Nutrient Neutral

PROJECT OVERVIEW: Nutrient Neutral is an environmental consultancy working with landowners, developers and regulators to create sustainable and innovative solutions to minimise the impact of food production and housing requirements on the water environment.  Several regions across the UK now require new housing developments to mitigate any additional nutrients generated as a result.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES:A methodology has already been developed to assess the potential nutrient losses from post development sites.  However, the data for this is extremely limited as it is based on 18 samples that are 20 years old and sourced from across ‘Northern Europe’.  It has been indicated that there is currently a lack of data to refine these estimations. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of England should be taken into account when calculating potential nutrient losses. In addition, the density of housing and effectiveness of SuDS for water quality mitigation needs to be calculated. There is a requirement for an accessible database for this purpose.

PROJECT SOLUTIONS: Nutrient Neutral wants to build a database to refine and support accurate calculations of nutrient losses from post development sites based on local climate, soils and development characteristics and the effectiveness of mitigation measure.

To support with this, academics conducted research into existing methodologies and identified current data sets available in the UK. The report produced helped with understanding the potential for replicating the original methodology and updating with UK data.