An Insight into Greening our Water Infrastructure
The UK water industry is in for a transformative shakeup as companies prepare for an unprecedented wave of investment to overhaul the nation's ageing infrastructure.
Under proposals submitted to regulators covering 2025-2030, the country could witness investment quadrupling to levels unseen since privatisation. With a mammoth pipeline of £20 billion per year in construction projects, the sector has a golden opportunity to dramatically improve its role in addressing climate change and the biodiversity crisis.
The need for added capacity has been mounting rapidly in recent years as demand for new connections surges. Companies simultaneously face rising fines for sewage spills and drought restrictions. Public awareness has heightened over the damaging impacts on fragile ecosystems, reverberating with shareholders and investors.
This reputational fallout underscores how desperately these infrastructure upgrades are needed - both to protect the environment and maintain service for customers, especially as climate change brings more extreme weather.
But the industry faces a monumental balancing act to deliver these ambitious plans while upholding commitments to reach net zero emissions. While most pledge to achieve net zero operations by 2030, these targets exclude emissions from capital construction and upgrade projects, which get counted separately. The imperatives driving down environmental impacts aren't nearly as clear-cut for capital emissions, with no overarching mandated targets. So the water companies, suppliers, regulators and broader value chain face a critical test to ensure clean, green best practices aren't overlooked.
Individually, companies have adopted various approaches driven by industry codes and voluntary sustainability standards like the newly updated PAS 2080 - considered the gold standard for infrastructure. This framework advocates system-wide approaches and whole lifecycle carbon assessments to inform decision-making.
Factoring in the cradle-to-grave impacts of assets from treatment plants to reservoirs is certainly a welcome shift. However, the industry needs to swiftly move to make such practices standard if it hopes to fully capitalise on this potentially once-in-a-generation investment opportunity.