UK Thematic Forums

The three UK thematic forums will aim to create a space for debate and tackling controversial issues. Although individual, each forum will be interconnected and relevant to wider cross-sector industries as well as the water sector.

Each forum will align with the Congress’s overall themes:

🌱 Partnering with nature and adapting to extremes 🌱

♻️ Water cycle: ensuring long term resilience ♻️

⚠️ Water and health: emerging threats ⚠️

    • Climate and nature crisis

    • Landscape scale

    • Long term resilience outcomes

    • Systems (e.g. built/natural)

    • Case studies

    • Challenges

    • Systems planning

    • Collective action

    • Governance and finance

    • Delivery at scale

    • UN - IPCC, IPBES etc.

    • EU institutions

    • UK Government/policy representatives

    • UK water sector

    • Other infrastructure

    • International water sector

    • Environmental representatives

    • eNGOs

    • Land and estate managers

    • Green finance reps/investors

    • Academia

With all catchments anticipated to deteriorate due to the effects of climate change, nature based solutions have never been so important. This forum will be split into two halves, with the first focusing on what is climate change and the importance of nature adaption, and the second exploring how we can overcome global challenges and implement climate based solutions.

Nature & Resilience Forum

    • Turning waste into value

    • Designing for circularity

    • Partnerships for progress

    • Data and digital

    • Circular leadership

    • Best knowledge sharing

    • Explore how circular economy principles can transform water, energy, and material management.

    • Showcase best-in-class global examples of circular innovation.

    • Drive cross-sector collaboration to identify shared opportunities across the water value chain.

    • Water utilities and regulators​

    • Sustainability and resource management professionals​

    • Circular economy practitioners and innovation leads​

    • ​Start-ups, policymakers, and solution providers​

    • Academics and researchers

Circular economy thinking can turn today’s waste streams into tomorrow’s energy, nutrients, and high-value materials. This forum will aim to create a shared global framework for identifying practical actions to accelerate circular economy adoption and explore partnerships outside the water sector that will help aid this.

Valuing Resources Forum

One Health Forum

Water and and society's health are highly interconnected, therefore, it's important that we address current and emerging threats to water quality and reliability. This forum will explore the idea of global harmonisation of standards and what skills, capacity and partnerships are needed to achieve desirable outcomes.

    • Water and our health

    • Water and our food

    • Standards, monitoring and analytics

    • Upstream interventions

    • Examine current and emerging threats to water quality.

    • Encourage meaningful participation and dialogue among participants.

    • Foster cross-sector collaboration.

    • Identify gaps in research, regulation and guidance and propose actionable solutions.

    • Promote One Health concept as framework for integrated water and health strategies.

    • Academic researchers in water, health and environmental sciences.

    • Public health teams and epidemiologists

    • Water utilities and infrastructure developers

    • Supply chain

    • Environmental and health regulators

    • NGOs and community representatives