In this free, online presentation, Dr Jonathan Fisher will explore the impacts of integrated water management on the following main drivers of economic growth:

• Enhancing Capital Assets and infrastructure including environmental infrastructure (water and flood risk management) on which he provides supporting evidence.
• Reducing burdens on business. He demonstrates that sound and well-resourced integrated water management (and in particular the Water Framework Directive regulations) are well in line with the Department for Business and Trade’s proposed seven behaviours of smarter regulation.

He concludes with an overall assessment that recommends key requirements to enhance the impacts of integrated water management on sustainable economic growth. This aims to input supporting evidence on this for the forthcoming spending review.

Speakers

Dr Jonathan Fisher

Dr Jonathan Fisher is a freelance environmental economist with more than 45 years' experience of delivering practical applied economic analyses of environmental matters, including 24 years on water and flood risk management. He has sound understanding on these matters based on experience of the practical application of economic appraisal  processes to determine improvements efficiently and within constraints. 

Up until 2014, he was economics manager at the Environment Agency where he was responsible for economic analysis and advice on water and flood risk management in England. In this, he provided economic analyses for a Long Term Investment Strategy that set out the risks of flooding in England from 2010 up to 2035 in the face of climate change. Given the resulting large expenditures needed that could not be funded centrally, he helped Defra (Environment Ministry) develop new Partnership policies for funding flood risk management with contributory payments by beneficiaries. Before then, he was the Department of the Environment's economic adviser on climate change and participated in the early work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. After that he was an economic adviser at the UK Treasury. Prior to that he worked as an economist in the Environment Directorate of the OECD. He has a PhD in environmental economics and a degree in economics and accounting.