Resource Type: Webinar

Watch the webinar recording here: IWA Webinar: Planetary Boundaries and Absolute Sustainability in the Water sector

Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) are strategies that utilise natural processes to address environmental and societal challenges, such as climate change mitigation, disaster risk reduction, and biodiversity conservation. They enhance ecosystem services by protecting, restoring, and sustainably managing ecosystems.

This webinar explored how nature-based solutions contribute to biosphere integrity, ecosystem health, and natural capital and result in a biodiversity net gain when implemented.

Watch the recording here: https://www.icheme.org/knowledge-networks/communities/special-interest-groups/water/events/12-06-2025-planetary-boundaries-series-nature-based-solutions/

Phosphorus is a critical raw material, essential for feeding the world, and is also vital for various industrial processes. It is also a finite resource and key focus for the water sector, with ever-increasing treatment standards and emerging requirements for resource recovery for phosphorus.

This webinar explores the challenges and opportunities available for chemical engineers and all water industry professionals when they play their rightful role in the biogeochemical phosphorus cycle!

Watch the recording here: https://www.icheme.org/knowledge-networks/communities/special-interest-groups/water/events/14-05-2025-planetary-boundaries-series-phosphorus/

The water sector is a significant contributor to climate change through the greenhouse gas emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) – wastewater treatment contributes some 5% of global anthropogenic N2O and 6% of global anthropogenic CH₄ emissions. This webinar will present an overview of the water sector and climate change and opportunities for industry practitioners to understand the importance of GHG emissions in treating water and wastewater while also reducing the sector’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

This webinar highlights the linkages between reducing GHG emissions and move towards circular economy and how this supports acting on other planetary boundaries beyond climate change.

Watch the recoring here: https://www.icheme.org/knowledge-networks/communities/special-interest-groups/water/events/11-03-2025-planetary-boundaries-series-climate-change/

The water sector is a steward of the nitrogen cycle, with a key function in nitrification and nitrogen removal in water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs). It remains a significant source of nutrient pollution, and increasing requirements for nitrogen removal mean significant resources (energy, supplemental carbon) as well as significant risks and opportunities around greenhouse gases.

This webinar provided an overview of the nitrogen cycle in the context of the water sector, with a focus on emerging and innovative centralised and decentralised approaches to treatment and nitrogen management that support the water sector’s role in a circular economy within planetary boundaries.

Watch the recording here: https://www.icheme.org/knowledge-networks/communities/special-interest-groups/water/events/30-04-2025-planetary-boundaries-series-nitrogen/

The Freshwater Change Planetary Boundary considers blue water, water available in the environment in surface and ground water, and green water, water available to plants. Both Blue and Green Water PBs are transgressed, and yet we live in a world in which billions of people lack access to safe water.

Find out more in this webinar why, as water professionals, we need to comprehend the water-climate-energy-food-economics-lifestyle connections fully.

Watch webinar recording here: https://www.icheme.org/knowledge-networks/communities/special-interest-groups/water/events/09-09-2025-planetary-boundaries-series-water/