How Nature can help remove the strange things that man adds to water:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-17/designing-wetlands-to-remove-drugs-and-chemical-pollutants

The importance of Wetlands to Drinking water supply

Water as a source of city heat

River Heatmap: showing where heat pumps could make a useful contribution

There are two shining examples of this technology in practice in the UK: a 2MW installation at Kingston Heights on the River Thames in London and a 300kW one at Plas Newydd on the Menai Straits in north Wales.

Biodiversity and corporate sustainability

http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2014/06/biodiversity-next-step-sustainability.html#more-30912

In terms of innovation and opportunity, businesses have invented a number of ways to use biodiversity to create value. These are just a few of the more popular ideas:

• Market biodiversity and its protection as a key value proposition to customers
• Leverage cross-sector partnerships to promote transparency
• Look to big data to support decision-making
• Utilize natural processes to replace cost-side efforts
• Build new products inspired by or directly using biodiversity and biomimicry
• Account for biodiversity as a revenue-generating asset

Read more here:

New Sensors

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edyn/edyn-welcome-to-the-connected-garden

People for Smarter Cities, water examples

http://people4smartercities.com/series/big-buy-how-city-and-its-citizens-got-smart-about-water

How models help understand climate change

https://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_schmidt_the_emergent_patterns_of_climate_change

Surveying sewers with little risk

I could see this surveying sewer systems in minutes without getting wet:

The video is worth seeing to understand its agility and accuracy

http://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d_andrea_the_astounding_athletic_power_of_quadcopters

When water quality data goes public

Kickstarter funded smart infrastructure

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3029546/with-googles-help-nycs-floating-river-pool-will-tell-us-how-much-poop-is-in-the-water?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcoexist%2Ffeed+%28Co.Exist%29

Major infrastructure often requires biodiversity offsetting

The real game is Net Positive Gain for the environment because all business, especially the water industry is a wholly owned subsidiary of the natural environment

This explains what offsetting  is is all about:
https://royalsociety.org/events/2013/biodiversity-offsetting/

https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/z_events/2013/policylab/bee-to-size.jpg

More on the potential for 3D concrete printing

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140414-new-photos-of-10-green-3d-printed-houses-in-shanghai-built-in-24-hours.html

Space for water

http://thomortiz.tumblr.com/post/16464679470/nastassiaxv-open-air-theater-and-rain-water

fuel-cell-gets-the-power-out-of-poo

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/fuel-cell-gets-the-power-out-of-poo/5307514

To treat wastewater  takes  about:1,800 kilojoules. (half a kilowatt hour per metre cubed)

The wastewater itself contains about : 7,600 kilojoules of energy in each metre cubed 

If you want to stop people putting wetwipes into the sewer system causing blockages, you need Design Thinking akin to IDEO:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/ideo-partner-fred-dust-on/id775460758?i=202308003&mt=2

ESG necessary for investment

ESG the new phrase for sustainability
Environment, Social and Governance. Without it investment is high risk.

How to get Ketchup out of a bottle

Could this transform blockages at key locations in the sewer network?

How to get ketchup out of a bottle..

Amusing but important - why business is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature: Natural Capital explained

Smarter Snow plough to reduce impact of weather on cities:

http://mashable.com/2013/12/17/smart-snowplow/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_source=rss&utm_reader=feedly&utm_content=buffer71d07&utm_medium=twitter



The idea is to pull together a much more detailed picture:

• GPS data, 
• is the plough in action, 
• is the anti lock system being activiated. 

This combined with weather,radar  and social media data gives a much better picture of actually what the weather is doing 

Creating Resilient Sewage treatment

Wetlands Transform a City’s Sewage Through a Bit of Solar Alchemy

Every evening, when the twilight sky casts its spell across Kolkata’s Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, motorists whizzing toward the airport can catch a glimpse of an eerie-looking expanse of water peeking from behind the area’s gaudy billboards along the city’s eastern fringe. Most have no idea that they’re looking at the lungs and kidneys of their city.

The East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW) are a key component of Kolkata’s waste-management resilience. Abutting this city of five million, the 12,500 hectare space, which includes about 4,000 hectares of sewage-fed bheries (fisheries), has managed to survive the onslaught of Kokata’s eastward urbanization. No more than one meter deep, this unique ecological zone’s sewage-fed aquaculture and garbage-fed horticulture provide the city with a natural waste recycling process not quite replicated anywhere else in the world. Indeed, it is the only sewage treatment “facility” that exists within the city limits of Kolkata, and offers a key element of redundancy to the city’s overtaxed waste-management systems.

http://100resilientcities.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/entry/wetlands-transform-a-citys-sewage-through-a-bit-of-solar-alchemy

If all the ice melted... a map from National Geographical

The full interactive map is here

The importance of Systems Engineering

http://www.raeng.org.uk/education/vps/pdf/RAE_Systems_Report.pdf

The importance of Systems Engineering

NASA specified and developed, at great expense, a

ball point pen that Apollo astronauts could use in

spacewhere gravity would not make the ink flow.

Russian cosmonauts used pencils.

Moral:specify what you want to achieve, not how to achieve it