For the fifth consecutive year, PSIPW sent a party-level delegate to the Conference of the parties (COP), the 26th iteration of which took place in Glasgow, Scotland from 31 October to 13 November 2021.
The COP26 summit brought parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
PSIPW was represented by its 2016 Water Management Prize laureate, Dr. Jim W. Hall, Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. Professor Hall advised on “physical climate risk analytics to inform adaptation-aligned finance”. Professor Hall has carried out extensive research on unlocking private capital in efforts to ameliorate the effects of climate change.
PSIPW, in previous years, has advised COP on the impact of climate change on groundwater management and on effective rain and floodwater harvesting in storage under the uncertainties of climate change.
Professor Hall and his colleague Dr. Edoardo Borgomeo, won PSIPW’s Water Management & Protection Prize in 2016 for developing and applying a new risk-based framework to assess water security and plan water supply infrastructure in times of climate change. Their innovations include a simulation-based method for analysing the risk to public water supplies under non-stationary climate conditions, a new non-parametric technique for generating synthetic streamflow sequences for water resources systems assessments, a new method for simulating the impact of unprecedented droughts on public water supplies, and a process for identifying water security investments that meet an acceptable level of water-related risk.
Their methods assist water managers in planning investments and policies to cope with the risks confronting their water systems. This has made them one of the most influential groups providing engineering and scientific advice for water resources planning and adaptation to climate risks in the UK and globally.