Chad Staddon (University of the West of England, Bristol) and Patric Bulmer (Bristol Water)
The Covid19 global pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of clean, safe and secure water services for everyone, everywhere, around the world. From a global perspective, research led by Staddon and colleagues has shown that around 25% of the global population lacks safe water services to support Covid19 mitigations such as hand hygiene. This reality, much discussed at last week’s Stockholm World Water Week (at home on-line version!), has given renewed impetus to efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6. In the UK, where we have long enjoyed universal water services, Covid19 has had other, differently profound impacts that are only just coming to light.
In this “Keynote Conversation” Chad and Patric focus particularly on four issues relevant to understanding how the water efficiency world has been changed by Covid19: short-term and long-term rebalancing of demand away from non-domestic and towards domestic consumers, the possible establishment of new consumption baselines (does the long-held domestic PCC of 140-160 lppd still hold?),with the implication that intraregional supply arrangements may need to be revised, and the “staycation” effect that has been particularly marked in the southwest.
We will talk about how all of this is changing the way we need to think about water efficiency.
