IES webinar - Desert cities, wild green fields: Systems of systems approaches for urban water management and rural land-use transformation
How do we use water more efficiently in our cities and also turn them green with nature-based urban systems? How do we change how we farm and manage the land around our cities to provide the food we need but also provide the ecosystem services we need, help to absorb the carbon we have burnt, provide us with clean water and not flood us when the storms come?
Hard urban landscapes are softening with green infrastructure. Sub-urban development needs to integrate into the rural life and livelihoods around us. How do we plan integrated systems of systems from water resources to urban supply, distribution, collection, wastewater treatment, as well as recycle,/reuse/recover water, energy and nutrients used in these systems? How should multiple stakeholders work together to invest in and operate infrastructure and ways of managing the land to provide multiple benefits, understanding their roles and managing contractual relationships for cooperation?
This webinar will explore these questions and consider what kind of digital twin systems will be required to operate cities as part of a natural and human ecosystem.
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 FrameworkTM.
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.
