which impacts the aquatic ecosystem, increases flood risk and is detrimental to water quality. Silt has a tiny particle size of between 0.02 and 0.63 µm (micron). Surface water runoff can erode exposed soils and entrain these tiny, energy-limited particles into water, where they can travel a long distance and remain in suspension.
As well as its damage to our environment, silt pollution brings significant costs and reputational harm to the business doing the polluting. The ‘polluter pays’ principle means businesses can be prosecuted and fined, and are responsible for clean-up costs. But silt pollution can be avoided with forward planning, good onsite surface water management systems and regular monitoring.
WHAT ARE THE PRIMARY SOURCES OF SILT?
Land-based construction activities, such as groundwork that strips soil and creates excavations and stockpiles, are a primary source of silt exposure and disturbance. When it rains, silts become mixed with water and can reach a precious watercourse through pathways such as drainage and surface water runoff.
Water-based construction activities such as headwall installation, bank protection or realignment of a channel risk disturbing the soils on the bed and bank of the watercourse that can be immediately mobilised by the flow of water. To minimise risk when carrying out construction work, best practice is to minimise silt disturbance.
WHAT ARE SOME INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES OR APPROACHES FOR SILT MANAGEMENT?
Securing new silt control interventions over the past decade has been critical to supporting the industry with improved water management. Using simple and cost-effective products, we
have developed techniques to treat and capture silt to separate the solids from water. This results in clean, clear water entering our watercourses, with silt as a byproduct that should be contained on site.
Gel flocculant has been a game changer for silt and clay impacted sites. Its unique composition treats flowing water, binding together the tiny silt particles so that they are removed from suspension. Gel focculant can be deployed into site ditches in a solid block form, using gravity to treat multiple sources of water before it reaches attenuation ponds. Alternatively, the blocks can be loaded into a pipe reactor mobile water treatment dosing unit. This can be used with a pump or under a gravity feed.
We manufacture and supply 100 per cent biodegradable mats (FlocMat™ and SiltMat™), which are used to capture and trap silt, as well as for lining ditches and polishing channels.
Water-based construction activities requires further tools to help mitigate pollution. We are the UK’s only supplier of bubble curtains using BubbleTubing® technology, which has won awards for its performance in helping mitigate pollution including sound, silt, oil, litter, weed to name a few. It also provides highly efficient aeration, which is often lacking during water-based operations.
All of our products can be incorporated into a surface water management plan.
HOW IS FROG ENVIRONMENTAL’S APPROACH DIFFERENT TO TANK-BASED WATER TREATMENT SYSTEMS?
Unlike with a tank-based system often installed for a temporary period, our technical team works with a site and makes use of existing surface water management infrastructure such as ditches and ponds to treat silty water before it is discharged from site. Where possible, we work with natural coir products and safe, non-toxic flocculants that are easy to deploy and can be scaled to suit any site size, geology or
topography. We also design gravityfed water treatment solutions where possible, removing the reliance on pumps, thereby saving on energy and associated fuel and hire costs. Our products can be used in isolation or alongside a model using a tank.
Our approach is to encourage sites to adopt a rain-ready system which provides them with year-round protection against wet weather. Because often the damage is done after the rain comes, we offer free CPD training to help upskill the industry, and to encourage proactive planning and product deployment.
WHAT ROLE DOES MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT PLAY IN EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SILT MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES OVER TIME?
Construction sites are dynamic environments: new activities and environmental influences impact surface water management requirements daily. Monitoring the volume and quality of any surface water leaving site is not only a requirement of a permit to discharge water, but provides an important management framework for the site team to establish and prioritise actions.
All water treatment systems require ongoing maintenance to ensure performance is optimised. The silt that is captured needs to be managed in accordance with the materials management plan.
HOW DO CLIMATE CHANGE AND EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS IMPACT SILT ACCUMULATION AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES?
The last five years have seen new records of severe weather events. The ground is saturated and water tables are high, meaning that natural infiltration is limited, which in turn is contributing to greater surface water runoff. Silt pollution is now a year-round risk. A rain-ready approach must start with early planning and preparation, including calculating surface water volumes and how water is moved and collected onsite for the construction phase of the work. o
Visit the team at Flood & Coast (stand number G26), view their website, frogenvironmental.co.uk, or contact them on 0345 057 4040 for a free initial consultation.
CIWEM News is edited by Chloe Goode
The trustee board are delighted to announce Anna Daroy as the new CEO of CIWEM – we find out her ambitions for the role
ANNE SHEPPERD OBE, chair of the board of trustees, said: “I am delighted on behalf of the trustees to welcome Anna Daroy, our new chief executive.
“There is much for us to achieve as we build and support our members and we know that in Anna, we have appointed someone with the experience, intellect and passion to help us influence change for the greater good of our country.”
Daroy has worked in the private and public sectors for over 25 years, successfully leading organisations through complex changes across multiple environments.
Beginning her career in management consulting with Ernst & Young and IBM, Anna has spent 20 years in board and c-suite roles, including leading and turning around international membership not-for-profits and charities. Her roles have included CEO of the Institute of Directors and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She currently also holds a voluntary role as a council member of the Rural Policy Group, which influences the government on the environment, particularly around farming and the security of our food supply.
DELIVERING ESSENTIAL CHANGE
Asked about her immediate impression of CIWEM and the work we do here, Daroy says, “I applied not only because I
am passionate about membership, but I have also been concerned about our water supply – and the environment – for over a decade.
“My role at CIWEM will allow me to help deliver the essential changes needed across industry and within government. I believe the work CIWEM does is critical to encourage the growth of essential skills across the sector. It’s part of the objectives of our royal charter and, in the current climate crisis globally, CIWEM plays an important role in both professional development and policy influence.”
The recent publication of A Fresh Water Future resonated with Daroy and she is excited about working towards getting the proposals of this policy framework implemented, with a view to seeing change in the UK.
As CEO, Daroy’s first priority is getting to know the team that supports the members of CIWEM. “Their passion and enthusiasm are what makes us a great institution,” she says.
Next on the list is growing the institution and offering members the best experience that we possibly can. To achieve this, Daroy will work closely with the trustees to implement a fiveyear strategy that will enable CIWEM to achieve growth and work with key partners internationally.
Daroy also wants to “ensure we are seen as the leading independent voice to government on all things water and environment”.
As part of pursuing her ambition to make CIWEM more member-focused, Daroy is looking forward to meeting members at CIWEM’s many events throughout the year, and is excited in particular about the Flood & Coast conference: “I will be meeting and listening to members to hear what is important to them.”
That listening exercise will take place well beyond the conference too: “To help nurture and grow our influence across the sector, I will be reaching out to our existing partners and encouraging new ones to come on the journey with us.” o
EACH MONTH ON CIWEM’s Planet Possible podcast, host Niki Roach tells the stories of the people paving the way for positive planetary and societal change. Upcoming episodes will explore the challenges facing Thames Water, coastal change, and housing and nature, featuring practitioners and visionaries from across the water and environmental management sector. Find Planet Possible in all the usual places, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe so as not to miss an episode: planetpossible.eco
junior president and Binnies principal
and coastal consultant Emily Clarke FCIWEM C.WEM shares her route to becoming a chartered water and environmental manager
MY BACKGROUND BRIDGES the flood risk management and water sector. I have an expert understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the key stakeholders and the policies and legislations that underpin our sector’s work. I represent the sector on numerous special interest, policy and project advisory panels and committees.
I’ve been fortunate to work for many of the different types of flood risk management authorities: starting my career at the Environment Agency, I then worked for Cambridgeshire’s lead local flood authority, followed by five years with Anglian Water and Water UK, before joining Binnies. Along the way, I have volunteered in inclusion initiatives such as raising awareness of neurodiversity and women in FCERM, have held several volunteer committee roles at CIWEM.
CHOOSING A CHARTERSHIP
I applied for chartership six years into my career, following completion of a Master’s degree in flood and coastal engineering, while working full-time. Applying for chartership was a personal and professional goal.
Throughout my career I’d spoken with members of CIWEM and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). Because of my
engineering background, many people encouraged me to join the latter. But I chose CIWEM as the Chartered Water and Environmental Manager (C.WEM) qualification felt closely aligned to my career, interests and values.
I had excellent sponsors who helped me work through the competencies. I showed them the examples I found for each competency and mapped out my experience to plot any gaps. My sponsors were supportive, giving me helpful prompts to fine-tune my application.
If I could do the process again, I would start it sooner. I advise people to map out the competencies early on in their careers, as it’s helpful for goal-setting and annual appraisal conversations
Lack of time prevented me from doing the application sooner. If you’ve been considering applying, but are unsure where to start, speak to someone who can mentor and sponsor you. The first steps are usually the hardest and once you have a good mentor, you go through your career achievements to see how far you’ve come and what else you need to do.
It’s a lot of work. However, the feeling when you’ve finished the application is great, and even more so when you
get confirmation that you’ve been successful. It’s a sense of achievement that will stick with me forever.
As you need two people to sponsor your application, I recommend having a ‘lead’ sponsor and agreeing this with your sponsors from the outset. Having sponsors who didn’t know each other and were able to work with me on different elements of my work was beneficial, as they helped me consider all my strengths.
My mock interview was invaluable and gave me the chance to practise my presentation and have my sponsors ask questions about my application. The mock interview felt much scarier than the real thing. They gave me helpful feedback at the end so by the time I got to the actual interview, I felt very prepared. I read through my full application before going into the interview and had a copy of it to hand. There is a long time between submitting your application and the interview – coming back to it when preparing for the interview enabled me to read it with fresh eyes.
I’m proud to be one of the youngest ever CIWEM Fellows and enjoy encouraging, helping and sponsoring others to achieve this accolade.
I am committed to the institution through the voluntary roles I hold including being an East Anglian branch committee member, an FCERM Specialist Panel member, an active mentor, assessor and interviewer, and a Professional Standards Committee member. These roles help me to learn, develop and grow as a professional.
As this year’s junior president, I’m thrilled to be supporting this year’s presidential theme, “connecting a community inclusive and accessible for all”, and representing early career professionals across the WEM sector. o
Want to become a chartered water and environmental manager? Find out more at: ciwem.org/ membership/additional-registrations
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Becky George MCIWEM C.WEM tells
us about a typical day
as an FCERM senior advisor at the Environment Agency
BECKY GEORGE HAS worked for the Environment Agency for 16 years, having started her career in the water sector at Southern Water in 2005.
WHAT DOES A TYPICAL DAY LOOK LIKE?
No day is the same, but typically it involves calls with colleagues across the organisation and external partners, where I provide technical leadership and specialist advice. I review and write briefing material for senior managers and the wider organisation.
“My role gives me a great opportunity to help make places more resilient”
I’m a CIWEM mentor to two graduates on the EA’s Environment and Science Graduate Training Scheme. Plus, I’m busy organising the Women in Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (WiFCERM) awards.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR TEAM
I work in the surface water and water industry team – a small team in the Strategy and National Adaptation Department in the EA’s National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) Directorate.
We lead the EA in three main areas:
● working with the water industry to deliver the FCERM Strategy for England ● leading for FCERM on drainage and wastewater management plans
● showing bolder strategic leadership for surface water flooding through our strategic overview role for all sources of flooding
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR ROLE?
To lead surface water flooding work that shows bold strategic leadership. My job is to provide clarity to our internal teams and external partners on our role and current activities. I work with others to understand the barriers to managing surface water flooding and how we can work together to overcome them.
I’m also taking forward recommendations from CIWEM’s 2023 surface water management review, the National Infrastructure Commission’s 2022 review and the recent Public Accounts Committee hearing on flood resilience.
TELL US ABOUT A RECENT PROJECT
I’m currently managing a project regarding our ambition to show bolder strategic leadership on surface water flooding.
The first workstream oversees a programme of shorter-term improvement activities the EA is delivering over the
next year, in addition to what we’ve already committed to in the National FCERM Strategy Roadmap to 2026. The other workstream involves working with others to identify and shape a programme of activities we could explore further and deliver over the longer term, taken across the whole risk management cycle.
The objective of this project is to further enable and support others to manage the risk of surface water flooding.
WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT YOUR ROLE?
The risk of surface water flooding is increasing with population growth and climate change. My role gives me a great opportunity to work with others to make a real difference in helping make places more resilient.
I get to work with a wide range of people from multiple organisations and backgrounds. This includes experts both across the EA – in our national and local area operational teams – and externally, such as risk management authorities, CIWEM, consultancies and Defra.
I enjoy the opportunities I have outside my day job, especially being part of the WiFCERM committee, leading their awards and mentoring young professionals.
WHAT CHALLENGES DO YOU FACE?
One of the main challenges affecting my work is the wider issue of skills and capability across the FCERM sector – it’s affecting the whole industry.
WHAT SKILLS DO YOU NEED FOR YOUR ROLE?
The ability to be agile and adaptable in an evolving work area is key, as is being a good communicator and collaborator in working with a broad range of people and organisations. Being able to see the bigger picture and remain strategic while working at pace is also important.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO SOMEONE WANTING TO DO YOUR ROLE?
Build and maintain your network – having a wide range of people you can call on for advice and who can identify opportunities which you might not have found or
CIWEM president Bushra Hussain on succeeding in a male-dominated field over 25 years as a civil and environmental engineer in Dubai
TIME FLIES WHEN you’re having fun! I can hardly believe that it has been over 25 years since moving to Dubai and starting my career as a civil and environmental engineer. But on the other hand, it does feel like a lifetime ago when I started out as a graduate with Hyder Consulting’s Dubai office back in 1998.
Things were different back then. For a start we only had one computer in our department, which the engineers all shared. We did not have email addresses and still corresponded through traditional methods like faxes and letters. We prepared calculations by hand and did not heavily rely upon software for analysis. Mobile phones were uncommon (I didn’t have one for another three years). But despite all of these limitations we still managed to get our work done.
“Each new encounter prompts selfreflection: do I fit in with people’s expectations or are they expecting someone who more closely resembles the ‘typical’ engineer?”
If, today, we were asked to operate without computers, email and mobile phones it would be considered little short of a catastrophe. The fact that only 25 years ago we were able to operate successful
organisations and deliver complex projects with little or no access to these tools may be a sign that perhaps they’re not as critical to our existence as we have led ourselves to believe. Food for thought…
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
You’re probably wondering about another element of working life in the Middle East. As a female engineer in a male-dominated profession, I have grown used to being in the minority. Adding my ethnicity into the mix brings additional challenges.
Each new encounter prompts self-reflection: do I fit in with people’s expectations or are they expecting someone who more closely resembles the ‘typical’ engineer? Questioning how I’m perceived when I walk into a meeting room for the first time is an issue I am still challenged with and will probably be challenged with for the remainder of my career. Alas, I know the feeling of imposter syndrome only too well. Thankfully, a sound understanding of the project needs, good communication skills and successful delivery is the key to winning over most personal prejudices.
But being different can also be an icebreaker. When I meet someone new it is often assumed from my name and appearance that I must be fluent in Arabic. I speak no Arabic sadly, and this prompts questions around where I come from, my
English accent and so on. So not fitting the mould is not always a bad thing. It triggers people’s curiosity and gets the conversation flowing in a more informal way than it might have if a more ‘fit-the-mould’ type had entered the room.
Being a minority also brings about opportunities to be ‘the first’. I am the first female Fellow of CIWEM in the UAE and the only female Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers based here.
This gives me mixed feelings. I’m glad to have attained these positions, of course, but it also draws attention to the extent to which women remain a minority in the construction sector. There is a long road ahead to getting a more balanced set of statistics – engineering remains one of the most male-dominated professions in the world.
Figures also show that female engineering graduates often choose to pursue other careers due to the masculine culture within this field. This is a sad fact, as any industry that is dominated by one group will lack the multi-dimensional thought process that a diverse group brings.
So to all budding female engineers out there, I have a message for you: I have managed to make an exciting and meaningful career out of engineering. I have successfully seen multiple projects to conclusion despite the challenges faced as a ‘ethnic female’. I am a fellow of two chartered institutions and am so proud to be CIWEM’s 37th President and 4th female President.
Having to go to site in all weathers is definitely a drawback to the job – I have experienced heat stroke more than once from being at site during the summer season. But the sense of achievement I get from seeing my projects built and watching people enjoying the facilities –well, nothing beats that feeling.
To all the women out there who are embarking on a career in a maledominated field – keep going against the grain, as the rewards far outweigh the prejudices. Don’t let anyone discourage you from making your mark. o
From major strategic projects to smaller scale local schemes requiring specialist support. Visit us on stand C18 at Flood & Coast.