Developing a stewardship model for ‘water smart communities’

Stuart Edwards, a Project Delivery Manager from United Utilities and a key partner in the Ofwat Innovation project ‘Enabling Water Smart Communities’, explains the development of stewardship models for new housing developments.

Illustration by Arup for the EWSC project

In our last article on the Enabling Water Smart Communities (EWSC) project, we heard from George Warren at Anglian Water about how the project is unlocking the tension between water scarcity and housing growth. Here, Stuart Edwards introduces work being done through EWSC to consider sustainable drainage systems (SuDs) as a means to develop estate management stewardship models.

The challenge

Water scarcity is putting the brakes on the government’s ambitions for house building. But there’s also the other side of the water equation. More frequent flooding from a variety of sources is also hampering housing development.

According to research for the Climate Change Committee, at present 1.8 million people are living in areas of the UK at significant risk of flooding. This will rise to 2.6 million by the 2050s under a 2 OC scenario and 3.3 million under a 4 OC scenario, assuming a low population growth and a continuation of current levels of adaptation.

Housing developments of the future will need smarter ways to manage rainwater and wastewater, to increase resilience to both flood and drought risk. Integrated Water Management is at the heart of the ‘water smart communities’ concept.

As water and housing sector challenges are becoming increasingly intertwined, siloed thinking and isolated operations are reaching their limitations and are failing to generate the resilient and future-proof solutions that are needed. This increasing sectoral interdependency demands collaboration that transcends shared challenges and overcomes preconceived boundaries that can limit true partnership between sectors.

The EWSC Framework

The EWSC project has identified a series of ‘enabling actions’ for water smart communities - to overcome barriers and develop much needed tools and guidance. These ‘enabling actions’ are grouped according to the three enabling principles for water smart communities: values, assets and stewardship. These are the building blocks of the EWSC model and framework. They are highly interlinked and operate at different levels of system complexity; when considered together they can unlock ‘enabling actions’ within a complex delivery environment.

As part of EWSC, United Utilities is leading an enabling action project linked to the enabling principle of ‘stewardship’.

What is meant by stewardship?

Stewardship is essential for looking after water as a common good, alongside other commons such as land, to maximise community benefits. Stewardship underpins the enabling of water smart communities by ensuring the other EWSC building blocks of values and assets endure and are sustainable.

A stewardship approach recognises that technology and physical assets alone cannot enable water smart communities. A community-centric approach is needed to maximise benefits, with communities involved with design and planning from the outset. This is before embarking on the installation of assets such as rainwater harvesting, water re-use systems and SuDS.

Repeating the same steps of the past will not take us forward, which is why our vision is to rethink ‘whole-life water stewardship’.

During the EWSC project’s ‘Discovery Phase’ three stewardship principles have emerged as critical to enabling water smart communities: building a strong shared culture; good governance of resources and assets; and delivering wider outcomes through the stewardship of water cycle assets. You can read more about EWSC’s insights on stewardship here.

Building a water stewardship model for new housing estates

The EWSC ‘stewardship’ project builds on the three stewardship principles by exploring the creation of a sustainable community-led stewardship model for Integrated Water Management (IWM) that empowers diverse sectors to adopt, operate and maintain assets.

The stewardship model will initially focus on the IWM asset group of SuDS, but as development of the model progresses, water reuse and recycling assets will also be considered. The model is centred around new-build housing estates with a view to maximise opportunities to create and install innovative technologies.

The project aims to create new governance and legal models and financial and economic instruments to underpin multi-agency, cross-sector and resilient collaboration. As part of this, the project will need to provide regulatory and institutional support for new stewardship entities.

The project will be working to four key objectives over the coming 18 months:

Objective 1: Research into existing stewardship models to understand the implications of different housing delivery and ownership models.

Objective 2: Co-design with partners to develop a new stewardship model.

Objective 3: Test and iterate the design of the new stewardship model at a demonstrator site.

Objective 4: Scale the model by developing an output that will support others to develop water stewardship.

Challenges and Opportunities

The project intends to develop and scale a community-led approach, and to facilitate a hypothesis-driven methodology to the design of new stewardship models. This allows project partners to frame questions that require answers and to run ‘tests’ to learn accordingly.

The illustration below outlines an embryonic stewardship model for estate management, showing the different levels of stewardship – at systems, neighbourhood and individual level – and the key stewardship considerations at each level:

As the model develops, the project will be considering the challenges and opportunities at the different levels.

At a system level, the project will need to consider the plethora of existing stewardship models across the housing and energy sectors. It will explore whether water could be integrated into the stewardship models of other house building sectors. The project will also look to improve links with successful integrated water management plans adopted by Combined Authorities, to see how they might be adopted at the community level.

There are also challenges that need to be addressed around finance and regulations in implementing some reuse and recycling approaches.

At a neighbourhood level, there are challenges with current housing developments which separate homes into plots, reducing options for open space use and stewardship. Features such as SuDS are often designed as an afterthought. Although the focus of the stewardship model will be on conventional housing types, the project will explore how water stewardship could support the development of alternative housing types and what benefits this might bring.
Linking back to the stewardship principle around wider outcomes, the project will ascertain how benefits such as resilience to droughts and floods can be maximised for communities over the long-term.

At an individual level, a big challenge is that people often have a lack of capacity to take on the liability of additional assets; they typically see estate management as part of public authority function. The stewardship principle around building a culture of collective responsibility towards water is important here. EWSC is exploring this through research into visions for water smart communities, linking to behaviours and perceptions around water use.

The potential benefits for community-led water stewardship of housing developments are huge, not just for the communities themselves, but also for addressing wider water and housing challenges. The EWSC project is on its way to exploring what a stewardship model for a water smart community looks like and how this might be scaled.

Stuart Edwards is Project Delivery Manager for United Utilities and Enabling Water Smart Communities.