The water industry needs to develop “a common agenda that the regulators, water companies and the supply chain can get behind”.

That is the view of Dr Mark Fletcher, leader of Arup’s global water business, who shared his thoughts with British Water chief executive Lila Thompson in the trade association’s first Talking on Water video interview of 2022.

Leading by example, he shares learnings from Arup’s experiences delivering blue-green infrastructure around the world and says adopting a ‘sponge city’ approach in Shanghai delivered a US$multi-billion cost-saving over traditional grey infrastructure.

In an interesting and wide-ranging interview with Leilah Thompson, topics covered include Arup's use of blue-green infrastructure to dramatically reduce the amount of grey infrastructure. What was notionally a 40 billion dollar grey infrastructure solution for Shanghai in China is now less than 30 million dollars of blue-green infrastructure and Nature Based Solutions. 

Arup went from China to Mansfield in Yorkshire and applied the thinking in a UK context, taking the same ideas to Mansfield and working with Severn Trent where the water company wanted to get justification for additional investment around Nature Based Solutions, green engineering and blue-green infrastructure.

In a few weeks Arup did work which justified over £80 million pounds of investment. 

Fletcher’s vision for future resilience in cities means “coming up with a nature-positive answer” and implementing hybrid solutions at scale.

He also outlined his views on post-Brexit opportunities for the UK water sector,commenting:

“There’s a real opportunity for our government to get more of the supply chain involved to collectively connect globally.”

Click here to listen to British Water's first Talking Water video of 2022 via the WaterBriefing Watch channel.