Sustainability considerations have become widely recognised in contaminated land management and are now accepted as an important component of remediation planning and implementation around the world. The Sustainable Remediation Forum for the UK (SuRF-UK) published guidance on sustainability criteria for consideration in drawing up (or framing) assessments, organised across 15 “headline” categories, five for the environment element of sustainability, five for the social, and five for the economic. This paper describes how the SuRF-UK indicator guidance was developed, and the rationale behind its structure and approach. It describes its use in remediation option appraisal in the UK, and reviews the international papers that have applied or reviewed it. It then reviews the lessons learned from its initial use and the opinions and findings of international commentators, and concludes with recommendations on how the indicator categories might be further refined in the future. The key findings of this review are that the SuRF-UK framework and indicator guidance is well adopted into practice in the UK. It is widely recognised as the most appropriate mechanism to support sustainability-based decision making in contaminated land decision making. It has influenced the development of other national and international guidance and standards on sustainable remediation. However, there is room for some fine tuning of approach based on the lessons learned during its application.

The scale of land-contamination problems, and of the responses to them, makes achieving sustainability in contaminated land remediation an important objective. The Sustainable Remediation Forum in the UK (SuRF-UK) was established in 2007 to support more sustainable remediation practices in the UK. The prevailing international consensus is that risk assessment is the most rational approach for determining remediation needs and urgency. Sustainability in this context is related to the effective delivery of whatever risk management is necessary to protect human health or the wider environment. SuRF-UK suggests that decisions made at the project planning stage, and also in the choice of remediation approach used to reach particular objectives decided upon, are both opportunities for sustainability gain. In 2011, SuRF-UK issued a set of wide-ranging indicators to support sustainability assessments made during project planning and remediation option appraisal. This advice was reviewed over 2018-2020 and new guidance on process and indicators has been released. Within this guidance, SuRF-UK has provided a checklist of possible sustainability indicators/criteria that can be used to benchmark the scope of sustainability assessment for remediation projects. These indicators are divided into 15 overarching ("headline") categories, divided in a balanced way across the three elements of sustainability: environmental (emissions to air, soil and ground conditions, groundwater and surface water, ecology, and natural resources and waste); social (human health and safety, ethics and equity, neighborhoods and locality, communities and community involvement, and uncertainty and evidence); and economic (direct economic costs and benefits, indirect economic costs and benefits, employment and employment capital, induced economic costs and benefits, and project lifespan and flexibility). The majority of this study explains these categories and their various considerations in more depth and provides the supporting rationale that led to their inclusion in the revised SuRF-UK guidance.

<p>The remediation of brownfield is vital to sustainable place-making and levelling up across the country. It provides an improved local environment that can unlock regeneration and the social, economic and ecological revitalisation of communities. However the total benefits of remediation are not fully understood or utilised in decision making. As a result, sites can remain derelict for years and opportunities to optimise value from public and private investment are missed.</p> <p>Jacobs and BGS undertook research for the Environment Agency in England to evaluate the feasibility of developing a tool, which included:</p> <ul> <li>A virtual workshop using MURAL to enable digital interaction and collaboration to refine scope, define data requirements and map project stakeholders;</li> <li>Primary benefit and user requirements research, including looking at the potential impact of a tool through the development of a Theory of Change model and focussed interviews with key stakeholders to understand user requirements.</li> <li>Review of academic and grey literature;</li> <li>Accelerated design sprint to frame the problem/opportunity, explore technology agonistic solutions for the tool and develop into a storyboard.</li> <li>Develop a low fidelity prototype as a blueprint of how a tool might look.</li> </ul> <p>The outcome of the work indicated there is both a need and demand for such a tool. It was also demonstrated to be technically feasible through the literature review and design sprint. Such a tool would have an extremely positive impact on the perceptions of brownfield, shifting it from a constraint to an opportunity. The presentation will provide a summary of the methods, an overview of the results and a demonstration of a prototype digital tool. Our disucssion will focus on the opportunities presented by using systems thinking combined with design thinking to influence the approach taken to planning and redeveloping brownfield sites.  </p>

In Groundwater Dependent Terrestrial Ecosystems (GWDTEs), atmospheric nitrogen (N) inputs have often been studied in isolation from terrestrial groundwater and surface water inputs. We describe for the first time the development and application of a combined atmospheric and terrestrial nitrogen source apportionment methodology, able to identify contributing catchment and nitrogen loadings to GWDTEs. We combined all N inputs using a site-specific conceptual model supported by 12 months monitoring for a Chalk-fed GWDTE at Newbald Becksies, East Yorkshire. We discuss implications for effective catchment management, wetland protection and development of a source apportionment methodology. Potential sources of nitrate include: atmospheric deposition, mineralisation, leaching from agricultural soils, manure heaps, septic tanks, sewer and mains water leakage. Atmospheric deposition was calculated from measurements of ammonia and nitrogen dioxide concentrations together with rainfall inputs of ammonium and nitrate. Quantification of agricultural sources used the FarmScoper modelling tool to estimate nitrate leaching in the groundwater catchment. Comparison between modelled nitrate concentrations in leachate (15–17 mg/l N) and observed groundwater nitrate concentrations (12.3–19.8 mg/l N) are good. The majority of nitrate is leached from arable land. FarmScoper allows mitigation scenarios to be tested, supporting measures to reduce nitrate within a groundwater catchment.