Jennifer Weeks
A 23-year western drought has drastically shrunk the Colorado River, which provides water for drinking and irrigation for Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and two states in Mexico. Under a 1922 compact, these jurisdictions receive fixed allocations of water from the river – but now there’s not enough water to provide them. Continue reading
Risk is the impact of uncertainty on achieving your objectives – the impact can be either positive or negative outcomes (ISO 31000). Governments have multiple objectives they have to meet – health and wellbeing, economic, environmental, ethical and so on. Each of these objectives essentially becomes a risk endpoint. The fundamental tenets of risk assessment are understanding the system (the context), understanding and assessing the risk (against your identified objectives), managing the risk and then monitoring whether the risk is actually controlled, and whether a further risk treatment needs to be applied.[1] Continue reading
Thank you for this opportunity to share some insights from my book, Our Environmental Handprints: Recover the Land, Reverse Global Warming, Reclaim the Future.
What is the Environmental Handprint and why should I care about it?
The Handprint is deceptively simple. If you do good, you have created a Handprint. If you do good for the environment, like planting a tree or shifting to paperless bill paying, you create an Environmental Handprint. Continue reading
Governance is an essential part of managing any resource, but if you were starting from a clean slate, what sort of framework would you use? If you already have regulation in place, how can you test if it is actually fit for purpose, including the social and cultural aspects of the time, and identify what needs to be changed?
ISO 31000 is the international standard of risk management. It applies to any aspect of risk (‘risk’ being ‘the effect of uncertainty on objectives’). Understanding risks associated with a statutory regime is just as important as understanding risks associated with any aspect of managing a coherent and functional society.
Using ISO 31000, we have thought about what the risks might be to achieving the objective of a fit-for-purpose legal and institutional framework for drinking water quality, and put forward some best practice principles to help address these risks. The principles will help you to assess your current legal framework or if you are starting from scratch, help you to craft a robust and contextually relevant legal framework for regulating drinking water quality. Continue reading
Annette Davison
COVID-19 has flipped everything on its head – including the way we undertake water quality management system audits. While ISO 19011 has provisions for remote auditing, it’s not something we normally do in undertaking water quality management system audits – usually we like to physically ‘go out in the field’ as part of our evidence gathering. Water supply systems have big infrastructure and a multitude of management and operational systems, which usually means a requirement for physical inspection. Continue reading