The real reason for our climate crisis is not fossil fuels or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions …. they are just symptoms of our addiction to using combustion chambers that power our industrial society. Each of us own combustion systems and value the services of heat, power and mobility that they provide. Our wanting of those services gives value to fossil fuels and results in GHG emissions, air pollution and relentless consumption of resources, both natural and human. Fortunately, there are lots of alternatives available right now for each combustion system, that provide the same services but without all the damage and suffering. The Combustion Transition Framework sets out an approach with metrics for analysing, policies for planning and tools for accelerating the transformation of our infrastructure, to build a stronger economy with a healthy environment. A sustainable net-zero society, will be a post combustion society.

Our speaker

Simon Spooner is an environmental scientist working for Atkins consultants in the UK. He specialises in developing and applying mathematical models combined with social, political and regulatory methods to plan and design better infrastructure systems and improved environmental conditions. 

Currently his main activities are: 

• applying his SimBasinQ river basin water quality model to address the impact of urban wastewater overflows on our rivers; 
• developing nature based catchment solutions to flooding, water quality, water resources, biodiversity and carbon sequestration;
• applying innovative strategies for planning the transition to net-zero based on his Combustion Transition Framework^TM.

Over the last 30 years as a consultant with Atkins, and before that Mott MacDonald, he spent a lot of time working overseas, mostly in China, on major World Bank, EU and UK government projects in urban environment development, energy systems and environmental policy. He was Technical Director for water and environment for Atkins in China delivering urban planning projects. More recently he worked in partnership with KPMG for the UK FCDO in China on the development of environmental governance processes and access to international financing for infrastructure projects under China’s Belt and Road programme. In the UK he has mostly worked for water companies in wastewater and river basin management and in water industry regulatory processes, including secondments to Ofwat and recently as senior expert advisor on the UK Health Security Agency programme to develop wastewater based epidemiology responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

He is an author of reference books on water and environmental regulation in English and Chinese, an Honorary Professor at Nottingham University and Advisory Board Member for UK and EU research projects and a reviewer for the IPCC Sixth assessment Report.