Rethinking River Health: Capgemini and Additive Catchments approach to transforming water industry performance

The health of our rivers is in dire straits. Up to 90% of England’s most precious river habitats have been destroyed by pollution, only 14% of the UK’s rivers are in good ecological health, every single one fails to meet chemical standards, and an alarming 75% pose a serious risk to human health.

Here, Iain Fry, Industry Advisor at Capgemini discusses the need for a new approach to investment and decision-making in the water sector to address this crisis.

The issue of river health provides a perfect backdrop to the industry’s ever-expanding portfolio of challenges, opportunities, and obligations that the industry is required to address over the next five years. It’s a great example of how problems need to be approached differently and how to find ways to disrupt decision-making so that a material step change in performance is possible.

As a CIO, I’m continually developing my thinking on the evolving digital operating model for businesses; striving to ensure it promotes and drives the value that technology undoubtedly creates, alongside the need to provide long-term sustainable performance.

The need to invest more in river water quality sits alongside the need to invest more across the industry’s whole asset base, be that below-ground pipes and networks, or above-ground treatment and processes. The challenge lies in creating the right balance and prioritisation of investment portfolios that are deliverable, effective, and affordable to customers.

At more than £100bn, the scale of the industry asset investment over AMP8 is so much bigger than ever before. There is a real risk that resource and material constraints across the supply chain, the five-year timeline, and the ever-present affordability assessment mean traditional approaches won’t be sufficient. Therefore, solutions must be challenged.

At Capgemini, we have the necessary breadth of knowledge, digital engineering capability and industry experience to help support the water sector in delivering these huge environmental undertakings.

We recognise that simply trying to build our way through this huge wave of investment is unlikely to be successful. In collaboration with our partner, Additive Catchments, we’ve been developing approaches to help better balance solutions and investment portfolios across physical, digital, and nature-based interventions.

Our new collaboration with Additive Catchments will support UK water companies to address the ongoing river health crisis. We recently announced a key partnership with Additive Catchments to scale their Catchment Monitoring as a Service (CMaaS®) platform. The CMaaS® platform leads the way in waterway health management, utilising advanced monitoring, systems thinking, and AI to offer water companies a comprehensive view of catchment areas, enabling precise, actionable insights tailored to their unique needs.

Through our work with Additive Catchments, we are uniquely positioned to combine this innovative platform with our leading digital capabilities, engineering expertise, and deep knowledge and understanding of the UK water sector.

Our teams not only work with most of the UK’s largest water companies, but we also attract and recruit our advisory, strategic, and consulting teams from within the sector. This, alongside our extensive ecosystem of partners across a global network of scientific, operational, engineering and academic organisations, ensures that we’re able to draw from the very best minds and thinking available.   

Having a strong strategic focus on the impact of addressing river water quality is paramount in ensuring the sustainability and enduring nature of solutions within our clients’ businesses. By applying a laser-sharp lens on the role of digital capabilities, and particularly how they will continue to influence and shape operating models, we ensure that both the solutions and the organisational capabilities required to deliver and support them are fully future-proofed.

Current regulation is structured such that a solid foundational platform can be established in delivering enhanced monitoring of river water quality. But this is only the start. To deliver on improving the overall health of our rivers, we need interventions that allow us to engage our focus across all concerned stakeholders and further embrace innovative thinking into our solutions. The presence and, ultimately, awareness of pathogens, PFAS and pharmaceuticals in our waterways continues to accelerate exponentially. With that in mind, we must ensure we’re at the forefront of solutions that can react quickly enough to keep pace. Digital solutions sit at the heart of our thinking and align seamlessly with the evolving role that the digital footprint of organisations will continue to play in shaping the performance of individual water companies and the sector as a whole.

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With deep expertise in the water sector, Capgemini is your business and technology partner for the investment in smart rivers. We have now expanded our capabilities and are pleased to announce we are partnering with Additive Catchments to lead the AI-driven transformation of UK river health. The partnership addresses the urgent need for continuous water quality monitoring mandated by the 2021 Environment Act, and together we aim to deliver high-assurance data and insights, helping water companies and stakeholders comply with regulations, tackle pollution, and drive meaningful environmental improvements. Discover more in our press release here:

Additive Catchments and Capgemini partner to lead AI-driven transformation of UK river health.

Water Quality Report 2023