Summit for healthy harbours by 2030

Southern Water has hosted a summit looking at reversing damage to Chichester, Langstone and Pagham Harbours with leaders from national and local organisations coming together.

The newly formed steering group will ensure the commitment to collaborate turns into action.

First brought together by Southern Water in May, the recent meeting, independently chaired by Professor Sir Dieter Helm, an international expert on the sustainable use of ‘natural capital’, to establish how much action is being taken by individual organisations.

An assessment of the current ecological status of the harbours and factors contributing to their environmental decline will be available later this year.

Professor Sir Dieter Helm CBE, the summit’s independent chairman, said: “This is an incredibly exciting project. We are all agreed the status quo is unsustainable. It is fantastic so many different parties are willing to come together to focus on the harbours and ensure they are better when we hand them on to the next generation than they were when we inherited them.”

Ian Mcaulay, Southern Water’s CEO, said: “We are achieving something substantial here. It’s one of the most exciting projects of my career.

“We know collective action is needed to improve the harbours’ water quality and natural habitats and it’s encouraging to see so many partners coming together with that purpose.

“The natural capital baseline we are funding for this group is progressing well and will be ready later this year. It will be leading edge and the primary source of accurate evidence of flows and polluting loads from all sources which are entering watercourses.

“For our part, in a conventional infrastructure approach, we are investing a total of £75 million in the area by 2025 to improve our service to customers and protect the local environment. These plans will directly contribute towards improving the health of these harbours.

“We are building new storm tanks at Budd’s Farm water treatment works and investing £36 million at Peel Common to increase our storm storage capacity and ensure the network can cope with population growth in the area.

“Combining these with conventional infrastructure investment means we can reduce concrete, steel, power and chemical usage and help deliver better water quality in a lower carbon future.”