Celebrating our new laboratory capabilities
Welcome, and may I add my thanks to you all for coming today.
I am delighted to be here with colleagues and partners to celebrate the opening of the refurbished laboratory at Olympia House.
Today marks an important moment to take stock of the amazing work our laboratory and field staff do in giving us the data and information we need to help protect and enhance the environment as part of sustainable development.
Understanding environmental data
The Environment Agency is a huge data producer and consumer. That is hardly surprising as we exist to influence a hugely complex system – that of our environment.
It is a system in a constant state of change. We see that change in nearly all of the parameters that we are measuring:
- in the air which blows through our cities and countryside
- in the materials that flow through our economy
- in the water that flows through our landscape and around our coasts
All of these systems have changed hugely in my working life.
Future changes
If the future is anything like the past, we will see a similar amount of change over the coming 25 years, but those changes may all occur at very different rates.
Change may be decadal in nature – we know that the mix of pollutants in the air of our cities and countryside has changed enormously since the 1990s and some levels of some chemicals, such as phosphates, have fallen considerably in many of our rivers over that time period. These shifts will in turn create changes in other parts of the system, such as levels of freshwater biodiversity, all responding at different paces. In the context of a changing climate, that suggests a very dynamic picture for our environment over the coming decades.
That changing climate may also increase seasonal changes across our environment. The blistering heat of July 2022 in England was in stark contrast to the high rainfall and stormy weather experienced in parts of the country in 2023 and 2024. This led to the flow, and therefore quality, of water through our pipes and sewers, our rivers and aquifers, our lakes and coasts being similarly highly variable over the space of just a couple of seasons.
Environmental monitoring
And we must not forget that change can also happen to our environment over very short timescales. Pollution entering a watercourse from an industrial incident or road accident can create rapid changes in water chemistry and longer lasting changes on river ecology. I have seen the damage a single barbecue can cause to acres of peatlands in just an afternoon – impacting decades of restoration work.
That’s why we at the Environment Agency collect data on our environment in such a wide variety of ways, to address these many issues and different timescales. That’s why we need skilled people and powerful analytical capabilities to gather, process and analyse information at the pace required to take action, be that over the space of hours or decades. We cannot stand still as science and the environment changes, and the lab you are about to see brings together some of the latest technology to help us do this information gathering in new and robust ways.
Our monitoring methods
I must point out that our labs are not the only way we monitor the environment. They are very important to us, but only one facet of our overall information gathering activities.
If we focus just on water, we employ:
- Continuous monitors for several applications
- A network of hydrometry equipment watching river flows and levels
- Sea and tide level monitoring
- Ground water level monitoring through our ground water monitoring network
- Earth observation and other remotely monitored data sources to increase the areas we can collect data from
We bring in others’ data too. We work closely with the Met Office to share data and analytical capabilities. We also expect industries we regulate to monitor and provide us information on their own emissions. In recent years that information flow has increased with more Combined Storm Overflow data becoming available, and this will continue with the requirements for more continuous monitoring under the Environment Act. Citizen Science programmes continue to flourish around the country, and we actively engage in learning from catchment-based research and other academic data collection.
Adapting to change
This laboratory, and the equipment and people in it, is a very important part of giving the Environment Agency the scale it needs to rise to this information challenge, and also to adapt and grow as our needs change.
Why do I say we need to adapt and grow?
As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said – no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. That’s certainly true for monitoring. We know that you never monitor the same piece of water twice as it flows through the landscape, but also the techniques and understanding we have at our disposal are changing all the time.
Evolution of monitoring
That’s important because it’s not only the water that changes – but the things that we want to know about it continue to evolve. As an example, to understand the pressure chemicals might put on the environment, we used to look only for 77 priority chemicals. Now we scan for over 1,650, with our labs being at the forefront globally in deriving new techniques for quantifying some of them.
And chemicals is just one issue. Right now we have:
- 100 different monitoring programmes and themes for water quality and ecological data
- 42 different legislative reasons for collecting water quality and quantity data
This means we:
- Have a network of 13,000 different monitoring sites relating to water quality, and 11,800 looking at water quantity.
- Take many samples – increasing from over 65,000 samples in 2022 to 99,000 samples in 2024
- Produce a vast quantity of data – over 1.7 million measurements last year
Our dedicated teams
This sheer scale and complexity is a true testament to the expertise of:
- Our field teams
- Analysis and reporting teams
- Hydrometry and telemetry teams
- Lab staff
They have to work out ever more efficient ways of reaching the sampling sites we need to visit, to undertake surveys and get samples back to the lab here or in Exeter for rapid analysis. Just for water quality and ecology that amounts to 77,000 tasks being scheduled next year, and I am indebted to their perseverance and professionalism in delivering so many to such a high standard.
Looking to the future
But today we’re really looking to the future. What will the world of water monitoring look like in a few years, and what is the place for this wonderful lab refurbishment in that?
Well first, as a good scientist, I can’t know what the future holds, but today I want to set out a bit of a vision for where I want the Environment Agency to be going over the next few years to keep our data collection and analysis as modern, robust and impactful as it possibly can be in the face of so much change.
The Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) programme
This refurbishment has been made possible by investment over the last few years through the NCEA. This is an amazing programme of work involving seven different Defra Group organisations all working together in a way that they never have before to create a comprehensive baseline of the state and value of all aspects of our environment. It is driven by two main things.
The first is the Environment Act and the statutory Environment Improvement Plan. The Natural Capital Committee advised the Treasury in 2019 that to assess whether the Government is meeting its legally binding targets on the Environment and so meet the “significant improvement test” it would need to have a baseline from which to work.
I led delivery of the National Ecosystem Assessment back in 2011, which was the first of its kind in the world to take a snapshot of the state and value of a whole country’s environment and the services it provides to people and nature. It showed we have some of the best environmental data in the world. But it also showed potential blind spots.
NCEA objectives
The NCEA was in part created to fill those blind spots, monitoring in places we haven’t done so before, like our smaller streams, lakes and ponds.
It’s there to look at these things in new ways, including:
- Exploring eDNA to understand the microbial and other communities in our soils and water
- Developing new approaches to understand groundwater ecology and groundwater microplastics
- Harnessing the power of remote observations and machine learning to map habitats
Future developments
These new data streams will come online over the next few years, with the full baseline complete by 2028. It will be a far cry from the Dudley Stamp survey of the 1930s using school children that tried to map our land into six broad land use types. It is almost impossible to conceive of the new insight it will give us and the science it will drive.
Understanding what works
The second reason for doing the NCEA is because we need more than ever to know what works. We now have an opportunity to manage our land proactively through substantial change likely over the next few decades. The introduction of the new Environmental Land Management Scheme means we will want to see how this impacts the 70% of our land surface used for farming activities.
Further change may be driven through our transition to Net Zero. The Land Use framework consultation and recent Climate Change Committee reports are both talking about very significant changes to our landscape. These will be needed to make space for nature, water, and emissions reduction, while also delivering new infrastructure and housing and maintaining food production. This will require information on how fast those changes are going and the impacts they are having.
Measuring diverse impacts
Because when we say “what works” we need to be aware that these changes could deliver a wide range of benefits or create other pressures. We will need to know:
- Are we capturing the carbon we need to?
- Are our water supplies resilient in the face of ever more variable weather patterns?
- Are our habitats large enough, linked enough and of high enough quality to adapt to the changing pressures?
- Are we investing in our environment in ways that increase the value of our natural capital?
The NCEA is not just about what is out there, but why, and what is driving change. This increase in our need for new knowledge is why we have needed to increase capacity in our labs to deliver these diverse measurements and analyses.
The future of water monitoring
When we then think about the future of how we actually monitor our water, a lot will depend on technological advances, which are challenging to forecast. I think we can expect to see more automated surveillance techniques being used, bringing more real-time understanding.
We will likely see:
- More powerful satellites for remote sensing
- Artificial intelligence and advanced computing methods in predictive ways
- Better analytics unlocking more parameters that can be monitored remotely, such as water levels in soils, habitat structure and condition becoming possible to monitor
- Higher resolution, higher time slice data sources
Innovation and science
This will be underpinned by further science, which will include more understanding of the systems so that we know what we need to monitor to detect a range of changes. If we can understand better the important nodes in the real-world systems we are studying, our monitoring points will become more targeted and more powerful.
It will also include more innovative approaches – for example in non-target screening as is being developed in this Lab – so we can understand our changing chemical landscape more quickly and advise on action needed.
Using more of these innovations in monitoring will safeguard the time and resource that will continue to be needed to go and monitor by hand where we need to get immediate or unplanned evidence. Incidents and accidents will continue to happen, and we will need to have the ability to respond.
Integrating new data sources
The big challenge is making best use of the new data sources at our disposal. From the Environment Act via the water industry, we will have potentially thousands of new sampling sites continuously monitored for things like ammonia, dissolved oxygen and pH. That’s not perhaps a huge range of parameters. Nonetheless it should help us to see if these outflows are causing intermittent issues to the river’s chemistry or ecology, and, because of the upstream monitoring, it could also help us to understand how these physicochemical parameters are changing through the rest of our catchments.
Also, the new technology and new sensors will require different approaches to data. DNA technology is becoming available to many. But this provides different information from ecology-based measurements. Our science suggests it can be powerful in detecting non native species, and it could also be a useful part of predicting ecological condition.
But there is so much more we need to do to capitalise on this and other new technologies. Every time as a regulator we invest in a new technology, we need to have high confidence that:
- We can trust what we learn from the observations
- Quality standards are maintained
- We have good data and analytical practices
All of this needs to be based on sound science.
Working with citizen scientists
These technologies are becoming more accessible to everyone, meaning more data will be available from Citizen Scientists. We’ve seen Earthwatch expand into wider emerging chemical testing. And with better kits for some water parameters and expansion of some citizen scientist networks, data integration questions are going to be at the forefront of how we work together better.
As we look forward in this new “data world”, our work with Citizen scientists more than ever needs to be properly complementary. We have statutory duties to monitor in certain places using specific techniques. The involvement of citizen scientists can be incredible in providing deeper investigative input. So, if we accept we’re different in what we are trying to monitor, why we’re doing it, and the scale of operation, working together we can be stronger – as fundamentally we all want an improved environment.
Future collaboration
Later this year we will publish our citizen science guidance, designed collaboratively with our partners. This guidance represents the start of a change – ensuring that citizen scientists know what to consider to maximise the opportunities of their data being understood, trusted and used by the Environment Agency.
We also know we need to do more than simply providing much of our data into externally facing databases, to share the insights from our monitoring evidence. We get plenty of queries about what data we hold, even though so much is already available. So, I have teams looking at new and better ways of presenting this to a wide range of users so that everyone who needs to act to improve the environment has access to the information from us that they need.
Thank you again for joining us on this journey. It really is brilliant to celebrate reaching this point in this lab refurbishment. I hope you will enjoy looking round to see the new ways of working that it will open up to meet the changing and developing demands of science and operations at the Environment Agency.
We will have our first new baseline from the NCEA in 2028. I expect it will tell us different things from the data we have collected thus far and enable us to consider doing things in new ways in future.
Ultimately, we only have one environment. And I think we all realise that we only have power to change some things.
I have a distinct childhood memory of a prayer written in calligraphy by my late grandfather at my grandmother’s bedside. It read “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference”. Maybe I can update it; hoping that this new lab refurbishment will mean that monitoring will grant us the surveillance to understand the things we cannot change, the insight to change the things we can, and the data to prove the difference.
I hope you will join me on this exciting journey, not just around the lab, but also into the future of environmental monitoring, and will be as excited as I am by the new opportunities ahead.
Thank you.
