It was a great pleasure to host the 11th in our series of Water Conservators webinars titled “A Roadmap for the Future of Water Innovation”. Professors Joby Boxall and Vanessa Speight of the University of Sheffield gave us a fascinating insight into a vision and roadmap for the water sector that they have developed as leaders of TWENTY65, the UKRI / EPSRC water grand challenge consortium, involving 6 universities and over 250 partners that has been envisioning and undertaking disruptive research to enable adaptable, resilient and sustainable water futures.
They began the presentation by outlining the core concept of collaboration between Water Service Providers, Academia, Supply Chain and other Stakeholders on the basis that there was no one “silver bullet” that would fit all solutions. The key questions they set out to answer were how can water services provide a positive benefit to the environment, economy, society, what socio technical solutions would work best, in which combinations, in different locations, and how to address ageing water infrastructure in the journey to becoming sustainable, adaptable and resilient?
Having set out the key future drivers for the water sector and performance metrics, they then tested the performance of solutions under different drivers to assess the performance of solutions. The largest differentiator between future scenarios was the extent of decentralisation, so priority technologies were considered under both centralised and decentralised futures. They then gave us examples of both scenarios and considered the possibilities of combining these futures. The key message was that possible futures will be different, designed to match to local context and situation.
Joby and Vanessa’s presentation was then followed by an excellent question and answer session where some of the key challenges for the UK water sector were discussed. On behalf of everyone I would again like to thank Joby and Vanessa for a brilliant presentation, and also give my thanks to everyone who attended making the webinar a great success.
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