CIWEM members and staff named among UK’s most influential environmental professionals

30 June 2025

We talk to Jo Bradley, one of the CIWEM members recognised on the 2025 ENDS Power List for her work tackling water pollution

CIWEM is proud to share that two of our members, as well as our director of policy, Alastair Chisholm, were named on the 2025 ENDS Power List last month.

Each year, ENDS Report publishes a list of the 100 most influential professionals in the UK environment space. Alastair appears in the ‘professional influencer’ category, while Oliver Grievson MCIWEM C.WEM appears in the ‘environmental consultants’ list, for his work in regulatory monitoring at AtkinsRéalis (Oliver was also recently awarded the CIWEM Presidents Award for Lifelong Commitment).

Jo Bradley MCIWEM C.WEM has been named on the ‘campaigners’ list, an acknowledgement of her impact as UK director of operations at Stormwater Shepherds, a global charity working to restore healthy waterways. Jo’s Power List listing reads:

“As she continuously pushes to bring the issue [of highway runoff] to the attention of the general public, Bradley’s clear, no-nonsense communication style has gained her the respect of academics, NGOs and public institutions alike.”

Emma Simon, CIWEM’s director of marketing and communications, caught up with Jo at Flood & Coast 2025 earlier this month to discuss the Power List, Jo’s work with Stormwater Shepherds and highway runoff.

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Emma Simon: Congratulations on having been named in the ENDS Power List! How does it feel?

Jo Bradley: Thank you very much. I'm really pleased. It's important for me. I work on my own a lot: it's just me at Stormwater Shepherds, and I work in my kitchen at home. And so, it's just lovely to have that reassurance that I'm doing the right thing.

Because without that, I spend a lot of time wondering whether I'm doing what I should be doing and whether people are pleased with what I'm doing. The reassurance of being named on the Power List was really nice.

ES: What do you think this recognition means for the future of your work with Stormwater Shepherds?

JB: It's really important for Stormwater Shepherds, because the work that I do is quite confrontational, it's quite oppositional, I irritate people sometimes. I never mean to, but I do.

So being named on the Power List gives me credibility. It means that the people in the industry recognise what I do is the right thing. And so then if I am irritating somebody and they try and undermine my credibility, I can waft my Power List mention at them and say, ‘I do know what I'm talking about’.

That's been important to me in the past. People have tried to undermine me and something like this helps me to deflect that.

Jo Bradley meeting with Emma Simon at Flood & Coast 2025

ES: What's your current focus at Stormwater Shepherds?

JB: My current focus is pollution from highway runoff. I am fighting quite hard to get everybody talking about pollution from highway runoff, to find a solution and to find ways to deliver those solutions at pace.

We have to do this work because highway runoff is toxic. It contains microplastic tyre wear particles, which go into our oceans and affect marine life and phytoplankton. And then we've got the toxins going into rivers and streams and affecting invertebrates and fish and birds and all sorts.

It is my focus, and it will remain my focus until we find a solution. Stormwater Shepherd's broader focus is on plastic pollution, urban pollution. I do try and do other stuff as well, but I've been working on highway pollution for a long time, and I'm not going to give up yet.

ES: It’s been a year since the publication of CIWEM’s report on highway runoff and the water environment, which we launched in partnership with Stormwater Shepherds. How would you say that the landscape around highway runoff has changed in terms of public and political perception of this issue?

JB: There are definitely more people talking about it. Organisations I've never spoken to before are suddenly interested. And even going around a show like [Flood & Coast], people go, “You're that highway runoff woman”, which is good because it means more people are conscious of the problem.

We haven't seen the shift forward that I wanted to see. I sometimes feel as if the regulators are digging in a bit rather than coming out of the trench and meeting me and talking about solutions. It’s frustrating.

But highway runoff was mentioned this morning in the plenary session, it’s been mentioned by the Rivers Trust and other organisations, so it's definitely on people's lips, and that's a good thing.

Last year, Stormwater Shepherds and CIWEM produced a report 'Highway runoff and the environment'

ES: You and your co-author, Alastair Chisholm, made a number of recommendations in the CIWEM/Stormwater Shepherds highway runoff report. How do you feel they've been taken up by the industry and the government?

JB: Yeah, not so much. It's a slow burn. It was always going to be; we were reaching for the stars. I don't feel like there's been a shift in political ambition around this topic, particularly. I haven't seen shifting regulatory control. I haven't seen a shift in any money coming forward to pay for the treatment of highway runoff.

We're definitely in a sort of state of paralysis. But everybody's talking around the topic, so that's a good thing. And certainly from [the Rivers Trust CEO] Mark Lloyd's presentation this morning, catchment partnerships could make a huge change here. They know their catchments, they know where highway runoff is causing a problem to their local rivers. And so I'm pleased and reassured a little bit by that sudden talk about catchment partnerships. They could be a massive help for this topic.

ES: How can your fellow CIWEM members, as well as non-members, help to galvanise action on water pollution?

JB: They've got a massive opportunity. One of the biggest things that CIWEM members can help with, particularly those working for design consultancies and design engineering firms, is designing good schemes – which they do anyway – but with a real focus on water quality.

The other thing we need to do is reach the clients. I can't really do that. I don't have a conduit to the big building clients in the UK. But the design contractors do. And we've got to get the message through to the client to say that highway runoff causes pollution, so we need to do decent water quality design into this treatment system.

And so that's a real opportunity for CIWEM members: to talk to the people who pull the purse strings – the big landowners, highway authorities, local authorities, NHS trusts, people who are building things – about doing good SuDS [sustainable drainage systems], doing good highway runoff treatment, and finding the money for that. Because very often I see there's good intentions and everybody wants to do good treatment, but then at the value engineering stage of the process, somebody takes out the vortex separator or makes the swale a bit shorter or, makes the rain garden a little bit smaller.

We need to fight back against that, and that's where CIWEM members have that fantastic opportunity because amongst CIWEM members, you've got hydrogeologists and water quality specialists and engineers and hydraulic specialists, all of whom can come together to make sure that we deliver really good treatment schemes, I hope.

ES: That's brilliant, thank you so much. Finally, I'm going to ask, if you could bust one myth about water pollution, what would that be?

JB: The myth that I like to bust is that highway runoff is diffuse pollution. It's been in that diffuse pollution bucket for a very long time, but the truth is that 99 per cent of the time, it's point source pollution. I can take you to a pipe and point at it and, in fact, take a sample of it, which means that it is a point source discharge.

It could be controlled by regulatory frameworks. It can be sampled, monitored, videoed, you name it. And so, using the diffuse pollution excuse to push this aside and say that we can't actually do regulation because it's too difficult – it's not true. These things are pipes that go into the river and cause pollution just like all other point source pollutions, and we can control them, and we should control them.

ES: Thank you so much.

JB: Thank you very much for having me.

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CIWEM members wishing to engage with their peers about highway runoff and water quality should consider joining our regional branches and specialist groups and panels.

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