The COVID-19 pandemic led to drastically altered working practices. During the UK lockdown, a questionnaire was distributed to water professionals to understand their experiences and perceptions of organisational response. Findings were evaluated on the measures of mitigation, adaptation, coping and learning. Employees' perceived there were adequate procedures to mitigate a threat, partly due to preparations for Brexit. Participants quickly adapted, with eighty-four percent working from home. Coping was experienced at an individual and sector level. IT issues and care responsibilities made it harder for individuals to cope, but good communication and signposting of support helped. Eighty percent felt able to continue their usual role, implying coping mechanisms were effective. At the sector level, coping involved the ability to meet an increased water demand with a remote workforce. Lessons learned highlight the importance of communication and collaboration. Future crisis plans should prepare for prolonged crises of international magnitude and multiple threats.

Academic research and technological innovation associated with rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems in the UK has seen a shift of emphasis in recent years. Traditional design approaches use whole life cost assessments that prioritise financial savings associated with the provision of an alternative water supply. However, researchers and practitioners are increasingly recognising broader benefits associated with rainwater reuse, such as stormwater attenuation benefits. This paper identifies and describes a set of novel RWH system configurations that have potential for deployment in UK houses. Conceptual schematics are provided to define these innovations alongside traditional configurations. Discussion of the drivers supporting these configurations illustrates the opportunities for RWH deployment in a wide range of settings. A quantitative multi criteria analysis was used to evaluate and score the configurations under a range of emerging criteria. The work identifies several RWH system configurations that can outperform traditional ones in terms of specified cost and benefits. Selection of a specific RWH technology is shown to be highly dependent on user priorities. It is proposed that the system configurations highlighted could enable RWH to be cost-effectively installed in a broad set of contexts that have experienced minimal exploitation to date.

Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) have become a key tool in the design of water sensitive cities, due to their capacity to store and attenuate surface water, and to treat runoff. SuDS implementation requires a complex alignment of planning frameworks, engineering designs, construction practices, maintenance processes, community buy-in and ownership agreements. To understand this alignment, and build an evidence base on the implementation and management of UK SuDS, a questionnaire was distributed to 50 000 industry professionals by the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. The findings suggested that SuDS are beginning to become the norm, although 'harder' solutions tend to prevail. Additionally, design and construction remain weakly regulated, and there is a lack of clear legal framework on SuDS ownership and maintenance. Expert practitioners supported the need for a single adoption method, coordinated by the local authority and suggested policy changes to make SuDS obligatory.

Wastewater surveillance has been widely implemented for monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and near-to-source monitoring is of particular interest for outbreak management in discrete populations. However, variation in population size poses a challenge to the triggering of public health interventions using wastewater SARS-CoV-2 concentrations. This is especially important for near-to-source sites that are subject to significant daily variability in upstream populations. Focusing on a university campus in England, this study investigates methods to account for variation in upstream populations at a site with highly transient footfall and provides a better understanding of the impact of variable populations on the SARS-CoV-2 trends provided by wastewater-based epidemiology. The potential for complementary data to help direct response activities within the near-to-source population is also explored, and potential concerns arising due to the presence of heavily diluted samples during wet weather are addressed. Using wastewater biomarkers, it is demonstrated that population normalisation can reveal significant differences between days where SARS-CoV-2 concentrations are very similar. Confidence in the trends identified is strongest when samples are collected during dry weather periods; however, wet weather samples can still provide valuable information. It is also shown that building-level occupancy estimates based on complementary data aid identification of potential sources of SARS-CoV-2 and can enable targeted actions to be taken to identify and manage potential sources of pathogen transmission in localised communities.

The unprecedented scale and impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic have required organizations to adapt all facets of their operations. The impact on the UK water sector extends beyond engineering and treatment processes, with social, economic and environmental consequences. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with executives from 10 UK water companies to investigate the organizational response to the pandemic, and how their response impacted operational delivery. The Safe and SuRe framework was used to structure interview questions and analysis. Emergent themes of changes to customer behaviour, changes to operational practices and industry collaboration were mapped onto the framework and a ripple effect map developed. Lessons learnt highlight a failure to adequately prepare for the scale of the threat, the success of sector‐level collaboration and a need to embrace new ways of working.

Enhancing resilience in urban drainage systems (UDSs) can be achieved by implementing a range of strategies that minimise the magnitude and duration of flooding during or after the occurrence of unexpected system failures. Dual-purpose rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems provide a promising multifunctional resilience-enhancing strategy due to their associated multiple benefits such as water conservation and distributed control of storm water. However, their effectiveness in respect to minimisation of resulting flooding impacts and provision of alternative water supplies during unexpected system failures has not been explicitly investigated at a city district or catchment scale. This paper applies the global resilience analysis approach to investigate the effect of implementing a set of multifunctional RWH strategies on improvement of UDS resilience to random cumulative link (sewer) failure, using a case study of the Nakivubo system in Kampala, Uganda. The resulting water supply resilience enhancement benefits are also investigated. The study results reveal that catchment-scale implementation of suitably designed RWH systems provides an effective strategy that improves the system's global resilience to flooding by up to 25%, while simultaneously providing up to 30% of the household water supply requirements in the case study area.

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Rainwater harvesting systems are often used as both an alternative water source and a stormwater management tool. Many studies have focused on the water-saving potential of these systems, but research into aspects that impact stormwater retention-such as demand patterns and climate change-is lacking. This paper investigates the short-term impact of demand on both water supply and stormwater management and examines future and potential performance over a longer time scale using climate change projections. To achieve this, data was collected from domestic rainwater harvesting systems in Broadhempston, UK, and used to create a yield-after-spillage model. The validation process showed that using constant demand as opposed to monitored data had little impact on accuracy. With regards to stormwater management, it was found that monitored households did not use all the non-potable available water, and that increasing their demand for this was the most effective way of increasing retention capacity based on the modelling study completed. Installing passive or active runoff control did not markedly improve performance. Passive systems reduced the outflow to greenfield runoff for the longest time, whereas active systems increased the outflow to a level substantially above roof runoff in the 30 largest events.Research measuring the performance of these systems in the UK is limited to monitored commercial buildings [7]; few household-scale empirical studies have been performed and are limited to single homes [8,9]. Studies in the USA have examined the stormwater performance of specifically designed active release systems which were emptied automatically before storm events [10]. However, these systems were large and installed on high-demand industrial facilities and not intended for domestic use. The long-term stormwater management of domestic systems designed for water supply is unclear.Other studies have conceptualised the systems' performance through modelling either at an allotment, neighbourhood or catchment scale. Xu et al. [11] modelled the ability of three types of allotment-scale RWH systems to simultaneously deliver the dual benefits discussed above in addition to river baseflow restoration. Using a historic 11 year rainfall dataset, they defined six metrics (the efficiency and frequency of water supply, baseflow and retention) to quantify system performance. These indicators were average values and did not indicate behaviour during storm events with specific return periods, which are of interest to drainage designers.More detailed models, such as the study of a sewer catchment in Palermo by Freni and Liuzzo [12] and the catchment response framework developed by Jamali et al. [13] capture the stormwater management of RWH systems on a larger scale. Due to the size of their spatial grid, the temporal resolution of these models was often low, in the order of daily [12] or hourly [13] time steps. Campisano and Modica [14] illustrated that their mass-balance approach proved unreliable for the evaluation of water supply ...