 I'm Paul Webley. I'm the director of SIRS. I'd like to welcome you all of you in the audience tonight, particularly those of you who've travelled a long way to be here and to Professor Lawrence Smith's friends and colleagues and family. Lawrence tells me that his aunt and uncle are in here, so welcome to you and his wife and sister. I did ask Lawrence whether his relatives had heard him give this sort of speech before and he said not, so I'll just tell you that you're in for a treat, it'll be great. Now, a SIRS inaugural is a big occasion for us. It's a ceremony, it's a reed to Passage, it's a celebration and it's also an enjoyable intellectual event. But just to make sure it's enjoyable for everyone, just a couple of housekeeping points first. Do please turn off your mobile phones. I'm looking for my mobile phone, I can't even find it so that's not a good sign. So I can't turn it off, don't seem to have it. Fine, but do turn off your mobile phones. There's no fire alarms assumed to happen, so if a fire alarm goes off, don't panic but do leave by the fire exits there and there. OK. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the third of the 2012-13 inaugural lecture series and it's a particular pleasure to me since Professor Smith is the first of the academic staff who transferred from Y College to SIRS back in 2007, which I had a small part in negotiating to be promoted to Professor. I hope that's the first of many, but it's really good to see. Professor Smith will be introduced by Peter Blinga, who's Professor of Dillan Studies here at SIRS, where he heads the Centre for Water and Development. Peter trained as an irrigation engineer at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, but then saw the error of his ways. His PhD is actually on the political economy of irrigation water management. He did a habilitasio in Developmental Sociology at Bonn University, and he's one of the three founding editors of water alternatives. His research fields are water governance and water politics, agrarian change in technology and intra- and transdisciplinary approaches to natural resources management. The voter thanks will be delivered by Tony Allen, emeritus professor at King's College London, who spent 35 years at SIRS, so he really needs no introduction at all. SIRS identified the way that nations achieve versions of water security by accessing virtual water in food commodity trade. His current research demonstrates that global water security can be achieved in national and global food supply value chains. We're very grateful to both of you, to Peter and to Tony, for being part of this event. At the end, you'll be invited upstairs to a reception of the Brunai Suite for some wine and canapes, so at the end, don't pause, it'll be time for you to go off for the food and drink. But to introduce Professor Smith, I'll pass over to Professor Malinga. Over to you, Peter. Thank you, Paul, for that introduction. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's both an honour and a pleasure for me to introduce Lauren Smith in the next few minutes. The topic today is water resources, and perhaps it is not the first topic you would think of when you think of SOAS, as known to be a school of social scientists with humanities and languages. But actually, with Lauren's promotion to a professor of environmental policy and development, we now have at least, I counted four professors in this institute with a very strong water profile. So there is something to be done there also in the future on the issue of water. So apart from celebrating Lauren's promotion and his professorship, which is obviously the main focus today, it is also a good occasion to highlight the SOAS portfolio on water resource studies, at least by mentioning it. So, water. Water is an important, an emotive and a political subject. And as fate would have it, when I was flying into London this morning from Amsterdam sitting next to two fellow Dutchmen on their way to the Luton car industry, what were they talking about, the floods in the UK? Put two Dutchmen together and I will talk water. The senior of a member of the couple gave this following in-depth analysis of the uneven development in the English nation, and I overheard the conversation, not revealing that I could understand them. They said, when 4,000 houses of rich people get flooded in the Thames area, that will get more attention than when 60,000 houses are affected in Yorkshire. You see the problem is that all money goes to London and very little to other places. It's London against the rest. Well, so much for the Dutch and their water expertise. But still, these few lines concisely illustrate both the material importance of water, the emotional charge of it and the political dynamics associated with water management in all kinds of places and at all kinds of levels. And you may know so us, though we're not. I don't think we are at risk of flooding, but we are in the Thames basin, of course. Water issues play out at different scale levels from the so us local struggle with the micromanagement of its sanitary plumbing to saving the world through addressing climate change. And water is also part of the reproduction of national identity, not only in the Netherlands, but equally so in the UK. Floods bring out armies and royal families, and the picture of Prince William helping to carry sandbags in the February floods last month even reached the Dutch newspapers. So it is in this contested terrain of water resources governance and development that Lawrence's work is located. He was trained at Cranfield as an agricultural engineer and later at Y College as an agricultural economist. Lawrence thus embodies the natural social science interdisciplinarity that is so needed in studying and addressing concrete water resources problems. So what are some of the main characteristics of his work? I picked out a few things that I find particularly commendable. Perhaps he is an economist at heart when I read his work, but his work on irrigation and poverty and inland fisheries and livelihoods that I've read focuses on the embeddedness of economic processes. And thereby he provides a strong critique of economic reductionism. He does that by meticulous and grounded analysis of concretely existing water resource management practices. He identifies different categories of fishers and how they secure their livelihoods, how fishing activities are part of broader social and economic processes, and he doesn't satisfy himself with the simple and singular economic incentives-based argument. That departure from grounded realities, as against strongly helped theoretical premises, also characterizes what I think is the second major focus of his work, that his work on participation and stakeholder involvement in development decision making, including water resources decision making. Rather than starting from theories of democracy or normative stances on inclusion and emancipation, as we so often find in development studies, he argues the case for collaborative approaches from the nature of the problem. Lawrence considers water problems as wicked problems, and what is a wicked problem? A wicked problem is a problem where we have both scientific uncertainty and value uncertainty as he defines it. That means that we basically don't know exactly how water systems work scientifically, and that they are non-linear and inherently unpredictable, and that's the scientific uncertainty. And the value uncertainty is about the fact that we have different views and interests associated with water, that there are no single best solutions for water management problems and that these need to be negotiated and deliberated upon. Making use of local knowledge, facilitating collaborative decision making. That's the kind of positioning that he chooses in his work. I personally find this a great quality. It makes Lawrence Smith an expert in boundary crossing, as I would put it. For someone in interdisciplinary research, there is no greater complement as the capacity to cross boundaries between expert and lay knowledge between different disciplines and between research and policy. And he excels in all these three in my assessment. Boundary crossing as a metaphor for interdisciplinary research activity also fits the nature of water studies. After the Dublin Conference in the early 1990s which produced the Dublin Principles, the Millennium Development Goals as they were related to water and the climate change debate that has grown in importance, water studies have quickly expanded across the world. Many disciplines are now flocked to water and these are interesting times for water studies indeed. Most funding for water resources has been strongly policy related. International funding, national funding, government funding, these kinds of things. The groundedness and boundary crossing capacity that Lawrence has is exactly what is required in that kind of a research environment where there is always a look for impact and the need to define impact pathways. A big complement I would like to make to Lawrence at this occasion is the way he actively works with the knowledge he produces and co-produces very successfully to make a practical difference in water problems including the UK. To conclude, someone once suggested to me that academics choose their theoretical frameworks and approaches not based on their analytical and explanatory power but simply in terms of the fit to their personal psychology, their temperaments. Whatever is causing consequence here I am not totally sure but Lawrence's case in my observation is certainly a case where his temperament fits the theoretical positioning he has developed. He is a great colleague, he is very cautious in presenting his argument, he is an excellent listener and he is oriented towards partnership and collaboration as a matter of principle. I would like to congratulate him with his appointment as a professor of environmental policy and development and I look forward to collaborating and strengthening the SOAS water profile. Ladies and gentlemen, let us hear how we can take care of our waters. The floor is for Lawrence Smith. Thank you. I don't think I'm very good with hats. Peter, thank you very much. More than kind and thank you to all of you for taking the time to come along this evening to listen to me. Peter and I were talking about what he might say and I suggested he said something interesting to introduce the evening and he more than achieved that brief. I suggested he didn't boost my ego too much and I think he failed there. This is a rather ego boosting occasion but it's nice to have friends who fortunately couldn't be here who helped to bring one back to earth. What I wanted to talk about this evening is in the outline here. I'm going to have a slightly lengthy introduction to put the work that I've been doing. I guess the promotion in part relates to the success of some of the work that we've done with the UK focus on how we seek to protect and steward the water resources in this country. It's work that has a very international dimension and we learned lessons from other countries but it's perhaps unusual for SOAS. I want to put it in a global context and I think it fits very well in that way within the remit of SOAS and the great diversity of research and scholarship that's done here. Then I'm going to focus on two particular approaches in our research. A conceptual basis which Peter alluded to of understanding rural water pollution as a wicked problem and the practical focus of learning from the people who seem to be getting the solutions right. I'll try and summarize some of the conclusions we came to in terms of at least guidelines or principles for those solutions and then on these occasions you don't have the opportunity to ask questions which is probably a good thing but if I haven't run out of time I will ask myself the questions that I thought you should ask me. So is that a selfie? Maybe it's not the correct use of the word but let's see how it goes. So the big picture, what have we got to manage? There's a lot of water on the planet but most of it is in the oceans and the ice caps so the bit that we can use is the ground water and the soil moisture and the surface water in lakes, wetlands, rivers and streams less than 1% but it's still an awful lot of water. But more practically the renewable water that we can use sustainably is what we get from rainfall and those of us in the water world thanks to the work of Falka Mark have got used to talking about the blue water which is that surface runoff, the water in the lakes, streams and also the water that we can extract from the saturated zone from ground water or that returns to rivers through the base flow. But what's equally important and if not more important is the green water. This is the water that's held in the soil as soil moisture that's used by rain-fed agriculture that's used by all of the other trees and plants that make up our ecology and environment and according to this it's roughly 2 to 1 from the rainfall, the green water compared to the blue water. Lots of the blue water gets used for irrigation so lots of the blue water gets used more than 2 thirds globally gets used to produce food as well. So what you can see from this very simple diagram is that how we manage land matters to how we manage water and that's one of the themes I'll develop further. Increasingly people are talking about the Anthropocene that we've moved into a new geological era and we've been in the Holocene for the last 11,000 odd years, we've moved into the Anthropocene. Some of the experts in this field are arguing about when that starts even if it's a valid concept maybe in the 1800s, maybe around the Industrial Revolution. If you are a geologist concerned about geological eras it really depends when human activities that change the planetary systems that change the planet are going to start to show up in soil deposits in the rocks ultimately in the fossil record. When did that start? To me that's missing the point. At least for a social scientist this is a social construct. It's a way of making the case of changing people's attitudes and understanding that we now live in an era where we've got to live within our means and living within our means for water is just part of that. The headlines of the Anthropocene, the way in which human activities are changing the planet, our climate change and its evil twin, the acidification of the oceans. But we can see just a very basic graphic indicating proportion of withdrawals of that renewable water supply, the blue water, the areas in yellow and brown are the areas most at stress with the least water resources and those areas are going to increase over time with the increased demands from population growth and economic development which gives people the lifestyles which means they have a larger water footprint, a greater demand for food particularly meat consumption and the other products that water is used to produce. But part of the Anthropocene also is that we have dominion in large part over our water resources. We already dam and control and regulate most of the major rivers in the world. We're exploiting unsustainably, we're mining the groundwater of the major aquifers of the world. The costs and difficulty of exploiting new sources of supply become greater as our demands increase. So this lecture is about stewardship, it's about management, it's about recognising the need to manage our resources. Another part of the Anthropocene which you might be less familiar with is how we manage fertiliser, how we manage crop nutrients. We now fix through an industrial process, we fix from the atmosphere much much more nitrogen than is fixed by the natural terrestrial processes of nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil. We mine phosphorus which is another finite resource, but we use it very inefficiently. So there's large amounts, reach our water bodies and the ocean. And this results in nutrification. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus over-fertilises the water, produces algal blooms, produces biomass which as they die decomposes and consumes all of the oxygen. So the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico with the agricultural runoff from down the Mississippi as the primary cause is perhaps most well known. But these dead zones are increasing in frequency and severity in many parts of the world. And it's not just coastal waters, it's inland waters. I'm currently working on this agenda in China and this is the example of the Tai Lake near to Shanghai and in the picture on the right. You can see some of the large blooms of blue-green algae that are a problem in this lake which is used for water supply for several million people. What time did I start? I'm going to keep an eye on the time. Let's move a little bit closer to home and the work that we've done. DEFRA, our ministry for the environment, food and rural affairs and our environment agency, are working to try and fulfil the requirements that we've signed up to as a country under the EU's water framework directive. A requirement to try and bring all of our surface water bodies to good ecological status. They're doing a lot of great work but it's a difficult challenge. We're not doing that well so far. Only about 25% of our surface water bodies are passing the range of criteria set for good ecological status, which includes chemical criteria, criteria of water quality. And they've got a bit stuck. There's not been much improvement. Fair enough we've had drought years and some pretty bad flood years, so it hasn't been an easy time. But it's a difficult challenge. In this graphic here we can see some of the main reasons for failure for most water bodies. It's a combination of these factors but physical modification away from the original morphology but also including modifications that lead to soil erosion. And with the sedimentation that goes into rivers goes much of the nutrients and other pollutants. And phosphorus, one of those key nutrients, again one of the major causes of failure. We don't see this too often these days. It has been a problem in many water bodies in the past. More dry years and we might see some reoccurrence. We see a lot of this, those heavy sediment loads and the pollution that goes with it. One of the groups that I've worked with in our research has been the West Country Rivers Trust. There are a few of their photographs here just showing some of the problems in the southwest of England. Still relatively small family farms, dairy farms, mixed farms with livestock. But farming very intensively. And I think the technical term for these landscapes is knackered. So when you get heavy rain and it does rain in the southwest occasionally as we've learnt recently, there's mobilisation through surface runoff of the soil and again the nitrate and phosphorus, particularly the phosphorus bound to soil particles. Maneuwer and the use of manures is a particular problem. The livestock are kept indoors over the winter. There needs to be sufficient storage so that can be applied in the spring and summer when the nutrients can be taken up by the crops. And not earlier in the year or late in the year when heavy rainfall will wash it into the streams. Rural roads provide, as you've seen with the floods, that rural roads can easily become streams and become conduits and pathways for those pollutants. So seems a bit of a stretch to go from the Gulf of Mexico to broken gutters and drain pipes in Cornwall. But there's probably a few of these on the farms in Mississippi. This clean water coming off the roof will run across the farmyard. It will pick up the manure, the fecal organisms, it will pick up the nitrate and phosphorus. If it doesn't wash directly down the road and into the stream, it will end up in the leaking slurry tank and increase the problem of the volume of material that has to be stored and subsequently spread to the land. Eastern England, big arable, different problems but still problems. Perhaps much of the pollution of our water resources is a bit more invisible. It takes place through infiltration to the groundwater but also movement from these under soil field drains into these field ditches. It's intensive, highly productive agriculture. So there's a lot of use of agrochemicals and fertilisers as inputs. The farmers are making big investments in the equipment and their farming system. So they expect productivity, they expect high returns. How can we persuade the farmers to give up the land to create a riparian buffer strip? The experts tell me that this width and just grass isn't really very effective but clearly the farmer wants to use it to move this machinery around as well. How can we get more land to protect the watercourse? How can we get it vegetated? How does it need to be managed? So this is all about the catchment management problem. This has been the focus of our work. How to protect and manage water resources in a catchment in which people can still live, can still work, can still earn a living, can produce the food that we need and where we can have tourism and recreation. How can we achieve a living and sanitary landscape with a healthy ecology? A lot of the measures are simple. How can we get farmers to fence the streams, to move from this to this with a recovering ecology and natural processes that help to clean the water? There's a cost to the fencing. There's a cost because the farmer will need a water point at the top of the field because the livestock can no longer drink from the stream. But many of the farmers find this is also something of a win-win. The livestock get less feet problems, foot problems. They're healthier and so more productive. How do we move from tracks with a stream running through it to a culvert and improvements? It will make life a lot easier for the farmer, but again, there's a cost involved. How do we get high levels of management that we need to manage manures, to manage fertilizers and the other inputs? How do we get those improvements in farm infrastructure? How can we start to restore the mythology of streams that have been straightened and dredged and turned into drains to get the water off the land as quickly as possible and when it rains a lot perhaps into the town centre downstream? We have a policy framework in the UK and it's pretty good. I think it's useful to refer to it as a mitigation framework. Much has been achieved particularly by some of the NGOs, the environmental charities and the Rivers Trust, in working on the win-wins, advice to farmers to do those things that can benefit farm management, often the farm income and improve the environment. But we also need the baseline of good regulations in this diagram at the bottom here, covering almost universal coverage if not universal. In terms of how we share the cost, this is putting the burden on the producer. The farmer, the polluter will have to pay the costs of meeting the regulations to set standards of good farming practice. Inevitably, those costs are passed on in the market to the consumer. In the EU under the common agricultural policy we have subsidies and we can attach conditionality to those subsidies, again requiring basic standards of good agricultural practice. If we want to go further we're going to have to compensate farmers for some of the more difficult measures. If they can't afford the capital investment perhaps providing some capital grants to assist with that. Where we have to get into the trade-offs of reducing productivity in order to protect the environment, there's a case for compensating those farmers who go further than that set of baseline good practice in taking environmental protection measures. We have the agricultural stewardship schemes under the common agricultural policy that provide for that and we're seeing some development of examples of payments for ecosystem services, development particularly by the water companies but potentially by other parts of the private sector to pay for the ecological services that farmers can produce through their management of land and water. But these resources are scarce, they need effective targeting. We need to get the right mix of these measures well-tailored to local conditions and they're delivered by multiple agencies to get those efforts coordinated and based on effective collaboration. There's perhaps a tension between policies that are defined at a European level and a national level and the need for flexibility in how those measures are implemented in detail when it comes down to the local level. We need a research base, we need to understand the biophysical processes. Some of the people that I've been working particularly with are from the University of East Anglia, this is one of their monitoring sites, it's part of the demonstration test catchment programme funded by DEFRA looking at how some of those management practices can be effective, what results will they generate when applied together at a catchment scale. They've also done some work with us on developing some modelling tools to be able to predict and model on a larger scale, on a catchment scale, on a system scale what the response to improving management might be here in terms of phosphorus exports. I'm also working in China with people from Lancaster and they also have one of the demonstration test catchments up in the North West and this is some of their equipment and it's about improving that evidence base and particularly improving monitoring systems and what we're learning is it's particularly important to monitor rainfall events as they happen and it's important for us to take samples every month or every couple of weeks which will miss these peaks of pollution or even in this case the dilution of the nitrate in the water. This is another graphic from the West Country Rivers Trust this is quite famous for those people who work on rural pollution and water quality in the UK it gets shown at a lot of meetings. What it's about is how do we move from this landscape on the left hand side being farmed intensively but with almost no barriers to protect water resources to this landscape on the left hand side, sorry on the right hand side, where we can still produce food but we can also produce multiple benefits for society in terms of improving ecosystems and biodiversity in terms of protecting the water resource which will be used for drinking water supply downstream in terms of making an attractive environment for recreation and we need to look more closely at the economics of this what are the benefits, many of these benefits are not delivered by the market so how can we make sure those benefits are delivered how can we capture those benefits and help to fund the costs of making these changes but it's not just about farming we need to look at our catchments as a whole we need to develop an integrated approach in rural areas sewage is also part of the problem particularly as a source of phosphorus so we need to upgrade both household systems and the smaller scale sewage treatment works that serve hamlets, villages and small towns when we're carrying out construction works we need to manage the loss of soil we need to look at restoring our stream corridors and that restoration of river morphology and wetlands we need to look at spatial planning and economic development so the houses and factories aren't built on the flood plain where they're at most risk and we need to look at how they're built and we need to look at how urban areas are built to allow more infiltration the concept of sustainable urban drainage to reduce those flood peaks this needs education and awareness raising we need to get the whole population involved in thinking about these issues where there's resistance we need to change attitudes that needs to be supported by the science base and we need to manage these other aspects this I would suggest is a mix beyond the capacity and capability of any one organisation so again it needs this collaboration and coordination so two approaches in our research understanding rural water pollution as a wicked problem and understanding what the people getting it right do I've talked about most of these points the challenges of catchment management the interrelated problems of protecting water quality of managing water quantity both in terms of managing demand so we don't have over abstraction but managing flood risk rural pollution particularly from agriculture is a really challenging policy problem because and it's often described as water point source pollution or diffuse pollution there are numerous sources they're dispersed we are unsure still about the pathways and the processes if a factory is discharging pollution we can slap an order on it we can regulate but here the costs of monitoring and regulation are going to be relatively costly it's going to be difficult to visit farms to observe these processes to attribute a problem to a particular farm even to a particular field evidence if necessary that would stand up in court we've talked about catchment management being multi-sectoral we've talked about the trade-offs the things that produce the pollution produce the things that we want in society so these difficult questions of how to share the costs how to capture the benefits so this I think matches the idea of the wicked problem that Peter referred to wicked problems are complex they're dynamic, there's uncertainty there are diverse legitimate values and interests in society it's very difficult to formulate the problem in such a way that you can blueprint and roll out the solution when you do one thing there will be externalities there will be side effects, knock-on effects there are these trade-offs to deal with and it's intractable for a single organisation so this is particularly captured I think by this duality of the societal uncertainty what does society want certainly different groups have different legitimate views and this technical uncertainty both about the biophysical processes and about the potential solutions so that diagnosis I think leads you to the conclusion that we need processes that have this inclusive stakeholder engagement we need solutions that are based on a broad response by the different groups in society civil society, the private sector not least farm businesses local and national agencies and the science community to provide the knowledge base we have to bring that the responsibilities for making improvements come down often in law to very local matters of planning and how land is used farmers are the kings of their castle they have the responsibility in law for how their land is used these are local issues we've got to bring decision making down to the right level and we need that decentralised collaboration and partnership working but that needs coordination to make it happen it needs at least one agency to take the lead and we've talked about in our work the need for a twin-track analytic deliberative approach it follows from that duality of societal and technical uncertainty we've used this American model a lot in our thinking starting by building the partnerships and the collaboration bringing in the science to characterise the catchment they say watershed and then developing, setting the priorities and developing the management plans but we can't blueprint the solution so we have to monitor, learn the lessons and refine it but in the real world it is messy, it's complicated it's not like this blueprint and implement it's not even a smooth transition it's much more stop and start learning as we go along developing our analysis and the implementation will often depend on the politics it will depend on the funding and the people who are good at this leadership and coordinating role are particularly good at working the politics and working the funding mechanisms now maybe that's common sense but if we explicitly recognise and understand this we can think about how we design the institutions and processes to try and make it happen more effectively this is not, I think, an occasion for lots of theory and jargon I've probably used a little bit of jargon already so I won't spend much more time on this partly a little bit of self-consciousness I don't want you to go away with the message that that wicked diagnosis is just about getting people to work nicely together and learning by doing it is more than that and we can turn to the academic literature to find explanations that go into more depth one area is to think in terms of economics and how these collaborative processes reduce the costs and risks of doing business of taking action for the parties involved we can look at the literature on social capital and trust and understand perhaps that trust can substitute for some of the rules, institutions and formality and again to help to get things done but those conflicts and trade-offs will still arise and we can look at the processes which can be used to help to resolve those conflicts and perhaps develop consensus and some of this work is Nobel Prize winning on the part of Eleanor Ostrom so it has a bit of explanatory power ok my time is slipping away so let's turn quickly to some lessons from the people who seem to be getting it right in our projects we've been able to draw on the experience of some leading examples of catchment management programs in New York State and Pennsylvania in the headwaters of the Susquehanna River that drains down to Chesapeake Bay and Chesapeake Bay is a unique and highly valued marine environment valued for its seafood and very important for tourism and recreation this is a bottom-up initiative a network of agricultural advisers and environmental management professionals employed at the county level by county government who have taken the initiative to set up their network to work together and very effectively win funding to deliver programs and projects to protect the water resources in the upper part of the watershed they make use of existing legislation to facilitate the practicalities of who holds the budget how does the budget get shared are you allowed to receive federal funding maybe you're not but we can so we'll put it in our budget it's mixing and matching it's making do to make the process work also in New York State New York City's water supply comes in the main part from the Catskill Mountains about four hours drive north of New York City it's untreated surprisingly the water quality is good enough that it's piped to the city there is some chlorination of the final pipe network to keep the pipes clean but people drink an untreated water supply in New York City it would now cost so much it's prohibitively expensive for the city to have water treatment plants on the scale that are needed but they're required by federal legislation to make sure they have a safe drinking water supply so there's an incentive for them to work with the communities in the Catskill Mountains to make sure their water is protected part of the area is Delaware County there's a reservoir at the bottom the county pretty much corresponds to the catchment for that reservoir the county government has taken the initiative they're well resourced by the city but has taken the initiative in developing a comprehensive catchment management program started with the farm program but has extended to include all of those other elements that I referred to just now and in terms of institutions and governance to use a little bit of jargon this is an example of multi-level and polycentric governance when people at home ask me what I do and I work on multi-level and polycentric governance and then we can talk about motorbikes or cooking or something more interesting what it means I mean here we've got four levels local, regional, state and the federal government the federal government sets the rules it sets the legislation it sets the environmental standards it provides some of the funding that's moderated by the state the regional level is providing funding these levels in various forms are providing also technical assistance and guidance so there's vertical integration in terms of those processes but what's also really key is that the local level Delaware County government is providing the horizontal coordination of all of the agencies that actually deliver improvements and programs on the ground you don't have to worry what the acronyms mean but it's that idea of horizontal and vertical integration getting the right mixture of the top down and the bottom up that is part of the key to success in Australia we've learnt a lot from the Healthy Waterways Partnership they're trying to look after this part of the country in South East Queensland it's actually quite a large area with a number of catchments that drain into Morton Bay another very ecologically very important marine environment and economically very important for tourism and recreation it's become a very impressive network of organisations state agencies, local governments local governments and these local community based implementation groups are particularly responsible for implementing programs on the ground but there's a secretariat that provides that leadership and coordination function there's a scientific group that makes sure the work that they do has real credibility and is peer reviewed and they've developed some very impressive and effective communication tools and modelling tools to understand the systems that they're working with and it's delivering results but the principles here that they work to commitment to working in a coordinated partnership structure in which everybody can be heard and contribute to decision making and implementation formulation of the management strategies on the basis of sound science and rigorous monitoring that is that duality that analytic deliberative or twin track approach put into practice so to try and draw some conclusions of the principles and solutions we've drawn them out in the form or the idea of a template perhaps that's the wrong word a set of guiding principles really a set of commonalities to this process what you can't do is blueprint a process what you can't do is say we'll take what works in Australia and we'll apply it in the south east of England these institutional arrangements are complex and they have to evolve and develop within the jurisdictions that they have to fit within and we don't want to invent new wheels we don't want to create new river basin authorities or catchment management authorities we don't want to create new bureaucracies so the first part here is this point that I've made the need for an adaptive management cycle and a twin track of deliberative partner and stakeholder engagement this is the American diagram this is the Australian diagram there's a lot of others in the literature this is our diagram it's simple partly because we're not very good at graphics and we don't have a very big budget for that but I think it works and we made this box big at the top and at the start to emphasise that you've got to start this process by engaging with the people who are concerned with these issues and particularly start with building those partnerships that have the relevant roles and responsibilities then you can move into this twin track of the scientific and technical analysis to understand the problems and what are the potential solutions but that paralleled by that deliberation about how we weigh up the conflicts and trade-offs how can we seek to move towards consensus how can we set the goals and prioritise solutions and then if that's the difficult bit hopefully we can then move into planning and implementation but maintain the monitoring to develop that adaptive management cycle in terms of governance this needs partnerships it needs cross-sectoral and multi-level collaboration and coordination based on those recognised responsibilities and duties most of those responsibilities exist most of the budget lines exist we just need to get them working together and get them used more effectively it needs this stakeholder engagement because that's the way we can integrate the local needs and priorities with the very valid higher level goals for public health and improved environmental quality that come down from the EU or from national government and more than that there are those uncertainties there are those gaps in knowledge there's that need to tailor to local conditions so if we talk to people about conditions on the ground and talk about their businesses talk about how the water flows down the high street when it floods we can enhance what we're doing with that local knowledge and that will also build acceptance and ownership so it will build some of that trust people will participate and start to change their behaviour without so much need for the regulation and the monitoring and enforcement I've talked about the need for it to be locally led for decision making to come down to the level appropriate to the responsibilities but some of the things need to be decided at that larger catchment scale so we've also got to have these provisions and working arrangements for different localities to work together and work across administrative boundaries we need to have the principles of good governance there needs to be transparency and accountability funding is necessary core public funding to get things started but where these initiatives work well they demonstrate amazing success we need to be able to access funding from a diversity of other sources including perhaps the private sector we need capacity we need those locally accepted people who can work on the ground who can talk the language of the farmers but can also work between the environment agency and the NGOs can work between levels of government experts and intermediaries to analyse, to advise and to mediate some of the boundary crosses these are skills that we undervalue but which Peter was talking about people who can cross boundaries and act as intermediaries people who can work with a multidisciplinary or even an interdisciplinary understanding we need the capacity to carry out those comprehensive assessments at a local level to feed into plans both strategic plans and action plans and again if the people working at the local level are going to be smart and they're going to get the funding they've got to make sure that their plans become the most cost effective way for the higher level authorities to achieve their objectives you've got to keep people on board you've got to have good tools for the synthesis and communication of information and again this is about raising awareness it's about changing attitudes it's about changing behaviour changing understanding but it's also about working the politics those Australians make very good use of a report card every year they publish the report card and each area receives a grade for its water quality the politicians, local politicians now ask to see the results 24 hours before the press release so if their grade has gone from a B to a C- they've got some excuses ready to offer their voters so that's about it that's where I wanted to get to I think I've been speaking for half an hour so I'm doing alright I could talk a lot more about each of those points to go into detail but I hope you've got the idea so perhaps I can conclude by asking myself three questions and I'm sure these are the questions that you would have asked me is this just academic can these principles be put into practice and even if you're interested and moved by this can you get involved perhaps I've answered part of that by talking about some of those practical examples and again it would have been nice to spend more time talking about those but with a focus on the UK again if you're not aware it's worth finding out a bit more about the catchment based approach this is a new policy initiative it started with a pilot set of 25 catchments but it's now being rolled out nationally to about 93 93 management catchments as shown in this as defined on this map in England and the Welsh borders and the objectives are to deliver positive and sustained outcomes for the water environment by promoting a better understanding at the local level and to achieve this very important aim of encouraging that local collaboration and more transparent decision making when both planning and delivering activities to improve the environment this is from the DEFRA policy document these are their objectives it's really quite a bold policy for government because they don't know how it's going to work out they've got to let 93 community based initiatives develop and partnerships develop the aim is to develop those partnerships one organisation has been given the task of being the host, the intermediary or the coordinator for those partnerships their task to develop their catchment management plans and the hope is that this will help to fill the gap in communication and implementation that's currently occurring between the higher level plans drawn up by the environment agency and local implementation local buy-in and local projects so maybe it's the big society in action although I don't really like to call it that it's the catchment based approach it needs support to see if it can work you can find there's some really good information resources on the environment agency website including a lot of information about where you live if you want to find out a bit more about the water environment in the place that you live there's information about the policy on gov.uk where you'll find DEFRA's information there's a new forum that's been created as a knowledge base by people for the use of the people working in the catchment based approach and the rivers trust is an umbrella organisation for the rivers trust movement which has grown up in the UK they now have charities trusts in all of the areas of England much of Wales and parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland they're heavily involved in the catchment based approach in many cases they're providing that function of being the lead or coordinating agency they would welcome your donations but if you're really interested they'd welcome you coming along to some of their catchment planning meetings and maybe offering your time as a volunteer so there's an opportunity to get involved second question I didn't think I could get away without talking about the floods I'm not really an expert on flooding but it is part of the catchment management agenda Peter referred to this and I think these two quotes illustrate that flooding is very much a wicked problem and it's amazing how a water crisis in this case flooding gets so heavily politicised so quickly and can come to dominate the national media I think the experts do know a lot of the solutions but they're part of that integrated approach to catchment management many of the things that we'll do to try and protect biodiversity or to create buffers to prevent pollution going from farms and farm yards and sewage systems into our streams and rivers will also help to reduce flood risk it's an integrated approach will it be enough to stop all of this? probably not if we have this much rainfall but every flood is different every area needs its own tailored historical solutions so dredging the dreaded word and flood defences are also part of the solution but they need to be put in the right places and in combination with these softer landscape management measures and we haven't gone far enough in working that out in developing more of an integrated spatial planning approach for our catchments to make these systems work effectively in combination and obviously think in the same way but we saw the community action even from royalty downwards handing out the sandbags but that community involvement was surely coming too late and there's a role for the stakeholders to get involved and to have a say in these processes much earlier it is about politics it's about working the politics it's about collectively developing the solutions so lastly I hope I've addressed this too but how does local action connect to those global challenges how does the local action connect to the challenges of the Anthropocene I talked about drain pipes as one example I struggle with this I'm really starting to worry about my carbon footprint but it's really difficult to reduce it and talking to colleagues the other day and one of them said yeah but think what the American military emits I think what Chinese power stations emit so what the savings that I might make are a drop in the ocean but I guess every drop in the ocean is significant every brick in the wall matters and more importantly perhaps in the context of this lecture many of the things that we can do to improve land and water management do depend on us and our contributions can be more significant and they do take place at this local level and if we can get local land and water management right it won't be solving all of the problems and it certainly won't be solving all of the problems of climate change but it will be making a very significant contribution so just a few last examples here places that we've been working with as part of our work this is in the Netherlands Peter this is a I don't know if you can read it it's a ground water protection area but very sensibly it's providing multiple benefits so there are pathways and cycle ways for recreational access but they put up a sign board to tell people they're entering a water protection area it's about that awareness raising there are other information boards and our scientific colleagues were impressed that they actually bother to communicate to people the processes of infiltration and the behaviour of an aquifer and where their water supply comes from how many people in this room actually know whether your water supply comes from groundwater or surface water do you know how it's treated do you know what the threats to its quality are do you know that when we've spoken to some water companies sometimes they have to juggle supplies from different places to blend them to get down to the levels of dilution of the really nasty stuff that will just meet the standards of the drinking water expectorate when our systems are under stress during floods or droughts the water supply is it's always safe to drink but it gets close would you like to know more would you like to be more involved this lady is a wonderful person who works for the city of Alberg in Denmark she's a planner she understands how to do rural spatial planning she and her colleagues have developed the protection of the area that recharges their aquifer to ensure that that water is so clean they can just pump it out and pipe it to people's taps there's no treatment there's still some farming in the area but the farming is now less intensive and the farmers receive some compensation for that other parts of the land have been taken out of production and turned over to forest is providing recreational and biodiversity benefits but people are involved at the local level what this sign means it's outside a village in that village has signed up to give up the use of chemicals in their gardens and in their households that would go down the sink into their septic system and down into the groundwater so it's community action and partnerships demonstrated in progress and lastly back to Pennsylvania this is a farm in Pennsylvania this is the farm advisor the trusted intermediary speaks the same language as the farmer this is Kevin Hyscock who is in the audience but this is the farmer he's about 400 miles from the Chesapeake Bay they're talking about this cattle crossing it's very simple, it costs a bit it stops the cattle lingering and churning up the stream bed so there's less soil lost and the cattle don't defecate in the stream quite so much there's a little bit of benefit to the farmer perhaps fewer foot problems and they get through the stream more quickly but the water quality in this stream it goes down to a lake that's used for fishing but he's also contributing in a very small part to the water quality in the Chesapeake Bay 400 miles away to the south so does that answer the question I hope so but those are my main themes that's all I've got to say I think I'm just about within the allotted time I should say this most of this is not my work I do work with partners as Peter said there are many some of the key ones, the leading ones are the folk from the University of East Anglia and now Lancaster University in the work we're doing in China Cornell University, the West Country Rivers Trust in particular the Rivers Trust I mentioned Defra, I've had the privilege of being able to consult with and advise and now some key partners in China the weather's getting better so I'll save a little bit of my carbon footprint by riding my bike instead of driving a car over the summer but I probably won't be wearing this get up but thank you for listening thank you Lawrence for an excellent lecture when I heard about six years ago I think it was about then that you were going to come to so I was very pleased indeed I knew you had a prominent place in international water science and if I could have planned it myself I would have arranged it but in the way of things in universities you can never do this happily you were at Y at the time and associated with Imperial College and there was a need to reorganise and restructure and as a consequence we've had the wonderful synergy of your coming and joining the distance learning programmes here so in addition to your research of course you do play a very full part in the educational side and higher educational side of what we do here so even though it was an accidental thing the outcome has been very good and thank you very much for tonight's talk in thanking Laurie I would like to pick up on the three themes people, policy and practice we've seen this evening that Laurie has made very good use of his capacity to relate to people he speaks very well as well so many virtues but he is very good with people and I first spent a number of hours with him over a conference which he organised here and noted how he puts into effect he brings people together, he gets money to bring them together he also makes sure that he has people actually managing water so he didn't talk so much about it tonight but I know from that experience I assume that you need farmers at the meeting so there will be very wonderful Pennsylvania farmers and Australian farmers and Danish farmers at his meetings which impresses me very much indeed so the people side the agents who manage water and the majority of water goes into our food we don't realise that 90% of the water that we need is in our food so those that manage food supply change and the farmers especially are very important I don't know whether there are any here to these this evening but bless them if they are so I emphasise that these people that manage water to make it productive along with the other land using activities are also as far as well we just assume that they should be good stewards and I think he is emphasised this evening that there are many ways in which they can come together themselves to actually achieve the stewardship standards which are being generated but he knows that it's very important to have the scientific engagement with them on the policy side his long experience has helped him to relate effectively to the mysteries of policy making he's good with metrics as well but knows that society, policy makers and politicians can easily foreground their concerns and interests and easily background the evidence in the metrics and the science but he's very practised in doing that as well and then on the third theme of practice armed with these insights he has demonstrated this evening that he can relate very effectively with practice he respects those who actually use and manage water for example the farmers that I've been mentioning a lot who exist in volatile markets and they give them much help on that side and they have to cope with livelihood threatening price spikes so it's not an easy world but they do manage the water and the last few slides indicate that the farmers of Pennsylvania are into the details of that so he's very respectful of all those who have this practice to put it who have in fact are engaged in practice so welcome Lawrence to as professor at SOAS in the University of London we are very proud to have you and now I believe we go to the Brunai suite upstairs and there is some reception there, thank you very much indeed