Wales Climate Week

This year’s event formed part of the consultation on a new national strategy that will establish the guiding principles around how government, businesses and the public can work together to address the climate and nature emergencies.

Our Director of Environment, Tony Harrington, attended the conference, and here are his thoughts.

It was important for me to attend this event and be part of the debate, as solving the challenges presented by Climate Change can only be efficiently delivered in partnership with colleagues in Government, in our regulators, and with the support of our customers.

It’s vital that we have these discussions to ensure that strategies are in place for organisations to take collective action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and to build resilience into both our assets and operations, so as to deal with the impacts of climate change.

As one of the largest energy users in Wales, we are committed to build on the success we have had to date and reduce further our total carbon emissions, by 90% (from their levels in 2010) by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality or better by 2040.

Therefore, it was important for me to outline how Welsh Water is adapting the way we deliver our services to help protect our environment and how we will deal with the challenges we face in the years and decades to come, with our ambitious pro-active response to achieving a net zero future.

The key points I made at the conference this year, were all around how we can achieve our goal of net zero by 2040, and the key principles that will underpin our work:

Prioritising investment. To achieve net zero by 2040, we will need significant investment (>£100m per AMP). Customer support for this will be essential. The investment itself will need to be balanced against other pressures including river water quality.

Best value for customers. We need to make best value investments, where every customer’s pound makes a positive difference to the environment, and society. For that reason, we have developed our multi capitals approach to investment, where options are judged by the improvements they offer both customers, the environment, and society. By balancing these, we should be able to ensure we move forward with best value investments for our customers.

The blue green agenda. It is becoming increasingly apparent that we must complete our work to mitigate our climate impact by 2040. Other priorities need to reflect their impact on the climate and be developed within the context of the urgent need for us to reduce our carbon footprint. This may mean prioritising those investments which both improve water quality and our carbon footprint e.g. nature-based solutions, ahead of those which only improve WQ.

As a provider of essential public services to over three million people, Welsh Water has a huge responsibility and a crucial role to play in protecting our environment to help protect our health, our homes, our water supplies and food production.

We all have a collective responsibility to act on climate change, adapt and make the changes necessary to protect our environment now and for generations to come. It is only by working together as partners, as set out in our Wellbeing of Future generations Act that we can achieve this at a price we can all afford.