 It seemed like the first thing I did. A lot of people were enjoying me this evening on quite a while, but it's been really nice. I should perhaps explain. Region College is 1597 by the way and it's a great late in the 16th century. It is an interesting institution. it's Christopher Ren and Robert Cook were both a question from professors. I'm very privileged to be a first professor of environment. She's only the second new professorship in 400 more years. Mae'n amgylch yn ôl i'r byd. Rydyn ni'n ddweud o'r ysgrifennid o gychwyn ffyrdd. Mae'n cyngor i'r chwarae gyda Llywodraeth Cymru, a'r cyngor i'r byd yn ysgrifennid o'r cyfrifennid o'r byd. Mae'n ysgrifennid o'r cyfrifennid o'r byd yn ysgrifennid o'r byd. Mae ysgrifennid o'r byd yn gweithio. Mae'n ffyrdd o'r cyfrifennid o'r cyfrifennid o'r byd, mae'n gweithio fryd yn gwislio'n gweithio. Mae f拍 adeg. Mae oedd ychwaneg. A adeg, darlyw i, mae hynny ychwaneg sydd o'r plant yn credu ei gwaith. Felly! A ddod i'n gweithio i hi'r ffordd. Rwy'n meddwl gweithio i'r ffordd a'r ymddangos, yma ychydig ff乎 miau ei ffordd? I gyd o'r crim ar ffordd y Lleith yn fawr. Yn rhaid yna mae hynny'n ddyn nhw. Ond oes hynny'n mynd i y多id hynny, mae hwn yn y wneud. Mae'n golygu o'n dod wedi bod yn cyllid hyn o'r dreuniaeth mewn duol i'w gwelaf i ddweud o'r dweud, ac mae'n dweud i ddweud am y ddweud i ddweud o'r dreuniaeth e'ch gwybod. Dwi'n cael ei wneud o rênyddu ddweud, yma'n rhoi ddweud o garlicai rhagor! Mae rydw i ddim yn sgol yn ffordd ar yibaeth? Rydw i, na chi'n gwneud bod eich bodai rydw i'r ddweud Ditodd. Rydw i'n meddoedd yr Ysgol yn Ysgol? Efallai nesaf. Rydw i, nesaf. Rydw i wedi eu blodd a'r bwysig. Rydw i ymddangos ymgyrchol yma. Efallai dwi'n meddwl i fathgwr ym ysgol, felly, yn 2007, felly wedi dynnu ymddangos, bydd i'r ysgol yn gwybod a chanol fel ar gyfnodd maen nhw i gynnwys ar y mes y niferu fyfledd 2000 o'r ysgwrdd nes. I wnaeth tynnu'n Cent yn iawn yn nhw i'w gyrdill ac mae'r gwybod, rydyn ni'n gallu pwyg mwynhau mewn gyfer ythydig yw hwnnw, un o'r gweithio gyd yn gynnwys ar gyfer mwyach? Dyny'r gweithio gynnwys ar gyfer aelod o'r cyffredin llywodraeth i ddoe'n eivolt tambiénu i gyd o'r cyffredin llywodraeth i gyd, oherwydd mae'r cofnodd yn gallu'n gwneud y cwmwyntau, ond there were pretty cross around that. But afterwards the county council set up some discussion groups in various villages around in the county for people who had been flooded to come and unload themselves with their county councillor. The event was took place in July and it was at the end of September these things were taking place. Rwy'n rwy'nhaib ystod ychydig, roedd y gallwn y gwybod i'w mwybwy o'r ffordd yr hyffordd drwy'r hyffordd yn gweithio'r hyffordd yma. Roedd unrhyw o'r bwysig, roedd o'r 15 o'r cwmdoedd yn gallu'r casl. Roedd ychydig yn falch beth dyma. Roedd yna'n mynd i'w mwy o'r brosbwy i'r bwysig, roedd o'n fwy o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig. ac mae oedd y masbyt yw'r pryd yn cael ein gŵr yn gyntaf o holl gael ar gyfer y gwirio'r adeiladau. Can you arrange it for us to have a school dinner? I really think that kind of thing makes you aware that managing water is a really important thing, it's a very fundamental part of our society. So, with that in mind let's move on. Many of you have seen these kind of integers before, I think I really use wood. Mae hynny'n gwybod. Mae'r ystod. Mae yw yw'r ystod o wath erbyn yn unwyr, mae'r ystod yn ateb o gweithwyr ar y busau. Mae'r ystod o'r ystod, felly mae'r ystod y trafnod o'r change o'r hollod o'r tyfu, yn y 19rwy, oedd o'r bwysig, o'r ystod o'r bethau o'r mewn gwirionedd. Mae'r ystod o'r cyffredin, oedd wedi bod yn ymweld i'w clywed. Oedd yn ystod o'r 50rwydd. Ac mae'n gwybod cael ei wneud ei wneud, y celfwyr yma yw'r 1.5 gradd ar gyfer yr oed yma, sy'n gyllid oedd maen nhw i'w Llyfrgell i gael yma yn ysgrifennu. Ond mae'r celfwyr wedi gael gyffredinol sy'n cyfle i'r fforddau ymryd. Mae'r ffordd mae'n gweithio i gael yma yn y celfwyr yn gwneud, ac mae'n gweithio i gael i'w gwneud. One of them will be water stress. You may think here in Scotland, certainly tonight, that you're not at an environment under water stress. This is forecast water stress by 2040 and it includes things like climate change, population growth and so on. You can see here that England and Wales are bundled in together, which may upset some of you, I'm sure. But you can see we are medium to high risk because the ratio of withdrawals to the supply of available water is actually not very high. And, of course, large areas of the rest of the world are in extreme stress, including, of course, much of the United States, lots of Asia, Central Asia, North Africa, North Korea, Australia and parts of South America and South Africa. So lots of stress is there and partly driven by climate change, partly driven by population growth. Again, here we've got another indication of something that's related to the water environment that's likely to be driven by climate change. If you watch it, it's a series of observations taken from space by NASA showing the North Pole ice caps. If you just keep your eye on this area here, this is the Northwest Passage. And you can see why cruise ships are now starting to offer interesting destinations coming through into the Northwest Passage, which earlier they would not have been able to reach. So we've got this series of sort of seasonal changes, but generally a reduction, a diminution, sometimes subtly, in the amount of floating sea ice in the Arctic. That's, of course, the indication of that. I think the indication of that is quite clear, again, in the matter of the water environment. There are other types of flooding. This will give you a certain amount of satisfaction, actually, because it's Florida. And you can see here that there's a couple of Democratic and Republican voting that got President Trump into office. And you can see here the simulation of what might be the situation with six metres of sea level running. She loses quite a lot of these constituents. I'll make them a further comment. OK. So, these kind of environmental implications are one of a number of suite of environmental changes, which I have put up here, a diagram produced by the Stockholm Environment Institute, a very well-respected institution, but the research was done in 2015. What the diagram shows is a range of environmental characteristics around the side here, and the portions of the pie here show you how serious in 2015 they thought the issue was. So, for example, if you look at something like nitrogen, biochemical flows of nitrogen, there was thought in 2015 to be an extreme problem arising from that. There's also a problem arising in terms of genetic diversity and in changes in land use. I find this diagram quite interesting. Despite the fact that there are a few things here which I felt we didn't know about, and certainly atmospheric aerosol loading is something that's evolution with particulates. It's something that's reached the headlines recently as a very serious matter. If you look at the climate change, it was thought to be not that serious and fresh water use not a problem at all. Now, I would disagree with this as an analysis, actually. I think it's probably, an analysis would be different if it were done today, three years later. And I think we have far more to do about those two areas in particular, but we should note that water is part of a much wider set of environmental challenges that we are looking at. Now, where do these challenges come from? Well, there are a number of things on the diagram here that are affecting the way we manage the water environment, having the other kinds of environmental parameters as well. The ones I picked out in particular around here, we've got, referring perhaps particularly to Great Britain here as it would be the case in many developed countries, we have population growth, obviously that's an international challenge, we've been dying billion hours soon. In Britain, certainly, we have an ageing population. We have huge growth in cities, concentrations of people with high demands for water. We have, here we are, this water, other kinds of resources and energy availability. We've got climate change and habitat destruction as an interesting challenge, and we've got in some cases ageing infrastructure, pipes, roads, reservoirs and so on. But we've also got some opportunities here. We've got massively improved global connectivity over the last few years. We can do stuff here electronically in terms of communicating with instruments and with control systems and with each other in a way that we could not have done even five, six years ago. We've got, in addition to that, on the horizon, we've got a range of other technologies, which I'll talk about in a minute. There's a very wide range of other technologies coming through very, very quickly that are potentially providing some solutions to some of the problems of water management. Just pick up this one, this is based on heritage and culture. This is an interesting thing too. Water features, if you like, reservoirs are very much valued by people, but on the other hand, many alterations to the water regime are seen as a threat to heritage. So it's a double-edged sword here in the way we look at the water environment in terms of the value we place on it as a heritage artifact, if you like. We like our natural environment, but we also like water features that are constructed by people. So there are some opportunities there at some challenges. Now, once we've lived through a little digression here, I don't know what happened in Scotland, but in the south of England in London in earlier last year, there was a big mark when you saw this on television or whether there was anything near in Scotland was there. Well, it was quite a big thing in England. It was a part of a worldwide movement of people who were promoting the importance of science and technology, and being able to see them gathering outside the houses of Collins. I just wanted to show you some of the pictures that are relevant to the discussion we're having now. Quite a lot of them were about climate change, the banners that people were carrying. Ice has no agenda, one of them says, and climate change is not a Chinese hoax. People also get very excited about it like this chap here is clearly pretty cross about what is going on here. So this is a big movement and an area of ice cream for actions. So climate change is a real teach science. Ice has no agenda, it just melts. But some of them I like even better. This one, what do we want ever to face science when we want it after a theatre review? Scientists are quite modest about pushing their own agendas. I like that one. Here's another one, science is beautiful, science is useful, science is for everyone, though it needs decolonising. The reservations are a strong message there. How about this one? How many scientists are badass? Whatever that means. And here we are, that's my favourite. So here's one. If you're not part of this, you're simply saying you don't have any chemistry, you don't have any ideas. You can see, actually, she's got some Trump things on the grasp yard here. Alternate facts. The point about this is that science is pretty important in managing water, and perhaps that's not always recognised enough, which I'll return in a minute. I was going to ask you to shout out for me what you think in the water environment has to be managed, floods I'll give you and droughts I'll give you with words. Shout. Water quality. Water quality, yeah. Yes, another dimension of water quality. Access. Access, that's interesting. Access and recreational opportunities, actually. Obviously access to water, to drinking water. Issues about the way water is disputed. There's also access in the sense that water is offering a recreational facility as well. Nothing else. Pollution, ecology, use of energy. Anything else? Possible rationing. Okay, so potential limitations on use will be running out. Anything else? The deterioration in the front. Okay, so the man-made use of water as a decorative feature. Anything else? Distribution itself. Anything else? Mutage, desalination? Anything else? Farming, right? Okay, that. There's a few others on here. Do you pick up some of them? I've not got all of the ones that we spoke about on here. Flooding drought, water supplies we've got there. Water quality, agriculture, fisheries, navigation, hydro power, ecology somebody did mention. There are things here that have to be managed concurrently together. You've got to get them all right in some sort of way. Now, solutions normally involve something called innovation. I'm going to talk about that quite a bit this evening. But it's generally recognised that in order to tackle some of these environmental challenges we need excellent science to talk about and we need some kinds of innovation in order to address the situation that we're in. Which in some cases is getting rather critical as the access to water issue slightly demonstrated. So what is innovation then? Anybody want to have some ideas? What are we thinking about innovation? IT could be. Thinking in new ways, yeah. Commercialisation. Commercialisation. Commercialisation, right. Commercialisation of what? An idea. Any other recycling of wastewater? Okay, that would be an example of innovation, certainly. We aren't doing some of this, but there aren't any ways of thinking about water. You're absolutely right. Surprising new advance. Sorry, say it again. Surprising new advance. Surprising new advance. It's something that happens that we can think about and suddenly bubbles up. I think you're all right. I think the gentleman over there had an interesting point. She's the one I've got in red here. So we know that it's bringing in something for the first time, transforming something, a new product, maybe something different, something not previously imagined as I think somebody in middle there said. But here, we've got to be talking innovation. An idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. It's actually got to be able to be used. It's not just enough to have the idea. You've got to do something with it. I've got the last thing on because I'll come back to this in a minute. Sometimes people think that innovation could be just to do with the way we pay for things. That's an interesting question. It's not usually people might say that's not really innovation but we will come to that. There are social aspects of innovation in a minute. Okay, so in theory that's what innovation is. So here we've got an innovation. A phone traffic. Okay, a lot of companies latest in innovation. Okay, so that's not innovation. But there are companies out here. If any of you have got large songs to invest, you may be aware of Gartner, which is an American punditry company. They advise investors and they do it by spotting the upcoming technologies every year. They've published an analysis on web. You can see if you can find this for free. If you want the details it's more complicated. But they're called Gartner. And this is there in 2016. Now you might have taken on two years out of date. I'll show you 2017 in a minute. But the thing is, you might actually recognise some of the things on here. Like 3D printing, for example. People have come across that. Or advanced machine learning is another thing you may have heard of. But there are things on here that most of us probably have not heard of. If you come to 2017 you'll be even more troubled by what is being shown. Possibly. I mean I don't know what mesh app and service architecture is nor do I know what conversational systems are. I think it might be something to do with social media. But on some of these other things intelligent things, perhaps which I guess what matters is to do with the kind of sensors and information you have attached to individual objects in your house in your pockets, in your phone for example, machinery in a sewage compartment or on a pipeline. So all sorts of data generating things big data that is being attached there. At the moment there's a lot of money going into some sort of blockchain which again somebody might have heard about. It's not just to do with bitcoins which you remember what bitcoins? It's only best. But blockchain is the technology behind that, that links transactions together. It doesn't have to be money it could be water for example. So that's got the innovations. Now the reason for showing you that is I want to also want to read you to this which is what they call the go up the hype cycle for new technologies. Now you can see what we've got here. We've got how visible is a particular technology and on the bottom here is the time. What you say in a new technology is first of all somebody has the idea it's invented. You get this trigger and everybody goes some would be brilliant I want some, give me some of it and so it goes up in visibility to something they call the peeping inflated expectations. She's very quickly followed by the trough of disillusion when you say where. And then you get slowly lighter and finally the plateau of productivity when you know some part of it works partly the way you expect it. Now why this is important is that government actually identify those things which they think are going to be important and then place them on this curve to help their investors. And this tells you whether individual technologies are coming or going in their opinion. So if you look carefully you can see for example that something like the connected home how many of you have got an Alexa in your kitchen and anybody has got an Alexa I've got one in my kitchen and I say what's the weather it says it's raining it's smart but it's actually smarter than that it's smarter than me because I haven't yet quite worked out how to use it. It doesn't yet switch my lights on which my husband does that. But this is the idea that your home can be connected to anything you can control it with your phone you don't get out of bed in the morning you know the curtain switch of eating on you know do the toast, feed the dog whatever it might be but you can see this is the peak of the inflated expectations or it was in 2017 there's about to be a crash and then later on it'll come up here again so if we look at the things on here which are innovations obviously you don't invest down the air if you're smart I don't even know what smart dust is or does but quantum computing you know you'd have to be in it from the long term because you've got to get through that back down there up here before you really make any money out of it that's the point and they put time scales on these things as well so some things take the plateau which is over here the plateau will be reached in less than two years whether it's a grey blob and actually there are no grey blocs I think there at the moment and some of these triangular ones it says here more than 10 years autonomous vehicles I don't think so actually sooner than that that's already elements of my mind now so they're not always right however what we have to think about is what are the implications of some of these innovations for managing water I want you to have that in mind these are by-large technical innovations things to do with gadgetry but lots of them but lots of them are things to do with gadgets so things to do with controlling groups monitoring what's going on collecting data together so we can see how a city water supply is running for example that kind of thing so these are potentially relevant innovative technologies for the water sector now some of these things as we can see on here happen very very quickly I already touched on the Lex service this is a nice diagram introduced by Daimler with Bosch this is an urban future where as it says here the vehicle comes to the driver not the other way round and the autonomous cars on the road by 2020 are already on the road so it's a slightly out of date what I want you to think about is what's the water equivalent of that what kind of changes is a historical question expect an answer now but you have to think about a system where somebody somewhere else puts water in treats and collects water together puts it into a system this is just the drinking water element in your house you drink it and it goes away somewhere else and somebody treats it now it could of course be different ways to do that and in theory those kind of changes might happen quite quickly one of the reasons they might happen quickly is because of these technologies that have developed extremely rapidly so I'm sure you'll know what these things are these are in your car, GPS systems or your phone, satellite imagery the digital cameras we know about all of these other things drones the web, miniature sensors the internet, so the internet of things again you can send things you can monitor what's going on the flow of the quality of water and salt instantly using a tiny sensor and assemble all that data together to help you control the system okay so these aren't enabling technologies and they've become very much cheaper very much better and rather revolutionary just in the last few years in agriculture for example which nobody picked up as a water management issue we've got new technologies people are scanning things with drones now to see whether the crops are thriving whether the water is needed whether the nutrients are needed and so on so that's an example of where developments have happened very quickly in agriculture and it's very cheap it's becoming quite common now now innovation of course covers a range of possibilities but what I've got up here except for the the measuring joke here actually nothing to do with water because they're interesting examples of tiny bits of innovation trivia almost the first one is exactly innovation trivia it's on roads in Australia there was a science man with questions on to stop you from wanting to sleep and actually drive along these very long highways in the Australian deserts as I say it may save your life here's another tiny innovation this is a system I think it's in the States where you can if you're waiting in an airport lounge you can print yourself a story to read what it is so there's the story here's a nice measuring joke innovation it's got the lines of how much you've got in it diagonally so that you don't have to keep tipping it up to check how much you've poured and here's a memory stick with an indication whether it's full or not or how full it is now those are all tiny tiny innovations every tiny thing that might help you along I think the water sector will look into something a bit more fundamental how about this then an off-grid floating home what could possibly go wrong well this is a genuine design I don't think it's ever been built but the point here is that some innovation is rather wacky one needs to think about the cultural aspects or the technological aspects so I guess another picture that was in this series showed a small chip lonely little boy playing with a car in that space at the bottom of the portal but I don't fancy his chances of playing in the garden I don't we've got few flowers though a bird box or maybe it's a male box anyway so maybe that's not what we want more realistically this is an innovative 2015 colourful one-minute drought plan but you can see here this is a reservoir and they decided to try and control the evaporation on the surface of the reservoir they would cover it in plastic balls plastic balls the whole surface so you can see they unloaded literally millions of these things so it flows on the water the evaporation now I don't know whether you think that's a good idea or not I'm a bit worried about plastic in the water I think a lot of us are these days and I also don't think this is really the solution to managing drought but they are doing it it's a real picture oh yes, I'm talking to you to have some presentations I see in front of Christmas Lectures the those boxes dear right ok, now something more stupid you win the prize for a sharp eyesight ok, now I've been talking about different types of innovation some different types of innovation the European Union European water sector published their own analysis of this and they talked about water innovation not only being about new sustainable technologies and I think that the closing home and the plastic balls on the reservoir are neither of those sustainable technologies they also talk about new kinds of partnerships new business models new forms of water governance and novel combinations and innovative ideas for improvements on the current technologies systems, that's the technology bit all have a part to play so there's various kinds of innovation that we're going to need here to tackle some of these water management problems so I think they're right come back to the European Union again in a minute but one of the problems we have is that there are so many stakeholders in the water sector we're all stakeholders we're all customers of water companies we met some of us may work in the industry some of us may be associated with governments and may be academics at least one academic in the room I think lawyers I forgot on the diagram I thought this up really to show you how clever I am mathematically this is a fun, you know the Venn Diagrams there's only over three circles on those Venn Diagrams this is a genuine five five set Venn Diagrams so there are a lot of stakeholders and lots of different stakeholders construction companies lawyers I think we might come into the category of consultants and independent experts you know what the government thinks experts these days of course but there are a large number of stakeholders in Scotland I'm afraid the research I'm going to talk to you about in a minute was done mostly in England but in Scotland we have a set of stakeholders which includes the people there on the right on the side of the screen the Scottish Parliament the Scottish Walls such as a company various regulators quite a number of regulators in fact again I'm not going to go into details of this but there are a very large number of stakeholders the ones there are just the ones we've named but we've got people like older agencies charities for example so you have to start to think about who is century involved now I've put some of them on here so people who are groups who are at the middle of managing the water sector would be the water companies in England and Scotland some also have a responsibility for the sewage dirty water treatment we've got the regulators of what or the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency or the drinking water inspectorate and various others we've got again close to the middle contractors people who build things people who repair pipes people who build tunnels and so on we've got government departments we've got universities, research organisations charities, professional bodies customers us jointly organisations who represent companies and so on we've got a lot of people some more centrally involved than others a couple of years ago, three years ago I did a piece of research about the water sector's views on innovation trying to interview people in all of those different groupings quite a number of interviews and conversations it's actually in practice very difficult to say who is somebody what is somebody representing as I said before people are often involved in one group they have a customer, we're all customers but they also may be a government minister or they work in a water company whatever it might be but I want to show you some of their views on innovation so we've got all these challenges facing the water sector we've got flooding, we've got drought we've got climate change, we've got pollution we've got plastics and so on and I want to show you some of the statements that people made when I was talking to them so when I asked them what innovation was, quite a number of people came up with very abstract ideas so they say things like well it's achieving expectations from water that can meet user and environmental use and environmental cost without costing more a structured response to mitigate risk oh dear sustainability, well yes that's important this is quite interesting, this one most people think it's about incremental change within comfort zones recognising the limits of existing systems so we get improvements in billing systems and reductions in debtor days, that's significant innovations but I said it's not that was actually somebody from charity organisation so you've got some challenges here to what the innovation actually is they do talk about occasionally about concrete ideas and by that I don't really build ideas I mean something rather more tangible and you can see here they're starting to talk about big data which is the internet of things and so on using water smarter more than once which is recycling as somebody mentioned there using new technology like mathematical modelling for example trying to simulate what's going on in a whole city in terms of where's the water coming from going to who's it being used by and so on, this one I like this was an ecologist she said innovation is to do with DNA analysis of the mutes in water the mutes are very important in certain types of the mutes because they hold up housing development great requested mutes housing if you find great requested mutes there and great requested mutes can only be found in person at certain times of the year so this is a real nuisance for housing developers because they have to wait to maybe up to a year because they're going to find out if there are any mutes there so somebody is now going to find new DNA in the water and which you can develop on housing now immediately assuming there are no mutes so those are concrete ideas now what's about this is that innovation covers this vast spectrum of possibilities from things like charging mechanisms and how do you get your bill to be a water would be an innovation according to some people or how do you communicate with people would be another and in the middle here we've got things which are rather techy wastewater treatment recycle network control through the internet of things as we go towards the right hand side of this diagram we've got things that are starting to talk talk about really big changes in the way the water is managed right through and we've got things like integrated management of water, energy and food together which is something I want to come back to in a minute and complete organisational change which would be something like well you know you will just get want to get your own water that would be a complete organisational change or we'll sell it and if you can't pay for it you can't have it that would be a particular challenge in organisational change often when I'm teaching students I'm a graduate so I used to say take that water and replace it by air and think if that's reasonable you can only have the air if you can pay for it and water is also important but we don't say that water we don't say if you can't pay for it you can't have it at least not completely I don't know if any of you have been to Japan but they sell oxygen and machines at the side of the road okay now so this example of trying to manage two things together this is a theoretical one this is in China where they're doing masses of innovation on water actually often led by UK companies for example but this is a vertical forest obviously built around housing it's perhaps a better option than the floating in the water but the point is it's not only the hardware it's the management systems that we use now integrating management and food together all these challenges happening at the same time it's no good managing one part of the water system if something else is adversely effective okay now the point is when you ask people in the water sector if they think there's a problem with innovation however it's defined I said yes no maybe and most people say yes there's a problem but people in large water companies who are managing lots of this system are more likely to say maybe they're not convinced that there is a problem and that's an interesting one a slight digression when I was advising the Plottershire County Council after the flooding in 2007 I interviewed somebody from a relevant water company this is being recorded in England and I interviewed somebody very senior in the company and I said was there a problem in the 2007 event when 240,000 people had lost their water supply and the army had to be brought in and he said no there wasn't a problem and I said well that just might work and he said it didn't touch our bottom line now that's an interesting question of perspective that is what we're saying here is when droughts in that case it was not a drought it was that the pumping station was flooded treatment plant was flooded rather it's business as usual minor tweaks are going to be enough to see it through so let's keep making these minor adjustments and I think we have to think whether that is actually true now those people who said there was a problem they talked about what kind of problem it was and people started to say things like well there are creativity problems you can't think about it in this way people get uncomfortable and of course there are public health risks associated with drinking water and food and so on if you tweak around that so previously untried solutions as somebody said innovation and science have got to be tried they make people uncomfortable so I won't go through all of this because a world leader in a water environment 15 years ago 17, 18 years ago now it's now best fit which is a bit disappointing those people who thought there might not be a problem they said things like this limited innovation isn't a problem because the industry is fit for purpose so it does what it needs to do so let's not change it and some consults and some contractors are innovative some are not so is there a problem maybe now what is the problem I started to ask them what is the actual problem and they said things like water is too cheap UK contractors don't know what they're doing we don't have any way of testing things this isn't an interesting one the interface between hard and soft science oh most of it is going to say interface between hard and soft science is problematic what's happened there sorry about that so there are certain statements there about what the challenges are and here are some more specific ones we've got aging infrastructure our pipes are leaking some of the information that's earlier we've got some centralized networks and treatments we've got areas of the world in adequate sanitation we've got rivers vanishing through over abstraction we've got carbon dioxide issues climate change related things we've got flooding as a serious risk and then where's the problem coming from well quite a lot of people said it's the water company's fault principally and they talked about water companies being risk averse they're not willing to innovate because there's too much best in it you may be aware certainly in England many of the water companies own my pension companies and they don't want big changes they just want a 72% return on their money they don't actually want to see big changes in ownership or technology so making money perhaps they don't share ideas they're not ballistic then there's some things here about universities it's too difficult to talk to universities so we won't get innovation tell people the language is too complicated there were some harsh statements I have to say about universities when I gave this talk about a version that someone else did not go down to the university called London so there are various problems people say that these problems are internal to the water sector again I wouldn't go through all of these the important thing is though so if we just pick up this statement here transnational corporations and many of our water companies not actually Scotland's water company but elsewhere in the UK they only embrace sustainability as long as it doesn't change the overall purpose which is to grow faster and benefit smaller shareholders so there is regulation on how much water companies can pay their shareholders or how much they can charge their customers but it perhaps doesn't truly engage with sustainability and the management of water across the piece now some people blame other people and basically I'm not going to go through all of these but depending on where they are in that five part bend diagram they will blame somebody in another sector so it's never problem is never with them it's with some other part of the system and yes this is the university one there's one thing about universities here they are higher education is not probably managed to be applied to research oh and then here one of the research councils who fund researchers at easy source and then taking money from companies and they don't require you to do very much so you don't apply to work with a company if you're doing research on the water environment and you get the money from a research council you can do something that can try to be a reticle okay and what's the solution well here we are one analysis here by somebody called spate in 2015 who talked about possible solutions I'm not going to deal with all of this because I don't agree with him I think this is not enough now what we've got here is when you said the water company said we need more money of course they do various things we could do we could stimulate innovation investment and so on more blue sky is thinking how do you get it and so on change the regulators approach and so on the most important thing here is what we're dealing with here is a wicked problem now this is a phrase which has become very fashionable in the media in the last 12 months and I'm sure you've all heard heard the phrase wicked problems being used yes well if you really put the conversation now you can drop this in sorry it comes out of the 1970s for some two planners American planners in 1973 and the characteristics of a wicked problem are on the screen here it's a problem that is not well understood it's complex it's got physical and scientific and human physiological dimensions where if you do something somewhere but one time it affects somebody somewhere else another time so I was talking earlier to one of the committee here and they said well my daughter lives in Puglia and it's great there they've solved the flooding so I said well where's the water gone I said I can tell you where the water's gone it's now in Gloucester but they've stopped it going into Puglia so what's happened in one place and how it affects what's happened somewhere else many different stakeholders as we've seen they don't agree about what's important it could be stopping people dying for a lack of water or it could be generating money for shareholders or it could be protecting mutes any of those things they use ambiguous terminology in different ways and they can't agree if the problem's been solved in fact they can't even agree what the solution would look like and here we can see Great Scott here a wicked problem this is actually a photograph taken during the 2007 flooding called Brown and here we can see another great buy and a great place of wicked problems in that flood event as well right now the important thing about wicked problems and again I was going to show you something for your hub conversation in this is you have to think about them in different ways novel ways and what you have to do is think about solutions not that are a perfect solution but something that is rather better or worse rather than absolute and you've got to make decisions even though you're uncertain about things and in fact I think Prince Charles probably struggles with this in fact the latest again for your hub conversation we're now into super wicked problems which hasn't yet got to the media but has some other characteristics like time is running out those who have caused the problem are also trying to provide a solution there's no body really in charge and we're only trying to solve things in the short term so that's the characteristics of hyper wicked problems now what's a management problem are hyper wicked problems all of them now let's just have a look at some solutions I like this picture innovation that we need to do this often occurs where one of the more groups overlaps or sectors or different sciences so let's have a look at overlaps now here's an example of an overlap this is a, I forgot this chap's name but he's amazing in Madd's inventor he's one of his overlap technologies as you put a computer screen on the front of your microwave so you can play games while you wait for your computer to play I'm not talking about that kind of interface I'm talking about all sorts of other interfaces one of which is between different groups of people and here's a great thing coming out University of Oxford it's a large climate modelling experiment and it uses your computer so because the computing power that's needed to tackle some of those things is so large you just sign up and it uses your computer to turn some of the numbers when you're not using it here's an innovation that drought implications for animals and it again draws on you non-specialists working with specialists and this one, they've got cameras set up in the Serengeti and thousands of people look at the images and they help by classifying and they say, well that looks like a I don't know what it is it's not a fact is it but it's an artwork no it's not an artwork and gradually using your data big data and this overlap area of population things are being improved I do have some concerns when it's being done with people because they are now asking for people to spot whether people are on the move trying to get away from drought in the Sudan they say, look at these satellites it is you as an unskilled user at a look, can you spot a temporary encampment of a group of people on the move some of these are a bit worrying again, fresh water watch you can join projects you can sample water on a scale the internet is delivering all sorts of things as flooding is one where all sorts of data has been pulled together which is telling us things about flooding in real time that we could not have in 2007 because it didn't exist in technology so you get flood monitor if it's all the time a little sense of people's gate posts and that kind of thing and we've got community science projects where people are looking at mapping, weather and vegetation so I'm sure the equipments in Scotland this one is in North Newwood now there are some issues about weather we actually want this kind of technology is it actually answering the big questions or is it just a process here means an improved end now here's an example, another example of something that's completely bonkers a smart innovative city with water central to it vertical walls we've got food harvesting devices apparently we've got these children very close to this train line sometimes completely mad I don't think a city designed to manage the water environment effectively would have looked like that but we are closing on some of these things so I don't know how any of you have come across these things these are really smart toilets don't you indulge, no they're already in London they use 80% less energy and 84% less water they just have an aeroplane so it massively cuts water use so they're already in use in London but what we really want is these solutions these innovations that are addressing more than one thing at a time in these wicked problems we want them addressing more than one thing at a time so here's in this case agriculture water and air particular case of various ways of thinking about that we've got to address more than one thing at a time now here's one close to here addressing more than one thing at a time it's a distillery it's covering nutrients and energy from waste water in a distillery so they're addressing three things there at least three things water use, nutrients and energy cleaning up the water as well and generating food or drink in this case here's a young company very young company London where they are recycling water growing through fish ponds here they've got plants on the roof plants on the roof up here fish ponds down here and the people having the chemical while the whole thing functions but that's actually operating now and it's generating food in an urban environment using less space and cleaning up the water at the same time this is right hot off the press this is a company called their Ponyx they won a prize last week because I was one of the judges they are growing organic quality food with no soil at all using a kind of mist system that just puts mist of water nutrients onto the plants almost vertical so it uses a thing like an eject printer and it's massively reducing the amount of water 15% of the normal water of course and you get the food no fossil fuels, almost no fossil fuels and so on and ten times the output on conventional farming in the same area okay there's another one there from Harriet Wat which was also one of them more last week so I'm going to skip across a couple of these now but what we want this this kind of thing in water is to have it operating at city scale big systems big changes and the things that we've got to do we've got to make this work we've got to have solutions that are, if you like, integrated systems I've put here water transport, food, energy, waste management soil and so on they've got to be recycling solutions they've got to be low energy other than now we're going to add to the climate change problem they've got to be long lasting, durable, like bubblegum but also flexible and they've got to be resilient to shocks something goes wrong in this system a big flood, for example we can't control the weather but if you get a big flood it's got to be resilient and I think you have to ask these questions about what we're doing at the moment about what I've called here bounce packability in Gossashere in 2007 the communication systems failed not because they were flooded but because people's phones and radio ran out of batteries ran out of energy because the flood knocked out one of the electricity solutions so we go for a high tech solution we have to be very careful about whether it will bounce back in the event of a hydrological of water failure and what I want to say now what I think we should be going for is what we call nature based solutions things that mimic nature things that bring us nature have natural features and bring those into cities and landscapes so those kind of things solutions that mimic or look like nature based on nature are going to be more resilient there's a couple of examples here one in the south west where counterintuitively it works out this is about the sociology of water management water companies pay farmers not to use fertilizer because that is cheaper than treating the water coming down the river when it's full of fertilizer so they're working in partnership together to try and make this work to try and use a nature based solution and I think this is my last example here there's a company called Albion Water that's recently been bought by Brisbane Water actually they are instead of just providing water and wastewater services in an area if you lived in an area managed by Albion Water they would manage the water the waste, the energy at the landscaping all together you would just pay one charge for that so the resources on them to help you reduce your use of everything because if they can make more money by you being more careful because it's very popular with residents okay now, just to finish we have innovation around the scale in this country but according to the Dally report in 2015 it looks like this all these different organisations involved in innovation in Britain we're going to lose this bit shortly so that'll be fine we're going to lose the EU but we've still got all this complexity here and I'd like to ask you if you think this is helpful in managing innovation and stimulating innovation because actually I don't what is helpful is if we actually start to influence the context in which genuine collaboration these cross-sectoral cross-group things build capacity for people to think differently that's what will enable innovation it's not about giving them information it's not about exchanging information or just bringing people together this bit here influencing the whole context making us think completely differently about water and all those other sectors of the economy and developing partnerships in this case the cats got at the water supply by working in partnership with the dog thank you very much