More than half of the world's population now live in cities, with rapid urbanisation expected to continue in the decades to come. This has major implications for the environment, as currently urban populations consume 75% of total natural resources and will exert more pressure on infrastructure and resources. 

This webinar will explore the impacts of rapid urbanisation on land, air and water from the perspectives of those working in the environmental sector. Presentations will include: 

• Mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG): Are we ready? The role of BNG in rapid urbanisation - Craig Llewellyn
• The impact of rapid urbanisation on urban air quality - Xiangyu Sheng
• Environmental megatrends: Rapid urbanisation and the water sector - Simon Spooner

This webinar has been organised as part of the IES's Future of ES23 horizon scanning & foresight project. 

About our speakers

Craig Llewellyn is an Associate Ecologist, and Policy Specialist at Atkins, with 12 years’ experience in ecological consultancy and policy decision making.
Atkins is a world-leading design, engineering and project management consultancy, with a vision of engineering a better future for our planet and its people.
Craig sits on the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM) Strategic Policy Panel, and Wales Group, and is CIEEM representative at Wildlife & Countryside Link for the Land Use Planning and Legal Strategy Teams. Craig’s role involves delivering parliamentary evidence, position statements, consultation responses to upcoming policy and legislation, inputting into best practice guidance for the industry and meetings with key government advisors. Recent examples include the Environment Act (2021) during the House of Lords Stage, and as an advisor for Natural England on the upcoming Irreplaceable Habitat Regulations (2023).

Dr Xiangyu (Sian) Sheng is a leading expert in Air Quality and Climate Change with over 25 years’ experience. She has a wide range of expertise in air quality modelling, odour, climate change, whole life cycle carbon assessment for large infrastructure schemes and urban development. She is a Director at Temple Group. Previously she worked at Capita/GL Hearn, Scott Wilson and CERC etc. She has been a technical lead for numerous high profile projects e.g. HS2, TfL, London 2012 Olympic Legacy, Brent Cross, Crossrail, 2008 Beijing Olympic, EU LIEP, EU-EMCP and EU EGP. Dr Sheng is a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (FRMets), a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Chartered Physicist (CPhys), and a Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv). Dr Sheng holds a BSc, BEng, MSc, MPhil and PhD. She has over 40 journal and conference publications. She published a book ‘Air Dispersion Modelling in Regulatory Applications’ in 2005. She is a member of the IAQM Committee.

Prof Simon Spooner is an environmental scientist applying scientific models combined with social, economic, political and regulatory methods to address the challenges that we face and help build better infrastructure systems. Over the last 30 years as a consultant with Atkins and, before that Mott MacDonald, he has had a role in solving many of these challenges such as the impact of our cities on river water quality, how to track threats like COVID19 through our water systems, how to incorporate nature-based solutions into our infrastructure and how to plan better responses to climate change. For this he has developed the combustion transition framework, an innovative approach to integrating GHG emissions reductions and land-use based regeneration of natural processes with a system of metrics and economic tools. He has worked about half his time overseas, mostly in China, on major World Bank, EU and UK government projects in urban planning, energy systems and environmental policy. He is an honorary professor at Nottingham University (China and UK campuses) and has written and edited a number of books on water and environmental management, regulation and adaption of European approaches to China for OECD, FWR, EU and Chinese publishers.