WET News

c l i m a te c h a nge a n d g ro w t h factors. "In our 'Resilience in the Round' report that we put forward before PR19 to help companies understand how we're thinking about this, we said very clearly that the environment is not just a set of tick-boxes and legal obliga- tions which companies need to fulfil – the natural environment fundamentally underpins the ability to deliver clean and waste- water services, because if the flows in the rivers change and the dilu- tion coefficients change or there's more extreme events, the way we work with the environment will be key, and we can't just build our way out of this." Bishop expects companies to pay more attention to nature- based solutions in the coming THE VERDICT "We're not expecting the water companies to replicate Water Resource Management Plans for wastewater. They are different, and we need to take account of those differences, but as a base model there's a very good link between the two." Trevor Bishop, Ofwat decade, with sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) among the initia- tives continuing to be develop. "We're starting to see a critical shift towards softer/greener infra- structure solutions," he says. "We've seen an uptake of SuDS, and of course there's a long way to go there, but also there's also a wide range of other solution types such as upstream catchment man- agement for attenuation of flows, which is all really important and e x c i t i n g f r o m a r e s i l i e n c e perspective. "Nature-based solutions won't resolve all the issues that we face in the sector and we will still need traditional infrastructure-type solutions, but absolutely I think a better balance between soft/green and hard infrastructure is what we're going to see over the next wwtonline.co.uk | DECEMBER 2018 WET NEWS 13 Ofwat wants to ensure companies pay full attention to wastewater resilience five to 10 years, with more innova- t i o n o n b o t h s i d e s o f t h e equation." Perhaps the most important issue in wastewater resilience is the requirement for more joined- up thinking, with water compa- nies having to take into account the many activities and issues that interface with the functioning of t h e i r s e we r age sys te m s a n d processes. "In the work of the 21st Century Drainage Board it is great to see the proactive approach to partner- ship working and the recognition that wastewater and drainage are intrinsically linked to other sys- tems," he says. "There's very strong links between the roles of water companies and those of other organisations such as high- way agencies, drainage boards related to surface water flooding and the Environment Agency on fluvial flooding, and the activities of water companies on ingress into their systems and the way that all interacts. "There's a real mix of respon- sibilities and accountabilities, and that's where resilience comes into its own because resilience is all about planning in combination, understanding the interdepend- ability between different systems and making sure they're taken it into account in an appropriate way. "It could be too easy for a water company to invest in their waste- water network in isolation but not to take account of the investment or changes that are taking place within the catchment for drainage or that might affect surface water run-off. Such an approach could lead to investment decisions which might not be best value for customers in the long term, so understanding the whole system, the whole catchment approach, is really important." For the water companies and their supply chain partners, deliv- ering wastewater resilience is a complicated issue and one that will require a range of solutions. An understanding of the full picture is vital, and Bishop high- lights the growing value of data, saying technology will likely "revolutionise" the understanding of how complex networks function and interact together. "In the past, many of our asset health metrics have been perfor- mance-based, which tends to look backward," he says. "What we are starting to see both in the UK and internationally is that technology- based innovation is starting to provide new opportunities for forward-looking condition-based assessments which have clear potential for better planning and focused long term investment. "Beyond that, there's the way we operate our systems and how they interact. The improvements we are seeing with remote moni- toring, with the use of big data, possibly machine learning/AI and even things like blockchain in the future, these all have opportuni- ties with regard to the way we look after these things and make them much more optimal and much more efficient into the future and thereby more resilient." While Bishop also welcomes the fact we have "access to some of the best climate science in the world", there is a recognition that, on some level, resilience means a need to expect the unexpected. "We can't pretend there isn't very significant uncertainty on the implications of those climate pre- dictions on the natural environ- ment and the services to custom- ers, and there's every opportunity for unseen consequences on the changes to those systems on both the clean and wastewater side," he says. "Resilience, rather than plan- ning for a very deterministic, single-scenario outcome, enables companies to plan for a whole dif- ferent range of assumptions and to choose options that genuinely r e p r e s e n t b e s t v a l u e i n t h e long-term. "It is about best value, not nec- essarily least cost, and making sure we invest ahead of the prob- lems not in response to them." l Trevor Bishop will be speak- ing at the seventh annual WWT Wastewater Conference & Exhi- bition on 29 January 2019 in Birmingham. For more informa- tion, visit: event.wwtonline. co.uk/wastewater

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