The water industry needs more private investment to enable improvements to the environment in the face of mounting challenges, the chair of the Environment Agency has said.
Speaking at the 2021 Water Security Conference Emma Howard Boyd said without increased private investment the sector was “too reliant on government interventions”.
She said that in the next five years the industry will face difficult decisions about how water will be allocated, valued and funded.
“We do need more private investors to explore the economic opportunity in improvements to the natural world,” she added.
Ofwat’s interim chief executive David Black said, at the previous day’s event, that the environment had been a lower priority in price reviews, but it would now be a central focus along with customers.
Aside from funding, Howard Boyd spoke about how ensuring there was sufficient available water in the future was a job for everyone and urged the industry to think about “people and communities, not customers”.
Outlining the scale of the challenge in the UK, she noted there could be 10 to 15 per cent less water available by 2050 if no action to reduce consumption is taken and there would be insufficient resources to meet the demands of people, industry and agriculture.
On a global scale, Howard Boyd warned that drought could be the next pandemic for which there is no cure. She said the number of people lacking sufficient water was set to soar from 3.6 billion to more than 5 billion by 2050.
“Whatever ignites the mass migrations and conflicts of this century, they will be lit on the tinderbox of nature in drought.”