New president urges water focus

Failure to tackle the issues thrown up by flooding, excessive rainfall and drought will “put us in the unappealing position of the Ancient Mariner, recognising what we have done only when it is too late”, he says in his presidential address, Living with the Albatross, which he was due to deliver at the Royal Society in London on 8 May, as BSj went to press.

In it, he praises the carbon emission efforts of past presidents but said these now needed to be built upon, which CIBSE was ideally placed to do thanks to the diversity of its members’ skills and the knowledge they could bring to bear on climate problems.

In an interview with BSj, Swaffield calls for a water issues group to be created within CIBSE.

“There’s a space in the market,” he said. “The Institution of Civil Engineers and the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management tend to look at these issues outside a building’s boundary, such as large-scale civil systems. Inside a building, the rainwater, recycling and harvesting are all within the remit of CIBSE.”

Even outside a building’s immediate boundaries, building services engineers would be drawn into work on sustainable urban drainage, time-delay run-offs and holding tank design, he said, so CIBSE should influence planning processes to ensure overall water conservation and use.