‍This is one of two panels we are holding at the University of Strathclyde on the 6 October, forming a one-day mini-conference. Please see the events page if you want to register for the other session as well as this one.

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08:00 – 08:30 Arrival & Breakfast Networking

08:30 – 10:00 From Point to Pipe: Financing Water's Journey to Bankability

Approaches to financing water projects have often been drawn along geographical lines, but a well-run scheme serving a secondary town and a poorly run scheme in a dense urban settlement can sit at completely different points on the same professionalisation and revenue-capability spectrum, regardless of population density. These fundamentals, not the map, are what investors and financiers actually respond to.

This session reframes the conversation around that journey: what it takes for a water system to move from dispersed and grant-dependent toward professionalised, aggregated and ultimately bankable, and which financing instruments, blended, cross-subsidised or fully commercial, become available at each stage along the way.

Our panel will also consider the extent to which the fundamentals needed to make a project financeable upfront are also the same building blocks needed to give longevity to water systems, as well as the lessons we can learn from projects where these were not in place.

- Robin MacKenzie, Group CEO, Strategy International

o WaterAid

o Joe Lorimer, Director, Lorimer Advisory  

o Doogie Black, CEO, Climate Sense

10:00 – 10:30 Tea and Coffee Break

10:30 – 12:00 Modelling the Margin: UK Water Availability in a Changing Climate

England has just had its driest July on record, with rainfall at 7% of the long-term average, and drought has been declared across half the country. This is the second severe drought in three years, following 2022 and 2025 – a clustering that is itself running ahead of what earlier projections treated as a plausible worst case.  

The UK's hydrological models are good, sometimes world-leading, but the observed trajectory of 2025–26 is testing the upper bounds of what several planning scenarios assumed. This event asks the following question: what changes in how we model, and how we plan, when reality is rapidly outrunning projections previously seen as robust?

- Robin MacKenzie, Group CEO, Strategy International

o UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

o Martin Woolhead, Deputy Director for Water Infrastructure Delivery, Defra

o Royce Dalby, President, Hydrosat

12:00 – 13:00 Networking Lunch

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