The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 108

Guest:  Lee Pitcher, MP for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Water

Sponge cities to tackle urban flooding

Today's podcast is another special episode recorded live in front of an audience for the second of the latest Twin Talks interview series hosted by Bentley Systems.

As with the first TwinTalk event with construction minister Sarah Jones MP, today’s episode heads to Parliament for a conversation with Lee Pitcher, MP for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, chair of the all Party Parliamentary Group on Water, and, up until the General Election in July, an engineering consultant with decades of experience in the water sector.

Today’s episode focuses on the creation of so-called Sponge Cities and specifically gets Lee’s thoughts on the findings of a new White Paper produced by Bentley Systems and water consultancy Aqua Consultants. This paper presents a rake of new thinking to tackle the growing and urgent problem of urban, pluvial flooding caused as our drainage systems become overwhelmed by increasingly intense rainfall and more frequent extreme weather events.

As we see on the news every year, flooding is not a new problem. But unlike river flooding, pluvial floods can strike anywhere, causing significant damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure.

And as the new Creating Sponge Cities to Tackle Surface Water Flooding white paper points out, urbanisation, outdated drainage systems, and climate change are compounding the issue

But solutions are at hand in the form of Sponge Cities – embracing sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), green infrastructure solutions and a range of new strategies to create cities designed to absorb, store, and manage water more effectively.

But of course, despite the obvious economic and social costs of inaction, we still seem to be struggle to embrace change. The question is why. How can we influence and shape the policy landscape, and embrace the collaborative role of planners, engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders to shaping the future of sustainable water management?

Lee is a great person to ask – so I started by finding out why another report might help prompt the required change?

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