Thames Water

Thames Water provides the essential service that’s at the heart of daily life, health and enjoyment. This involves:

• Treating and supplying 2,600 million litres of water per day to nine million people
• Transporting and treating 4 billion litres of sewage per day for 14M people
• Maintaining a vast pipe network that, if laid end-to-end, would stretch more than three times around the world

Anything that can potentially impact on the delivery of this essential service needs to be understood and planned for. Climate change is one such potential impact.

Responding to climate change, population growth, tackling leakage, improving water efficiency and delivering high-quality customer service have been identified as the top priorities for the company and our customers for the future. For details of Thames Water’s plans up to 2015 along with their plans for water resources.

Dr Keith Colquhoun

Keith is the Climate Change Strategy Manager at Thames Water responsible for ensuring that the business understands the potential impacts of climate change and also where possible reduce its contribution to the cause of climate change. He has been involved with the LCCP since its inception, contributing to several of its key reports. He was the author of Thames Water’s Adaptation Reporting Power response that describes the company’s understanding and preparedness to the impacts of climate change on the business – to download the reponse.

In addition, he has helped Thames Water reduce its Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions to 16% below 1990 levels despite serving the equivalent of three million more customers and meeting more stringent drinking water quality and wastewater effluent targets.

Keith says: “Thames Water have made some real progress in responding to climate change but needs to do more.” He also says that Thames Water can not respond in isolation and that by working with the LCCP and other organisations we can all work towards a future that is more adapted and less impacted upon by climate change.