Cranfield University has embarked on a major research project, funded by the Water Research Foundation (WRF), focused on the implementation of risk management practice in international water utilities.

The $300,000 project, Real-life enterprise resilience, aims to develop a toolkit of resources including an interactive i-book, based on world-leading academic research, for practical use by utility managers in the field.

The City of Calgary in Canada’s  water and wastewater utility is among a number of public utilities supporting the project looking to secure water services for their citizens in the future.

 Rob Pritchard, General Manager, Utilities & Environmental Protection for the City of Calgary, said:

“Utility companies rely on the WRF and others to translate academic concepts into usable tools in practical formats. While there is a plethora of resilience programs and projects, even at the international level, there is no practice-led resource for water utility managers that supports a response to regulatory calls for improved resiliency. This project will address that need, and Calgary citizens will benefit as a result.”

Other project partners who have provided funding include Seattle Public Utilities (US), Water Corporation (Australia), EPCOR (Canada), EPAL (Portugal) and SA Water (Australia). Scottish Water, UKWIR Limited, Yorkshire Water, Northern Ireland Water and Thames Water are UK project partners.

The project strengthens Cranfield’s position with the influential Water Research Foundation, a leading organisation in the US that aims to advance the science of water to protect public health and the environment.

A number of water utility co-funders helped to match the WRF funding for the research through a tailored collaboration programme.

Cranfield has collaborated with the WRF for the last ten years on a number of projects . The new initiative will further enhance Cranfield’s reputation as a leading voice on risk governance and enterprise resiliency in the international water sector. 

The resources developed by the project will enable the management of extrinsic threats and systemic risk, support the development of proactive adaptation strategies, while creating long-term strategic value with stakeholders.

Dr Simon Jude, Cranfield Institute for Resilient Futures and principal investigator, said:

“The desire for resilient water utilities has become an international keystone of utility governance. This project aims to close the gap between regulatory calls for greater resilience, academic thinking and practical application. This is applicable, hard science for the workers in the field and executives in the board room, with the purpose of delivering a more sustainable, resilient water supply for future generations. “

“This is the latest in a series of projects that have been developed from the technical to the managerial level and from an internal to external focus. Our work, supported by the Cranfield Water Science Institute, has looked at risk analysis tools, through to risk management culture, risk in the board, integrated risk, and now is looking at real-life enterprise resilience and practical application.”

Cranfield’s work will support the recent call from the Effective Utility Management Steering Group – a consortium of leading US bodies with strategic interests in utility governance – who have called for “enterprise resiliency”; a utility-wide, strategic approach to organisational resilience.

The Water Research Foundation is a non-profit research cooperative which has funded and managed more than 1,500 research studies from asset management to treatment, utility finance to resource management, conveyance systems to water quality.

Cranfield Water, part of the exclusively postgraduate university, has over 40 years’ experience in the sector and strategic partnerships with the Department for the Environment, Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent Water and Anglian Water.

Facilities at Cranfield include a pilot-plant hall at the University’s own sewage treatment works, state-of-the-art soil and water laboratories, a grey water treatment pilot area, a managed borehole drilling site and soil and irrigation testing facilities.

Cranfield is also home to the National Reference Centre for Soils, which houses the largest collection of its kind in Europe and is recognised as the UK’s definitive source of national soils information, and a big data visualisation suite, which has tools to analyse big data collections including environmental resources from 280 countries/territories worldwide.