Lunchtime Seminar with Simon Spooner

Speaker Bio: Simon Spooner is an Associate Director at AtkinsRéalis, a technical consultancy with about 36,000 professional staff worldwide. His has been elected AtkinsRéalis Fellow for Water Quality and Carbon, one of 40 top technical experts in the company. His day to day work now mostly focuses on improving the water quality of our rivers and resilience of our water resources. He has spent nearly half his career in China working on water policy and technical exchange between Europe and China and also as a Director of Atkins Urban Planning business there. His work covers climate change and novel ways of planning transition to truly sustainably living. He is a fellow of the institute of Environmental Sciences, Chair of the Foundation for Water Research and an Honorary Professor of Nottingham University, UK and Ningbo (China) campuses.

Talk Title: Combustion Transition / Embracing the Biosphere: Novel ways to become a truly sustainable society

Talk Summary: In the last few centuries, we have built a comfortable industrial society with combustion energy released from the carbon laid down by past and present living things. We feed ourselves by clearing their land for our simplified farm ecosystems and carelessly pollute the world. We power ourselves from the great disequilibrium in the atmosphere that they created. Our water comes from reaching ever further upstream for fresh water and dumping our waste as close to our doorstep and with as little treatment as we can get away with. We have now learnt how to get the energy we need from renewable sources and to utilise it with electrical systems that cause little pollution, we are beginning to learn how to better manage land, giving space to other living things and to work with more diverse and complex ecosystems to provide both food and a wider range of ecosystem services. There is a great deal still to learn about how we must change our energy and food systems and then the vast challenge of building whole new infrastructure and land management systems. How do we transition from consuming and despoiling the natural ecosystem to living as part of that system with infrastructure and behaviour that replenishes and enhances, compared to a world without us. This talk will set out a novel set of principles for this, metrics to track progress and plan action, and a framework for implementation of change by engaging stakeholders at all levels to transform their local infrastructure to provide the services they need by working in partnership with nature.