Mott MacDonald has joined forces with the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB), Anglian Water, BT and UK Power Networks and a host of research centres and industry partners to work together on a Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo).
Delivered through the government funded National Digital Twin programme (NDTp), CReDo will develop, for the first time in the UK, a connected digital twin across energy, water and telecoms networks to provide a practical example of how connected data can improve climate adaptation and resilience.
Mott MacDonald embarked on the project given its expertise in the field of climate resilience and asset management. It will help create and build the system, informing how data flows across sectors and assets, which is essential to capture systemic failure. Pulling expertise from across the water, energy and telecoms sectors of the business, Mott MacDonald will use a systems thinking approach, coupling its domain expertise, infrastructure and asset knowledge with digital and resilience know how.
The collaboration between owners of infrastructure assets, researchers and innovators will apply the UK’s state of the art capabilities in systems engineering, digital asset management and modelling to the climate crisis to plan a more resilient built environment, keeping communities safer in the face of flooding and extreme weather.
The CReDo project looks specifically at the cascading impacts of flooding caused by climate change on connected energy, water and telecoms networks. It will provide a practical example of how connected data and greater access to the right information can improve climate adaptation and resilience in a scalable way by visualising cascading failures and identifying critical assets and interdependencies across sectors. CReDo provides a critical next step – a demonstration of how interoperability between sectoral digital twins can unlock further value.
Mark Enzer, chief technical officer and head of the national digital twin programme at the Centre for Digital Built Britain said: “The aim is to develop a tangible working example of the national digital twin in a highly relevant area: delivering better climate resilience outcomes by making better cross-sector adaptation decisions. We want to demonstrate that data-sharing across traditional sector boundaries is an essential addition to the climate change agenda.”
The NDTp will host a CReDo webinar for COP26 on 2nd November. Technical experts, asset owners and climate specialists will discuss the project alongside the launch of a short film by BAFTA winning director Colin O’Toole, and an interactive tool developed by ESRI UK in partnership with Mott MacDonald showing how connected digital twins can support planning investments for infrastructure resilience in a more efficient and sustainable way.