Scientific Advisory Group

About the Scientific Advisory Group

A Scientific Advisory Group has been established to ensure that the Environmental Markets Board has access to the best scientific information to undertake its oversight role.

The Group is chaired by Professor Steve Ormerod.

Water Quality Subgroup

The Water Quality Subgroup has been established to review:

the Draft Nutrient Reduction Standard used to quantify the expected nutrient mitigation from interceptor woodlands and wetland projects
the Monitoring Programme needed to verify the level of mitigation delivered

The members of the Water Quality Subgroup are:

Steve Ormerod

Steve Ormerod is Chair of the Nutrient Agile Group.

Steve is Professor of Ecology and Co-Director of the Water Research Institute at Cardiff University.

He brings over 40 years’ experience as an academic ecologist involved in the application of ecology to biodiversity conservation and environmental management in the face of global change, publishing over 300 scientific papers. Steve has an extensive track record in provided expert scientific advice on the natural environment, including being involved in the National Ecosystem Assessment, the first analysis of the UK’s natural environment in terms of the benefits it provides to society and continuing economic prosperity, and is a former Chief Editor of the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Steve is currently Deputy Chair of Natural Resources Wales, a Member of the Joint Committee of JNCC and Vice-President of the RSPB of which he was Council Chair (2012-17). He also chairs the Strategic Implementation Group delivering the Welsh Government's responsibilities under 30 x 30 (Global Biodiversity Framework). Steve is also a Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust; CIEEM; the Learned Society of Wales; the Royal Entomological Society and the Freshwater Biological Association.

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Professor Nicholas Howden

Professor Howden is Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering at University of Bristol.

He is Honorary President of the The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM).

Professor Howden has a PhD in hydrology, hydrogeology, and hydrogeochemistry and, after completing his PhD, he worked as a hydrologist for contaminated land consultants and the former technical arm of the Coal Board as a hydrogeologist.

Professor Howden's research aims to understand how agricultural practices propagate through the system, often with long delays, and how research can be applied in practice to protect water supplies now and in the future.

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Professor Philip Haygarth

Philip M. Haygarth is a Professor of Soil and Water Science at Lancaster University.

He is a biogeochemist focused on nutrients, notably phosphorus, and started his research in the early 1990s at BBSRC’s North Wyke (now Rothamsted Research) and progressed to Lancaster University in 2008, studying fundamental mechanisms and processes in soils and water, subsequently widening to catchment, national and global scales.

Most recently, Phil has been focused on extreme event impacts on soil-water nutrient biogeochemistry, and in 2022 started a new collaborative UKRI NERC research grant called ‘Accelerating Nutrient Cycles at the Riparian Land:Water Interface’, with research on nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon focused release from riparian river systems in northern England’s Eden, Scotland’s River Dee, the Swedish boreal forest and eastern Germany.

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Professor Adrian Collins

Adie is Science Director at Rothamsted Research and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Southampton and Exeter in the UK and Waterloo in Canada.

His research interests broadly encompass the sustainability and resilience of agriculture.

They specifically include a number of themes, including:

characterising pollutant emissions to water including in association with current extreme weather events;
the development and application of pollutant source tracing procedures;
understanding cross-sector water pollution at different scales and the development of screening tools for contextualising the role of agriculture in water quality problems;
the impacts of agricultural pollution on aquatic ecology;
measuring and modelling the efficacy of on-farm interventions for managing agricultural sustainability and resilience.

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