ITRC Stakeholder Workshop, The Royal Statistical Society, London, 6th November 2012

The second ITRC Stakeholder Workshop was held at The Royal Statistical Society, on November 6^th 2012. The workshop presented an opportunity for project partners, stakeholders and the Expert Advisory Group of the ITRC project to hear about progress on the main work packages from a wide range of researchers and investigators, and again offer their opinions and feedback as to what aspects of the programme they would like to know more about, or become further engaged with.

Those attending the workshop, included representation from industry, government and academia who participate in infrastructure provision, maintenance, delivery and research, including:

Government / Pseudo-government	Research / Academia	Infrastructure / Utility Providers	Engineering Consultancies	Local Government	Other
Committee on Climate Change	University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamaigne	BP International	Atkins	Hampshire County Council	Institution of Civil Engineers
Department of Energy and Climate Change	ECI, University of Oxford	United Utilities	Black & Veatch		CIRIA
Department for Transport	University of Cambridge	Northumbrian Water Ltd	JBA Trust
Highways Agency	Imperial College London	Thames Water	John Dora Consulting Limited
Climate UK	University of Southampton	National Grid	Bam Nuttall Ltd
Environment Agency	University of Oxford		COSTAIN Group
DEFRA	University of Leeds		Parsons Brickerhoff
HM Treasury	University of Newcastle		AECOM
EPSRC	University of Exeter		CH2M HILL
	National Soil Resources Institute, Cranfield University		MWH
	Sandia National Laboratories
	University of Birmingham
	TU Delft, Netherlands
	University College London
	Judges School, Cambridge
	University of Wollongong, Australia
	University of Sussex
	UKCIP, University of Oxford

 

During the workshop, presentations were delivered by various members of ITRC, including the following:

–          ITRC Infrastructure Strategies (WS1): Alex Lorenz (Oxford University)

–          Process for conducting the next cycle of ITRC assessment (WS5): Robert Nicholls (Southampton University)

–          Infrastructure Risk Analysis and the ITRC Infrastructure Database (WS2, WS4): Raghav Pant (Oxford University), Stuart Barr (Newcastle University)

One of key aims of the workshop was to help guide aspects of WS1, and consult stakeholders about reviewing and identifying infrastructure options and begin to build cross-sector strategies. This process was coordinated by Alex Lorenz (WS1 Researcher) and Roger Street (ITRC Stakeholder Champion), and required stakeholders to review the proposed infrastructure options from ITRC within each infrastructure sector (energy, water / waste, transport) for their completeness and priority for evaluation. The options proposed within each sector represent a change or alternative to the current status, possibly in terms of structural change, or influencing supply and/or demand. For example, consideration of the electrification of transport could be considered an option within the energy sector. Furthermore, this led to consideration of cross-sector strategies whereby options from different sectors can be considered together e.g. energy-transport options, or energy-water options for example.

The workshop also presented an opportunity to showcase the custom network database schema developed within Geospatial Engineering @ Newcastle, and the Python linking architecture coupled to that. This system is being used to build national and regional-scale infrastructure network models to then subsequently form part of the infrastructure risk analysis being carried out in WS2. If you would like to read more about this, please see a previous post here.

Further to the afore-mentioned, ITRC-specific presentations, the audience also heard from two external speakers, who delivered keynote addresses on complex adaptive system modelling, and future finance options for infrastructure provision:

–          Complex Adaptive Systems modelling to inform policy decisions: Theresa Brown (Sandia National Laboratory)

–          New business models for national infrastructure provision: Simon Taylor (University of Cambridge)

Stakeholder workshops such as this, provide project partners with a direct opportunity to get involved in the various aspects of the consortium, and help to continue the consortium’s success to date with stakeholder engagement and co-production, a key deliverable and consideration of WS5. This process will continue with the next cycle of assessment as part of WS5.