Community Water Management for a Liveable London 

To understand public perceptions of water management in London and England.

Introducing a water quality model with a user-friendly interface that local stewardship groups can use to consider local interventions and explain water quality challenges to the wider community.

The WDE is an online portal for centralised spatial information about the water environment. It aims to empower communities to create and understand water quality data in order to influence decision-making and improve their local environment. The WDE also aims to improve the transparency of and accessibility to water management data held by institutions such as water utilities and environmental agencies to improve efficiency and stakeholder collaboration.

The project aims to incorporate water science in London’s secondary school classrooms. We are working together with Thames21 and London’s teachers to co-design online learning tools to help with teaching students about water resources, water infrastructure, and the problems we will be facing in the future to maintain both.

Our work is helping improve understand on the role urban natural capital, including wetlands, parks and our many green spaces, plays in our society. This involves linking stakeholder knowledge with system dynamics modelling, building evidence which will allow our natural capital assets to be better designed, maintained and utilised, strengthening our resilience to adverse impacts of change.

Our low-cost, modular, Wi-Fi connected smart water tank acts as a buffer between water that hits a building’s roof and the sewage system. Models currently in development will allow the tank’s technology to predict heavy rainfall, remotely triggering its drainage and then using it as storage, thus also reducing domestic water consumption.

Using a System Dynamics approach, the project aims to identify and bring together stakeholders’ perspectives on issues affecting the area in development, and to model and analyse systemic interventions which would address those problems and lead to effective sustainable design.

We are modelling the wastewater, water supply and rivers of London at a citywide scale to demonstrate integrated water infrastructure planning. This will support Thames Water and the UK water industry by providing a blueprint for how infrastructure solutions can be made efficient through integrated planning and thus realising a future where the environment is placed central to water management.

The project established what local environmental stewardship groups view as the most important water management issues in their area.

Supporting Haringey Rivers Forum to engage local stakeholders in projects to restore lost rivers, including Moselle Brook and Stonebridge Brook, to identify funding opportunities for future river restoration projects, and to assist citizen science water quality monitoring programmes.

Supporting the WCGN’s ‘sustainable watering project’ by reviewing existing evidence and producing guidance for retrofitting water infrastructure to new and existing gardens and by developing a water impacts calculator for community garden planning and funding.

Residents from the Kipling Estate, Southwark, worked with CAMELLIA researchers to co-design a garden that met their needs, fulfilled sustainability targets, and delivered additional benefits for local water management. The project also delivered a garden water calculator for the roof which was used to calculate the water requirements and layout of the garden.