Dynamic visualisation and modelling to support sustainable phosphate management

Under the Water Framework Directive the UK water companies are responsible for providing effective treatment methods which will reduce the level of phosphate, a key nutrient in river eutrophication, in their respective waterways. The sustainability assessment of any treatment method or management option adopted for the control of river phosphate is an extremely complex issue. This complexity derives from the fact that any assessment must draw criteria from the three aspects of sustainability (Figure 1) (Sahota and Jeffrey, 2005) to ensure an effective and efficient service, maintain public health and welfare and reduce resource usage (Foxon et al., 2002) It is also clear that this process is made even more difficult by the need to include a diverse range of stakeholders in the decision-making process when these management options are planned. To be effective, the decision-making process is dependent on all the stakeholders being genuinely involved, but the current prevailing practice is for decisionmakers to seek agreement for proposals once the key decisions have been made (Geldof, 2005). Involving all the stakeholders presents a major challenge. Communicating the sustainability in general and its implication for the decisionmaking process is extremely difficult due to the inherent complexity of the data involved. Coupled with this, for any decision to be truly sustainable, all stakeholders must be able to understanding the short and long term implications of alternative courses of action (Beierle and Cayford, 2002). Kapelan et al. (2005) suggest that this communication barrier can be overcome through the use of 3D visualisation. It is suggested that using 3D visualisation will enable more effective communication between experts and non-experts and thus allow the inclusion of a wider range of stakeholders. This view that visualisation aids stakeholder Abstract Under the WFD the UK water companies are responsible for providing effective treatment methods which will reduce the level of phosphate, a key nutrient in river eutrophication, in their respective waterways. The selection of effective treatment methods poses a sustainability problem as there are a number of economic and social aspects which must be balanced with the environmental standards set down by the WFD. This choice becomes even more complex as all of the stakeholders involved, the companies, the local government, local industry and the general public must be engaged in the decision-making process if they are to fully support whatever solution is chosen. This paper describes a sustainability assessment and visualisation toolkit, PhiZ, which has been designed to allow the assessment and communication of the sustainability of phosphate management scenarios. The PhiZ system takes the approach of combining a number of computational models covering the economic, social and environmental aspects of the scenarios with a unique visualisation based on 3D rendering techniques derived from the computer games industry, through which the results of the models can be communicated. This unique visualisation not only allows the ecological state of the river to be assessed over time but also allows a non-expert user to interactively investigate the impact of different management techniques on sustainability of the river catchment. PhiZ does not define sustainability but does provide a method for all the stakeholders involved to compare the relative sustainability of a number of management scenarios.