How to go from gray to green infrastructure?

Welcome to the Urbanista blog where we discuss water management challenges of Nordic cities. From safe drinking water distribution and stormwater collection, to building sustainable urban living environments. The Urbanista blog is based on the Urbanista podcast episodes. This post is based on the interview with Tallulah Lutkin, Utility Performance Editor at Global Water Intelligence. We discussed the main challenges of transition from gray to green infrastructure, new carbon neutrality requirements and regulations. 
 

Thank you for listening to our podcast where we are trying to share and communicate topics, problems and challenges that exist in the subject area of water. Perhaps sometimes the communication between people in our industry is not the best, but that’s why we are here, trying to have this conversation with different people and actors from different sectors and sharing and communicating about the challenges, particularly around the topic of sustainability.  And this is also the speciality of our guest today.

So, who are you and what do you do?

- Hello. My name is Tallulah Lutkin, and I am the Utility Performance Editor at Global Water Intelligence (GWI). We’re a media company, but also a lot more than that. We would define ourselves as the leading source of information, data and opinion on the water industry and the global water industry.
I am Utility Performance Editor, so I spend my days talking to utilities and hearing about their challenges, successes and innovations and all the great stuff they are doing to become more climate resilient and to enable them to continue providing services in a world that just keeps changing. In short, I’m here to talk about utilities and all the great stuff that they’re doing.
 

Can you tell us about the research you do at GWI?

- The research is very much the core of what we do, and our research base is the water industry itself. This means the utilities, the suppliers, the people who invest in the water industry.  We basically have a global network of all these people, who we have great relations with and are able to reach out to. We reach out to people on the ground and in the field who can give us great information. We then collect all these pieces of the puzzle and we turn it into the global picture of the water industry.
 

How do we define Green Infrastructure and its role?

- I think green infrastructure is a big package of lots of different things. We could define it as a way to integrate environmental features and nature in a designed way, to be able to become more climate resilient. For example, to manage stormwater flows, to prevent flooding, etc. Within the water industry it means using those environmental features and what nature already knows how to do, which is absorb water, and realise that concrete is just not good enough nowadays.
So green infrastructure can include a set of things. It’s a whole matrix. It can be very simple, like soil; so if you plant a tree, you now have soil and that will absorb water. Or it can be very engineered, like permeable pavement, so that’s a very engineered product. Bioswales are another very engineered solution. They are different layers of soils and capture stormwater. It can be small, like a raingarden on top of a roof, or it can be massive, like redesigning a whole marshland. It can be urban and engineered into that environment, or it can be coastal, or far off in a rural area. So, there are a whole matrix of things that can be done, but every time it means finding a way to not use concrete, tunnels or big engineered solutions that need to be installed and take up a lot of space. It’s integrating nature. That’s where the green in green infrastructure comes from.
 

What are the advantages of green infrastructure?

- Since most of us will be living in urban environments, one advantage is that we are introducing greenery which has a purpose or a function. I.e., to prevent flooding and make us more climate resilient. But it also improves the quality of life. For example in my street, we don’t have a lot of trees. Maybe it would be nicer if we had more trees and greenery, if I had a park that was closer. As a member of the public, I might not know that this park is also functioning as a stormwater buffer. For me, it’s just a place where I can ride my bike. So that’s really the double function of green infrastructure.
 

How can we move from grey to green? Have you seen many examples or reusing water in urban design?

- When we talk about going from grey to green, we use it as a metaphor. It can, however, be very visual. We literally go from a grey urban environment, like a basketball court, to a green area that is absorbing water and also looks green.
And stormwater isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a resource. There are lots of areas that are very water scarce and I think that something that’s very important to remember.  When we talk about climate resilience we talk about a lack of water or a surplus of water, but actually those aren’t necessarily two separate things. For example, there are many areas of the US where there is a lot of water scarcity and droughts, but there are also times of extreme flooding in the same location. That’s why it’s really important to harness the stormwater, to be able to collect it. It needs to be treated of course, because rain can pick up dirt when running across roads; it needs to be treated, but then it can be used in many different ways. Depending on where you are, it can be used for industry, for irrigation, for indirect use like recharging aquifers, and then that can help with your drinking water resources.
I think that what is interesting about the water industry is that water is usually a local issue and the solutions you are going to need are also quite local. If you have a lot of agriculture, for example, it makes sense to reuse water for irrigation. If you have groundwater, it might make sense to reuse it for aquifer recharge. It really depends on where you are. However, at the same time the solutions are global. In Australia ground water recharges are already used, but this could also be used in California. So, at GWI, we try to bring these utilities together in a room and try and get them talking about what they’ve been doing, the lessons they’ve learned, and talk about the challenges and solutions, so that we are not constantly reinventing the wheel. Global conversations are really important and that’s why podcasts like this are also important.
 

How do you see the water sector moving toward the Net Zero goals?

- I would like to be able to say that there is a clear global movement towards Net Zero. I think that the reality is that things are still quite regional. But we can say that it is regional in quite a broad sense, i.e., the European Union, and in the US there are associations that are getting utilities together to talk about net zero. There was actually a collaboration between American utilities and Danish utilities to discuss how to set a net zero target. Australia is quite advanced and the state of Victoria has a statement of obligation for water utilities to have a net zero goal. And this is something we are trying to encourage at GWI, conversations that help us become more global.
Conferences like the United Nations Climate Change conference (COP) are quite a good catalyst to improving the global question of net zero and issues like carbon are very much a global problem. It needs to be a global conversation with more global governance and more discussions not only between utilities but also between governments. We know that water is 80% of adaptation, but water and water infrastructure is also 2 % of carbon emissions, which is as much as the aviation industry, so when we talk about planes, well, water use is very similar in terms of carbon emissions. We really need a global conversation about achieving net zero at a water and wastewater level. This would really help to mitigate the impact that we’re already seeing.
 

The water sector carbon emissions are similar to the aviation sector! What are your thoughts on this?

- That’s absolutely true, and one of the GWI research projects was to try and estimate the emissions of the water industry. You can check out our white paper on this where we break it down between water, wastewater and sanitation. Onsite sanitation systems are used a lot in the developing world, which are not connected to a sewer, for example septic tanks and latrines produce a lot of methane. Wastewater treatment also produces a lot of methane, which is 25 times more potent than greenhouses gases and CO2. It’s also very energy intensive to pump water around, so that is also a major contributor.
In summary, we all talk about planes, but we don’t talk about the water industry. To be fair to water, it and wastewater treatment is a lot more important to us as a society than air travel. Safe and clean water is essential, but there’s a lot that we can do to mitigate emissions. There are many solutions, and many utilities are already doing a lot to mitigate those emissions.
 

Should there be more focus on the waste-water treatment not managed by the public sector?

- I could give you an example, because I’m getting married this summer and the venue has a septic tank. And this makes you think, what are the emissions of the septic tank? And what are the emissions of the truck that needs to come to collect the waste. Here in France it is not really regulated and often people don’t see it as their problem. We might think of environmental contamination as in pollution of the water, but we don’t consider the methane emissions from all the water just sitting there.  Then in places in Africa, South America and Asia where most people in urban environments rely on this type of sanitation the issue is even bigger. It’s an area that is overlooked and that we don’t have a lot of data on. It’s likely that we very much underestimate the impact of these ‘off-grid’ systems.
 

Regarding resources and budget, how can the budget for water management be managed and understood by the public?

- I have a lot of thoughts on this. At GWI, every year we publish our Global Water Tariffs Survey. What we try to do is record basically how much people pay. So, what does a water bill look like in San Francisco, or in Berlin or Bangalore? We collect data on water tariffs for over 500 cities across the world so we can really get a global picture of how much water costs. We’ve been doing this for over ten years and we have got some really interesting takeaways. Firstly, the fact that water tariffs are just barely keeping up with inflation. That was an observation from last year, since when inflation has gone up massively.
 

Are we paying too little for water?

- Yes. We are paying much too little. I think it’s a big issue globally because of the huge disparities. For example, the average water tariff in San Francisco is about 150 dollars for about 15 cubic metres. In Athens, it is just 20 dollars. There’s a huge disparity between how much people pay for water. Maybe in San Franscisco, they are getting the price about right, but perhaps most people listening to this would consider a 150 dollar water bill every month to be excessive. But that’s what water costs. Water is extremely capital intensive. It requires a lot of infrastructure, treatment plants, pumps, and people obviously want their water to be great quality. They want to be able to drink from the tap. It’s vital, but it’s costly and we do not pay enough for it. There is, of course, the question of it being a public good, and this is true. You don’t want water to be unaffordable because everyone needs it.
However, what we’ve seen across the utilities that we talk to is there are those that do a lot of community outreach and that explain these issues and say, “Look, we know you want your water to be available and of good quality. And we know that is important, but it’s expensive.” And explaining that to a community makes them understand the importance of water. The solution is to raise the profile of water. Do more outreach, explain to the users and the community. I think I heard someone at the global water summit we had a couple of weeks ago comparing water operators to mushrooms, because they’re always in the dark and nobody sees them. People don’t realise where water comes from, why it is important and how expensive it is.
 

What changes have you seen with the water utilities improving their sustainability?

- This is a really important question. If you can’t integrate a carbon footprint into your procurement process, then you will never achieve net zero. The procurement process is the base for everything you build and everything that utilities have. What we’re seeing from utilities is that they are very much taking the initiative on their own. The frustration comes from the lack of standards. There’s not enough control of the accounting process and each supplier can have their own system, each utility has their own way of trying to integrate carbon into procurement. Basically, there’s no global standard for doing this. However, the good thing is that utilities aren’t just waiting around for there to be a global standard because, I think if they did so, it might never happen. I think that the utilities and the suppliers are kind of figuring it out, but the more that they do that, the more these processes are going to come to fruition.
A really good example I’d like to talk about is that of a company in Auckland, New Zealand, called Watercare. They have integrated into their sustainability strategy something that they call the 40/20/20 vision. This means that they need to reduce their infrastructure carbon by 40%, i.e., reduce the carbon impact of their projects by 40%; increase health and safety standards by 20%, i.e., making sure that when they build, health and safety is improved; and reduce cost by 20%. So that’s their framework for when they do procurement. What is very interesting about Watercare is that they have very much taken the position that the first question they ask it, “Do we need to build at all?” Because the best way to decrease your carbon emissions from infrastructure is to not build. Obviously that is quite a radical position. I don’t think many utilities are doing the same. And, of course, it puts them in conflict with their suppliers, because if they stop buying anything, the relationships suffers. But with respect to this, they’re really working with the suppliers to understand the strategy and explain that it’s in everyone’s interest to do that.
 

Is it just a focus on renovating or are they also looking at a more long-term, life-cycle view?

- It’s interesting when we look at the procurement process and how to take into account the carbon footprint when you procure, is that probably the lifecycle is actually more important than the point of purchase. You have to consider the manufacturing process of your suppliers. I.e., if you produce a pump, what is it made of? and what is the carbon footprint of making it? But then once the pump is in the ground, what is going to be the lifecycle carbon footprint of that pump? I think that being able to take both of those into account, really finding that balance between life cycle cost if it offsets the carbon footprint of manufacturing or not.
It also comes into the question of replacement. Does it make sense to replace and buy a new pump that is more efficient, or just keep the old pump and therefore avoid creating a manufacturing footprint for that pump? I think that’s the nub of the question. How do you balance between the manufacturing footprint and the lifecycle footprint? The lack of standards and data make it really hard to figure that out. If your supplier doesn’t know what the carbon footprint cost is, how can you figure it out? I think we’re at the stage where the utilities need to force their suppliers to have the data, and the suppliers themselves need to start figuring out what those footprints are. It’s a collaborative process and it’s really the next big thing. A couple of years ago we were talking about how to make a net-zero road map, and now we are asking how we can make that happen in reality. And that, pragmatically, is via the procurement process.
 

How effective has the current legislation, and has the EU taxonomy helped?

- It feels very much like we are in uncharted territory with all these things. There’s always criteria or metric that you need to complement the data. But the most important thing is to move fast. We can rely on something that already exists, like the EU taxonomy, but we need that legislation and those standards to accelerate, because otherwise we’re just not going to make it.
 

How can we summarise this issue and the future goals?

- Something that is always in discussion is the topic of awareness. When I tell people about my job, they look at me blankly. They don’t understand what a water utility is, and I think that would be my really important takeaway from this. We’re not going to achieve anything if there is not the political awareness in the public’s mind, of issues related to how important water infrastructure is and how cool and interesting it is. Consider that there are people using the waste you have flushed down the toilet and making renewable energy from it. How cool is that?
I think that this question of raising the public profile and the political profile of water is the key to unlocking everything: legislation, investments, etc. I think that things are starting to happen. There’s a lot of outcry in the UK about sewage discharge and people are beginning to understand what it is and who is responsible. And when there was a drought in the UK last year, there was a lot of talk about leakages and non-renewable water. These kinds of conversations are vital and it’s really important that there is the awareness because that is what will save water.