During summer 2024, the Open Innovation Team worked with a water management research group at Brunel University to identify key research findings of importance to national policy makers. This culminated in very well-received presentations to senior policy officials.
Dr Thomas Miller presented on Monitoring Chemical Pollution Across UK Waters. He showed that monitoring across the UK reveals significant and widespread chemical contamination of water from both legacy and emerging contaminants. As an independent state, UK has opportunity to smarten our water quality and biodiversity monitoring and assessment. Thomas proposed that we should increase monitoring and expand targets for monitoring, increase understanding of biological effects in rivers, and develop and invest in new tools and tech for ecological assessments. He also highlighted a skills training in this area to be future proofed. This was attended by 11 representatives from DEFRA and Natural England.
Prof Trevor Hoey presented on Do we still need to make space for water? Assessing opportunities and impacts of natural flood management. He Proposed natural flood management as better than engineered solutions such as confining rivers, such as using flood plains and future proofing against expected increase in flooding events across the UK. We had 10 attendees from DEFRA, across 4 teams, including policy advisors, analysts and a head of research, and 1 attendee from the Environment Agency, with others seeking to access the recording afterwards.