Climate resilience is no longer just an environmental issue — it is becoming one of the defining operational challenges facing the UK water sector.
Water companies need to make better long-term investment decisions under increasing uncertainty. Decisio helps utilities connect operational, engineering, environmental and financial intelligence to build more resilient water systems.
Resilience is built across the whole water cycle, not event by event
More than half of England is now officially in drought. At the same time, population growth, ageing infrastructure and tighter environmental expectations are increasing pressure on water systems. Building resilience is no longer about responding to isolated events — it requires integrated planning across the entire water cycle.
Resilience runs on two clocks
Resilience gets used to mean several different things in the same conversation — redundancy, storage buffer, recovery time, supply-demand headroom, asset reliability, adaptive capacity. These rarely move together, and people around the same table are often optimising for different ones without realising it. There is also a distinction worth drawing out: reducing the chance a risk materialises is not the same as improving how the system copes when it does, and the two lead to very different investment decisions.
Much of this comes down to timing. Day-to-day resilience — storage, alternative routes, recovery time — is almost entirely bought by decisions made years earlier: the trunk main route chosen, the headroom left at a works, the mains renewed a decade ago. Long-term investment choices are only justifiable by reference to how the system performs day to day. In practice, these sit with different teams, on different cycles, and get handed between one another in a spreadsheet — which is exactly where the systemic view tends to go missing.
A whole-systems approach to water infrastructure planning
Whole systems digital business twin
A node-level representation of the raw water, potable water and wastewater system, including above and below ground assets and the changing long-term targets that affect them.
AI-powered investment options
Auto-generates new investment options beyond traditional planning, identifying connectivity schemes and capacity uplifts that account for real-world constraints.
Adaptive planning & scenario analysis
Tests investment pathways against thousands of possible futures to identify no/least-regret strategies and rapidly respond to evolving regulatory requirements.
Multi-stakeholder collaboration
A cloud-based platform with interactive dashboards and GIS mapping, bringing engineering, finance and regulatory teams onto the same page for board-level assurance.
“Without a whole systems and adaptive approach, water companies struggle to adapt to an increasingly dynamic and uncertain decision landscape.”
The Decisio™ Water Systems Digital Business Twin — neither a hydraulic model nor a real-time digital twin, but one that understands the capital and operational cost, and the site and system-level constraints, of water moving across the network.
Digital Adaptive Water Systems Planning
Traditional investment planning and network modelling tools struggle to keep pace with the growing complexity of the sector. Decision-making within utilities is often fragmented, with different teams working in silos, making it difficult to develop a unified, system-wide approach to investment planning. Without an integrated, whole-systems and adaptive data-driven approach, utilities struggle to adapt to an increasingly dynamic and uncertain decision landscape.
To address these challenges, BMA’s next-gen AI decision intelligence software, Decisio™, provides a structured, whole-systems approach to water infrastructure investment planning. Unlike traditional hydraulic models, the Decisio™ platform delivers a comprehensive digital representation of raw water, potable water, and wastewater systems, integrating asset, operational, cost, financial, and engineering data — essentially creating a digital business twin of the entire water infrastructure. Through cloud-based multi-stakeholder access, the platform ensures that decision-making is no longer siloed but instead integrated across business units, promoting a more coordinated and strategic approach to water systems planning.
Trusted by leading UK water companies
“Working with BMA has helped transform our approach to water infrastructure planning.”
Deborah Feldhaus, Head of Water Resources and Regional Planning, Yorkshire Water
- Auto-generated thousands of new asset investment options, identifying up to 30% CAPEX efficiency
- Unlocked regulatory funding for a new £300m whole-life cost water treatment works
- Identified optimal network configurations with future OPEX savings of circa 4%
“The Decisio™ platform has given us the capability to combine information from multiple sources, run multiple scenarios and understand the optimum combination and timing of demand reduction and supply side options to address our long-term supply challenges.”
Andy Dunbar, General Manager, Scottish Water
- Reduced projected supply-demand risk from 280 Ml/d to just over 25 Ml/d by 2050
- Deployed the Digital Business Twin across all 189 water resource zones
- Supported prioritisation of investment for SR27 (2027–33) in the context of long-term strategy
Plan for resilience, not just compliance
Talk to our water sector specialists about building a whole-systems view of your network ahead of PR29.