FREEDOM: Forecasting Risk to upland water treatment assets from the Environmental Exacerbation of Dissolved Organic Matter levels.

The water industry faces intensifying risks to its water treatment systems from rising dissolved organic matter (DOM) concentrations in upland raw water supplies. This is leading to rising treatment costs, drinking water quality breaches, and threats to existing infrastructure. Scottish Water (SW), the industrial partner in this proposal, working with CEH, aim to address this challenge by developing an entirely new approach to understanding, managing, and planning responses to DOM increases over the next 50 years in response to environmental change. This represents a radical departure from the current water industry focus on 'managing away' rising DOM levels in supply catchments through upland restoration, which has had only limited success.

Risks and costs of rising DOM levels are widespread. They affect other water companies, including United Utilities, Welsh Water and Irish Water, who, alongside SW and academic partners (Universities of Glasgow and Leeds), will form the Project Advisory Board and ensure continued relevance and impact of the project.

The project will build on a modelling framework developed by CEH and harness new scientific understanding to equip SW with: 1) state-of-the-art knowledge of the consequences of future environmental change for DOM levels; 2) a web-based Decision Support System (DSS) with which to anticipate where and when treatment-related thresholds are most likely to be breached; 3) the ability to more efficiently manage water treatment assets; and, 4) a robust, long-term strategic basis for sustainable catchment planning and optimised infrastructure investment. By developing these capabilities CEH will provide SW with tools to optimise mitigation (e.g. land-use interventions) and adaption (e.g. infrastructure investment) strategies.

Proposed activities and (respective Work Packages) include: finalisation of SW needs and collation of SW data in a project database (WP1); development of an existing model framework to enable forecasting of future DOM quality, quantity and Key Performance Indicators (WP2); model implementation, focussed on circa 100 SW supply catchments (WP3), generation of a spatially explicit model of current and future DOM concentrations across the UK uplands according to climate change and air pollution scenarios (WP4); and, development of the DSS incorporating web-based tools, to provide a front-end for model outputs for use by SW, and enable forecasting of future annual average and seasonal extreme raw water DOM concentrations and quality, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (WP5). Additional funding from SW will support collection of new data to assist in model parameterisation and testing.

CEH will work with SW to implement the prototype DSS, initially for a subset of 'exemplar' sites to test and subsequently showcase the application of the tool, before scaling up to the full set of catchments from WP2. Consequences for SW's KPIs will then be assessed for a range of environmental scenarios and mitigation strategies. Results will be disseminated by a CEH in a series of briefing notes to SW and through the DSS directly. Exemplar studies will be presented to the wider water industry at the end-of-project dissemination meeting. At this point other water industry partners will be given the opportunity to engage in a future beta-test of the DSS, and work more closely with CEH and each other in developing further iterations and functionality.
Ultimately, the project aims to transform approaches to rising DOM across the UK water industry, and potentially internationally.

Project duration will be 18 months. During this time, SW will independently fund a parallel project of new data collection that will help to strengthen the empirical basis and parameterisation of the model to support future use. The total cost of the project, at 80%FEC will be £135,595, with £75,000 from SW to support supplementary sampling.

The overall outcome of the project will be a complete overhaul of the water industry's approach to managing the risk of rising DOM, from one currently based on short-term, localised, reactive strategies to a much longer-term, scientifically-informed and business-led approach.
The benefits of the project to Scottish Water and the wider industry will be both immediate and direct, through access to a co-designed Decision Support System, and more gradual through consolidation of newly forged close working relationships between Scottish Water, CEH and our other industry and academic partners that will extend considerably beyond the duration of the project, through knowledge sharing and transfer mechanisms, joint studentships, and on-going research.

The primary output from the project will be the development of a co-designed web-based Decision Support System (DSS), underpinned by NERC science and informatics expertise. This will, for the first time, provide Scottish Water with the capability to predict and respond to:
1) Future DOM trajectories and extremes at current/potential future plant locations.
2) Changing chemical properties of DOM that affect treatability.
3) Catchments at most and least risk of worsening water quality.
4) The extent to which a range of catchment management options may be able to mitigate risk at specific locations.

The DSS will, therefore, enable more strategic planning, by informing industry when future investments relating to water quality issues may be required, e.g. within the next 10 or 50 years, and enable the industry to develop resilience to future climate and other environmental changes. By informing decisions on where and when to introduce catchment based solutions or new treatment assets, the project could result, over the next 50 years, in savings to the industry, and consequently to water customers, amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds.

Although Scottish Water faces particular challenges, all UK water utilities that source water from upland catchments (e.g. United Utilities, Yorkshire Water, Welsh Water, Southwest Water, Northumbrian Water, Northern Ireland Water), as well as Irish Water, face the same threat of rising DOM levels, as is indicated in the attached Letters of Support. While this project will develop the DSS to inform Scottish Waters' decision making specifically, wider co-design is ensured by the involvement of United Utilities, Welsh Water and Irish Water on the Project Advisory Board. Representatives from all interested companies will be invited to the project dissemination meeting, where they will be given the opportunity to become involved in further testing and development of the DSS in ways that may best meet their individual DOM treatment priorities. Promotion by web-based conferencing of the outcomes of the project by the Water Research Foundation will bring the outcomes of the project to an international audience and could go on to influence approaches to managing DOM increases in other parts of the world.