Posted on 20/11/17 by Kristen Guida
News and Events
The future of London’s wastewater London’s wastewater services face 21st century challenges, including rapid population growth, changing weather patterns, ageing infrastructure, and tightening environmental standards. Thames Water sets out its approach to managing these pressures, and embracing opportunities for innovation, in its London 2100 document. Through an adaptive pathways framework, Thames Water will set out a range of potential solutions, in line with industry guidance. Stakeholder views are welcome. For a copy of the document, get in touch with Kristen or Keith Colquhoun.
London First and Thames Estuary Partnership water security briefing London is expected to require an extra 200 million litres per day of potable water by 2025. This will need to come from a variety of resources, as well as from savings or reuse. Furthermore, to meet the most severe droughts, longer drought permits and severe water restrictions may be required. A six-month drought order could cost businesses between £750 million and £1.7 billion. This means that water security is a priority issue that must be tackled if London is to be secure for the future. The briefing, chaired by LCCP’s Chris Rapley, looked at the challenges and what businesses can do in resilience planning. Speakers included Alex Nickson from Thames Water about planning to meet future water demand, and Christine Cambrook of BuroHappold.
UKCIP18 briefing On September 22, LCCP hosted about 40 stakeholders for a briefing on the next set of UK climate projections. Jason Lowe and Fai Fung from the Met Office presented about the features of the new projections, how they differ from the UKCP09 suite, and the potential uses of the projections in local decision-making. Discussion focused largely on the need to work with priority sectors and stakeholders to improve capacity to use the projections. Presentations will be available on the LCCP website.
State of the UK Climate 2016 The Met Office published its report in August. Major findings include:
UK Natural Capital Stress Test On September 25, WWF published this report, which uses new flood and water scarcity risk mapping to determine the costs of inaction to the UK economy to 2050 if no action is taken to curb or adapt to environmental changes.
Forward Look
October
17: The Grenfell Tower fire: Implications for business. Chaired by Steve Hamm of London Resilience. Find out more.
30: Resilient Housing Conference 2017. The Concrete Centre will host this free event at the Building Centre, London. The focus will be on enabling the design of long-lasting, high-performance homes.
November
16: Following the publication of the RHS’s excellent Gardening in a Changing Climate, LCCP will convene partners to explore how this work might be turned into an online tool to help Londoners with gardens and allotments identify suitable plants that would be robust in a changing climate and possibly help improve climate resilience. Speak with Kristen for further information.
20-22: International workshop on data science for high-impact weather and flood prediction. University of Reading, Henley Greenlands campus. The workshop is being sponsored by the EPSRC funded project DARE (Data Assimilation for the REsilient City), based at the University of Reading, and being carried out in collaboration with the University of Leeds, University of Bremen, Aston University, UK Met Office, Environment Agency, JBA, CH2M, Institute for Environmental Analytics and London Climate Change Partnership. (http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/dare/)
December
6: URBANFLUXES demonstration meetings: The team, which has been producing tools to tackle urban heat, will hold two discussions: one for scientists on obtaining anthropogenic heat maps in cities (am), and one for decision-makers about how to reduce urban heat problems and energy losses (pm). Register here.