Water Briefing: ‘Transforming the way we assess and manage our water resources isn’t just an Ofwat requirement; it’s our obligation to future generations, say the scientists behind a revolutionary new bottom-up approach based on systems thinking.

Dr Peter Coombes of Urban Water Cycle Solutions and Dr Michael Barry from BMT warn that, by continuing to use conventional top-down assessment techniques based on averages, we risk getting things dangerously wrong and not understanding why.

Dr Peter Coombes and Dr Michael Barry: Scientific breakthroughs, which apply bottom-up systems thinking to the assessment and management of water resources, reveal the potential scale of miscalculation – and missed opportunities – occurring with traditional methods.

Although it has been the standard approach to water resource management for decades, top-down thinking based on averages is not fit for purpose in the face of rapidly ageing infrastructure, population growth, climate change, and increasing urbanisation, and it severely compromises our ability to understand, manage, and deliver essential water services.

Simply put, applying averages makes no conceptual sense – is there such a thing as an average household with 2.3 occupants, and a corresponding average water demand that is isolated from an urban system? If not, then how could we expect that using such an unreal thing in water resource analysis would produce real outcomes that can be relied upon?

Water regulators and suppliers must change their mind-sets now if they are to future-proof our natural resources for generations to come. In order to properly understand water resources and economic policy opportunities, they must reject traditional average-based engineering and economic assumptions in favour of holistic bottom-up analyses of the complex and competing demands of real urban and environmental systems. These approaches must be incorporated into the real feed-back loops in society and ecosystems.

The Systems Framework enables this approach. A world first, it has been supported by increases in computing power and advanced algorithms and is already delivering more than 120 sustainable projects across the world and underpinned government policy discussions. It is the key to delivering reliable, robust, and cost-effective water sustainability, and to meeting Ofwat’s demand for resilience-in-the-round business planning.’ Click here to read more