46. 17-03-21 TWENTY65 Conference

This week I attended the TWENTY65 Conference on the future of the water industry and on Wednesday gave a presentation on the Water Conservators input into the City of London’s Climate Action Strategy. The presentation highlights how the water industry has a significant part to play in achieving the City and UK’s target of Net Zero by 2040.

The TWENTY65 group is made up of a consortium of UK universities, funded initially by the EPSRC, that will develop social and technological solutions tailored to specific challenges at niche locations within the water cycle. The TWENTY65 team aim to bridge the innovation gap between cutting-edge academic research and the wider water industry by bringing the industry together to think about water in entirely new ways.

The TWENTY65 Conference was attended by a wide mix of water professionals and academics including Joby Boxall, Professor of Water Engineering at Sheffield University, Tony Harrington, Director of Environment at Welsh Water and Nicole Ballantyne, from KTN, who is a judge for the Ofwat Innovation Fund. The conference opened with keynote speeches from Baroness McIntosh from the All Party Parliamentary Water Group, and John Russell from Ofwat. There were participants both from the UK and overseas.

Highlight of the week for me was attending my first virtual exhibition, which was a part of the conference. The software enabled you to walk around a virtual exhibition hall and visit various stands. You could click on a stand to view material such as videos and web links by the exhibitor and stop and talk to the exhibitors. Water Conservators had a stand and I had some really interesting and useful conversations, including with a student at Newcastle University researching water quality in service reservoirs and an academic from Australia looking at Sustainable Urban Drainage schemes for cities. I can see the virtual exhibition is going to play a key role in the future, and communication on innovation will be truly global, thus reducing the amount of air travel and hotel bills.