“IF THE 20th century was the era of the engineer, the 21st century is going to be the era of the environmentalist.” This is the stark prediction of Nick Reeves, head of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. If he is right, environmental scientists will have their work cut out in the coming decades. “The pressure is really on the science community to develop the technofix solutions we’re going to need,” he says.
Air and water pollution, mountains of waste, loss of biodiversity, climate change – it’s an intimidating list of problems to fix. So what are the growth areas for the future? And which skills will be in demand?
The environmental sector has already come a long way since the 1970s, when concerns about the environment really took off. In the UK, the environmental sector now employs some 170,000 people in monitoring, research, consultancy and charities and has a turnover of around £16 billion a year – and it is predicted to grow.
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Water supply will be one of the profession’s biggest growth areas in the coming years, according to Reeves, due to a rush of house building in the south-east coupled with declining rainfall. “London is now drier than Barcelona,” Reeves says. “Where is the water going to come from to supply this growing population?” Water companies have made huge strides cutting down leakage in recent years, he says. “But there is still a lot of work to do on the antiquated system we inherited from the Victorians.”
The irony is that despite the large number of environmental degrees and master’s courses on offer, water professionals are in short supply. This is due, in part, to the national shortage of engineers, but also to a lack of awareness about the profession. After all, a water engineer is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of an environmentalist. The answer, says Reeves, is to improve the communication skills of those already working in the sector to make the profession more visible. “We need people who can enthuse the public and be real advocates for environmental issues,” he says.
One of those advocates is John Lawton, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. NERC funds research to the tune of around £300 million a year across an extraordinarily broad range that covers terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems, hydrology, the atmosphere, the oceans and the polar regions. One of the challenges of the next decade will be to ensure that these disciplines work closely together, reflecting the interdependence of the Earth’s systems, Lawton says. “What happens in the biosphere influences the atmosphere and there’s a strong coupling between the atmosphere and the oceans…it’s arguably the most complex system that scientists have ever tried to understand.”
A key component of this complex global system is the Atlantic current that brings warm water northwards and helps keep the weather in north-west Europe and North America relatively mild. Some models suggest that global warming could cause this circulation to slow or even shut down within a decade. In 2001, the NERC began funding a £20 million programme called RAPID, based at the Southampton Oceanography Centre, that aims to predict the likelihood of such an event by modelling past and future changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar ice caps. “It’s low probability but high impact,” says Meric Srokosz, scientific coordinator for RAPID. Dozens of research projects are being allocated funds, and most of the results should be in by 2007.
Srokosz agrees that interdisciplinary skills are going to be in high demand in the environmental sector. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs working on RAPID, for example, need to have a handle on ice core and sediment studies, meteorology, oceanography, numerical modelling and statistics. There is a shortage of people with the appropriate breadth of knowledge and skills, so RAPID will take on talented scientists from related disciplines and provide them with training.
With research like this there is a lot more than academic curiosity at stake: climate change could cost lives. In Europe, the hot summer of 2003 may have led to as many as 35,000 deaths, according to a report in June from the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen. The economic costs are massive too: €10 billion a year and rising as a result of climate-related events, says the report. “Politicians ignore climate change at their peril,” says Jacqueline McGlade, director of the EEA.
McGlade thinks that along with legislation, the key to many environmental problems will be market-based solutions such as the European Emissions Trading Scheme, which comes into force in January 2005. This allows businesses to trade greenhouse gas credits. A similar scheme could even work for waste, she says.
In the future, close attention will be paid to the environmental costs of products. Some companies have voluntarily begun to assess the impact of their manufacturing processes and products on the environment. In “life cycle assessment” (LCA), for example, the environmental costs of a particular product are quantified, from the sourcing of raw materials via manufacturing and consumer use, to disposal. In particular, LCA looks at energy input at every stage, and resultant CO2 emissions. Unilever, the consumer products multinational, is one of the pioneers of this approach. It has conducted LCA surveys of its dishwasher tablets and laundry detergents. Henry King, head of Unilever’s corporate safety group in Colworth, Bedfordshire, says that in coming years this kind of environmental awareness will become the norm, as European Union legislation such as the Integrated Products Policy starts to force companies to minimise the environmental impact of their products. “To date it’s been very much an internal initiative,” King says. “But in future it will become embedded in legislation and thinking.” New legislation means more work for the UK’s burgeoning consultancy sector and the Environment Agency, the government body in charge of environmental protection.
On the academic research front, Lawton identifies several areas that the NERC will promote in the coming decade. These include the effects of climate change on health – through the emergence of new disease vectors, for example – and the development of genetically modified crops that produce polymers which can be turned into plastics without using petroleum.
Many of the technologies to reduce energy consumption and manage resources better already exist. But he is sceptical about individuals making lifestyle changes such as leaving their cars in the garage or taking fewer holidays abroad. “The challenge for scientists and technologists and economists will be to develop systems that allow people to continue to have fulfilling and enriching lives without the lights going out and without buggering up the planet.”
So what’s it like?
Peter Garbett, 32, environmental regulation adviser at Severn Trent Water
Day to day? It’s my job to make sure that Severn Trent complies with environmental laws when we dispose of waste water. We have to monitor the quality of sewage effluent and liaise with the Environment Agency on regulatory permits. In the past, I’ve been in the drinking water side of the business, taking samples and organising monitoring. Some days I was at the sharp end of customers’ tongues; others were more relaxing, taking samples in the countryside.
Why? It’s got to be worthwhile when you’ve got people picnicking and fishing by rivers that were once grossly polluted, with limited aquatic life. Now you’re seeing not just fish recovering but the whole food chain – insects, birds and flowers.
Way in? I took an environmental science degree at the University of Plymouth and got a placement with Severn Trent in the summer holidays. It was a great job for a student – half lab-based and half outdoors, wandering about the countryside in a van taking river samples…a whistle-stop tour of the company’s operation. When I left university I got a job paper-pushing at British Gas. I was desperately looking for work in the environment sector, so when I saw an ad in the paper from Severn Trent I applied – and got it.
Best bits? I work with a great bunch. We’ve got some very committed people here. I used to be on standby, when you can be phoned in the middle of the night about a problem. There are guys who go and sort out the problem while most of the population is sleeping. The other good thing is variety. I’d hate to be in a production-type job where you’re just stamping a piece of metal and passing it to the next person. Here you feel like you own something important.
Worst bits? My only gripe is that the environmental work isn’t seen as valuable because it doesn’t make money. People take water for granted. You go to dinner parties and tell people you work for a water company and they say, “I thought water just fell out of the sky and straight into the mains.” The only time we make the press is when something goes wrong. Fortunately that doesn’t happen too often.
