Surface Water Management
& Future Water Supplies By Terry Nash, Director, UK Sustainable Development Association
The UK … too wet or too dry …?
It is one of the anomalies of the UK climate that notwithstanding apparently copious supplies of regular rain which periodically gives rise to local flooding, we are at one and the same time short of mains water.
Terry Nash, MD of the Gusto Group and a Director of the UK Sustainable Development Association
This can in part be explained by the limitations of national arrangements for capturing and storing water, and in part by the UK’s steadily rising population. This means, for example, that the driest and most highly populated part of the country (the south east) enjoys an average rainfall per capita lower than around the Mediterranean, with inevitable pressures on water supplies being the consequence.
Somewhat alarmingly, the Environment Agency is forecasting that the population will continue to grow by a further 20-million over the next 40-years, leading to still greater pressures on national water supplies that are already under stress in all areas south of the Humber.
Changing priorities …
Starting with flooding, for many years it has been a national priority to regulate surface water on new development sites so that water running off the site is controlled and down-stream flooding avoided. To this end, Sustainable Drainage Systems (SUDS) have become commonplace, often being based on the concept of simply holding the water on-site for subsequent slow-release over time.
However, these traditional methods only deal with water quantity, and make little or no improvement to water quality, local amenity or biodiversity, all of which need to be taken into account to deliver the sustainable homes of the future.
To meet these requirements, SUDS must now be designed to cope with “quantity” issues such as local flood management, reducing downstream flood flooding, and avoidance of river bank erosion. Alongside this, however, water quality also need to be taken into account, together with wildlife habitat , biodiversity and visual appearance.
And last, but by no means least, developers must first agree the overall design with the its local SUDS Adoption Board, and agree an associated adoption fee. This will inevitably mean that all elements of the system must be open for inspection and maintenance, to ensure their long-term effectiveness.
Letting nature take its course …
The recently published Developer Guidelines advocates that this should be achieved by mimicking nature to the maximum extent possible as illustrated in the report as shown.
|30| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
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