Session 7 of Discovery Days 2024 features the following talks:
00:01:06 – 00:17:50 Professor Angela Daly: Good data governance: Data for the people and planet
00:18:20 – 00:35:00 Professor Colin Dey: Activism and… accounting?
00:35:24 – 00:52:09 Professor Sarah Hendry: ‘Water Law’ – What’s That?
Discovery Days offer a fascinating exploration of a wide range of important topics, from health and wellbeing, human rights, and our ground-breaking scientific research and arts practice. All our speakers are helping us to transform lives locally and around the world.
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/engage/events/discovery-days
thank you John um and it’s really great to see so many people here this afternoon um and we’ve got three professors for the price one um which I’m really looking forward to introducing and to listening to their talks this afternoon so we have Professor Angela Daly Professor Colin day and Professor Sarah Henry um we’re going to they’ve got 15 minutes each I’ll introduce them one at a time and then we’ll take questions all together at the end um so without further Ado if I can invite um Professor Angela Dy to come up to the stage so um Angela is the chair of Law and technology in our school of humanity social sciences and law I’ve got that wrong haven’t I yeah I think you got it right right good excellent um and Andrew is going to talk to us today about good data governance and data for the people and Planet over to you thank you very much um and I should also say that I have a joint appointment between the school of law and the lever research center for forensic science but I am a legal academic uh by background um so thanks very much uh for coming today uh today I’m going to talk about my research and knowledge exchange on the topic of data and digital Technologies which is what I research and I look at um the governance of data and technology and how this has implications for us as individuals communities and also Nations throughout the world I’m also increasingly looking at data governance and the environment and overall how we can promote good data practices for both people and planet to start with who has seen this uh TV series or maybe who hasn’t seen it um Mr Bates versus the post office you can raise your hand if you like yes a few people yeah at least we should probably have heard of it as it’s absolutely dominating um the news at the moment uh for those who haven’t seen it um it’s about the post office Horizon it miscarriage of Justice um and it really demonstrates in my view at least how the research that I work on on data governance and on technology governance can have some serious real life implications um we actually hosted an event about this about 18 months ago uh between the Lum research center for forensic science and the law school so I would say we’re a bit ahead of the curve um in terms of understanding the huge problems and implications as well of this miscarriage of Justice it involved flawed accounting software and relevant that the next Professor is an accounting professor in fact uh being used in the post offices um branches throughout the UK it had bugs and glitches in it provided by Fujitsu by the way H bugs and glitches in it which were causing accounting errors and rather than kind of acknowledge that for some reason the post office decided to use these errors prosecute the sub postmasters and Mistresses in these branches accusing them of false accounting and fraud and basically ruining their lives as we can see in things like uh the TV series now it illustrates a whole host of problems in my view about the overreliance on data and digital systems and a lack of due scrutiny and critical engagement with them of course these systems are incredibly useful um but they also have to be used properly and ethically and they have to be governed properly as well and we really see what the implications are if this um doesn’t happen so hopefully I’ve made the case but I’ll make it a bit more about why good data governance and Tech governance is important but increasingly we live in high highly digitalized and datafied societies almost all of us have smartphones our interactions are increasingly online particularly with the government and companies and Banks and so on and even these days just to be a university student uh you must have a smartphone and there was an article on this very Point thinking the guardian or Observer over the weekend about how it’s basically impossible uh to be a student these days without one we see lots of benefits to digitalization in many ways especially for those who can remember how it was before life is easier it’s more efficient and it’s more convenient but there are also serious problems too and the Horizon it miscarriage of justice is kind of the tip of the iceberg data and Technology don’t always lead to progress and positive outcomes and this was something that was already recognized in the 20th century by the American Technology historian Melvin crur the first of his six laws of technology is that technology is neither good nor bad nor is it neutral and this is very much a law which has underpinned and resonated in my own work on law as in the legal system so as I mentioned in terms of bad data practices I would say the Horizon uh miscarriage of justice is a very uh emblematic example but in many ways it’s also still the tip of the iceberg um during my doctoral research I looked to something slightly uh different but adjacent which is the problems that are posed by large technology companies in countries like the UK that is what is known as gaam Google Apple Facebook Amazon and Microsoft um and about how our laws don’t really regulate them very properly or holistically um and leave various gaps now since I got my PhD there has actually been a flurry of regulatory activity particularly around around those companies but NE nevertheless I think gaps still exist um and really they’re so incredibly powerful it’s very difficult to kind of hold them to account and govern them properly and there are a whole host of problems that these companies have posed um they surveil us they collect lots of data about us H they pass that on to others sometimes that’s the government sometimes that’s correct that they should be doing that but they also sell them sell the data on for economic purposes as well well and sometimes political purposes that are perhaps less than Savory and the Cambridge analytica Facebook scandal from a few years ago kind of demonstrates that we also have further issues in the UK at least and and in other countries like the UK with these companies because they’re actually headquartered in the US now we’ve got um we’ve had a lot of discussion in our jurisdictions about Chinese tech companies uh Huawei in particular but also increasingly Tik talk and that because they come from companies that are headquartered in China um they pose certain National Security concerns in countries such as the UK and this has led to countries like the UK um restricting them and in some cases actually and excluding them all together from various National INF infrastructure projects and why is this the case because there’s concern that the Chinese government can use these companies um to surveil people in other parts of the world but equally the same thing is also true of the US technology companies and they do have done similar things and they’ve also done similar things um with um UK sorry us allies including the UK have also been involved with this as we saw from the Edward Snowden Revelations to this effect um about 10 years ago that the US and its allies have co-opted these large companies gaam for purposes such as this now this has reemerged recently too in the context of the Scottish public sector um because there’s been moves to use cloud-based Services particularly from Microsoft um for various functions most controversially uh the use of Microsoft azour cloud uh to store digital evidence by police Scotland um concerns then that you have a US headquartered company storing highly sensitive information such as digital evidence and concerns that I’ve raised particularly around sovereignty and the um prospects of access to that data by the security services and police of another country without kind of due process so these issues are Amplified with the roll out of artificial intelligence um AI relies on large amounts of data it relies on large amounts of energy and power and essentially resources and money um to create Ai and to power it so a whole host of questions are raised about the companies and also governments involved in AI who’s creating AI what data is being used to power AI um and for what purposes and already we’re seeing companies and uh countries using AI in very problematic ways sometimes that involve bias and discrimination okay though can we do better that’s all quite depressing but are is there some Goods here um and can we kind of do better in terms of using data in better more appropriate more ethical ways that would be more Community oriented people friendly environmentally friendly as well well we can although it’s maybe not so easy or not so prominent uh but in a book that I edited with a couple of colleagues called good data H we tried to do this we tried to present a more optimistic effort and attempt at understanding data and data governance highlighting good practices um and setting out Visions for how data can be done better than what we’ve got already um still somewhat of a utopian project I guess um but at least the alternatives are there and this is something that we need to work towards this is in becoming more and more crucial when it comes to the environment and data and some of my recent work is on this topic typically environmental concerns have not really been something which is been part of the conversation around data and data governance um in law at least that tends to be something if dealt with At All by energy environmental regulation but really this can’t be ignored anymore on the one hand it’s very clear that we have climate change upon us and on the other hand we’re increasingly understanding what the costs to the environment of data actually are like data and Technology more generally there’s a good and bad side to this and arguably a not neutral side as well good the good side is that data can be very important and key to understanding things like um attaining implementing and auditing the UN sustainable development goals um and that clearly is a good and appropriate use of data but there’s increasing recognition as I mentioned of the downside of this of the environmental costs data Digital Data doesn’t just exist in The Ether it has a real kind of material iial aspect to it so the data that we use and generate particularly in cloud services doesn’t just kind of exist in nothing there are a whole host of data centers um that are needed to kind of power this and data centers need data they need energy and that can produce like CO2 and particularly if we’re looking at non-renewable energy sources this is a huge issue for artificial intelligence because AI needs a lot of data therefore it needs a lot of energy and a lot of data centers and already this is causing practical issues in the UK that there are areas of West London where it’s unlikely that there are going to be any new housing um developments because there are too many data centers there already and the electricity grid can’t actually cope with any new um connections including to houses and not only is there competition over electricity but there’s also competition over drinking water in fact in these same areas of London because the data centers require large amounts of water um to cool them down because they over heat and so that’s obviously quite problematic another aspect to the of the equipment that data is powered with is that um there are serious environmental and also labor issues around the kinds of rare earth uh minerals and metals that are needed uh to create our smartphones and computers etc so one such metal Cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo and children are among those who mine it and the conditions in which people mine it are really quite hazardous so clearly that is a problem too in the Scottish context we’re not immune from this and in fact there recently um has opened a wind farm in the entire Peninsula all of the output of this wind farm is going to power Amazon data centers um so while of course Amazon needs to decarbonize many of you will know already that in Scotland we pre-existing problems around things like the concentration of land ownership and the cost of land as well and in my view at least having large uh International Tech behemoths added to the mix is probably not going to help matters okay so in terms of kind of a few more solutions in some of the current projects that I’m uh working with and yes of course I still engage in a lot of critique uh but but to try and be a little bit more positive there are a few things that we can do practically as well so firstly coming out of the final report of the independent expert group on unlocking the value of data to the Scottish government which I chaired one of our key recommendations was more public engagement and participation in how data is um used and governed particularly when it comes to data that is held by the public sector um in Scotland a lot of that data as Health Data but not exclusively so and that data can actually be accessed and used under certain circumstances by corporations so we in our view as the independent expert group the public should be giving more input into this data use um and also if value is being generated from it that value should be shared with us as well and but we certainly need to have more understanding and also ensure that what’s happening produces public benefit and is legal and ethical as well another solution too especially to the problems of large companies and governments um dominating data and data governance is implementing more commons-based Frameworks for data governance which display some of these powerful interests or at least attempt to and try to hold data in more distributed and Comm commonly owned ways and the digital Commons policy Council H the dcpc is an international think tank of which I’m a founding member and promotes um the goals in terms of Commons use um Commons Frameworks over data thirdly um we also need a more joined up and holistic conversation around data and data governance across sectors and across countries and um I’ve been co-leading a Scottish University’s Insight Institute program on this topic and we have our final conference a hybrid conference in Glasgow at the University of stth Clyde and online at the end of this month where we will be discussing many of these matters in more detail um and with Solutions and involving policy makers and academics so in conclusion um ensuring good data for people in Planet as I hope you under have heard by now is quite a complex and multifaceted process uh we really need to understand what the material and virtual um and ethical costs are of data for both us and the environment in order to understand how to govern it and um uh do data better we need to understand misuses of data uh the power relations over data and this is going to become more and more important as we move to artificial intelligence if we do indeed move to AI as well um I think one thing that we do need to think about critically though is how appropriate and what kinds of developments we do want and that’s quite key for AI too I don’t really think there’s been a good public conversation around what AI is desirable for the public um and what would actually be useful for us um and I think we also as part of this need to think more critically about the data that we have already is it worthwhile having all this data given the costs particularly the ones that I’ve spoken about in the same way when it comes to carbon emissions that we’re going to get to Net Zero more effectively by actually not generating carbon in the first place rather than offsetting it once it’s been generated do we need to think in a similar way about data and do we need a more sober approach to the delage of data that we have perhaps it’s better for us not to generate so much data rather than get drunk on it and have to deal with the hangover afterwards thanks very much thank you Angela that was absolutely fascinating um and um I think staying with a similar but slightly different theme I’m really delighted to um introduce Professor kard day who is chair of sustainability accounting and is going to talk about activism and accounting good grief thank you very much for the introduction lazan uh afternoon everybody great to see so many people here um I am actually I’m a graduate of dundy University uh many moons ago and started my career so it’s it’s a real privilege to to be back here and the reason I started my career in dunde all those years ago is because of the expertise that dundy had in accounting for sustainability and as you may have heard in the previous session dundy has had a a real tradition of leadership in that area so uh we’ve had three professors of accounting speaking in these Discovery day talks this year and it’s great to see I think dundy becoming a real center of excellence in that area again um so how do we bring about transformation um dunde university has a strategic focus on social purpose and transformation and how do we get there from where we are now and I think to address that we need to have some understanding of how change happens you know we’ve heard um a lot about interdisciplinarity in these lectures so far and I think any kind of serious engagement with the sustainability agenda needs to be interdisciplinary but what I want to do in this talk is make the case for two things in particular for activism and for accounting as indispensable elements in that change process in other words we can’t get to a more sustainable World unless we can think like activists and unless we can use accounting as a tool to achieve that aim and in fact as Angela very well demonstrated in in her talk uh one example perhaps right now of some of those issues is the post office Horizon um Scandal so you know that’s perhaps something that we can have in the back of our minds so I also realized that for many of you perhaps um accounting might seem like a pretty strange place to start and you know accounting is a subject that does have a little bit of an image problem I’m not going to shy away from it um and as you can see on the on the graphic there it’s a it’s a bit of an issue with the classic stereotype of the boring um geeky white male bean counter um and in fact it just it’s funny to think tomorrow there’s a lecture on how forensic science might be a subject that’s too sexy and I don’t think I’ve got that problem today to be honest let’s let’s face it um you know so I mean things have changed a bit and we’ve got Hollywood Blockbusters uh you know coming into this sort of idea that would have been Unthinkable previously but these portrayers are still fictional they’re still detached from reality but you know hopefully nobody would ever try and stereotype me um there we go yet again so you know that’s the best joke in the presentation so you know you better laugh at that one um but yes I think the thing is in reality accounting does actually play an extremely powerful role in making worlds economic worlds business Worlds the natural world visible thinkable and knowable I love this cartoon which uh kind of captures that idea of the kind of the Dark Arts of um corporate accounting maybe sort of playing to the idea of the sort of Creative Accounting idea that you’ve probably heard of the other funny thing about this uh this cartoon it actually has a direct correspondence to one of the most seminal and important um accounting articles of all time in my opinion this paper by Ruth Hines in 1988 and you can see how the language in the cartoon and the language and the title of the the paper corresponds so closely um and it really captures the idea that accounting shapes and legitimizes how we make sense of the business world the natural world and other worlds now a more sustainable World in my view also will have to be a more accountable world you know we can’t get there without accountability and the United Nations sustainable development goals as many of you will be familiar with represent a kind of essential fundamental Benchmark um that helps us address that challenge but you know are we meeting these goals and when we think about the halfway point of the sdgs as we head to 2030 for some people um progress is not enough and you know this this image by Jen Bendle kind of um subverts the the SD GS into the sustainable development own goals um and I think it’s an important Point really then from a from the perspective of progress maybe that’s not been enough and for me um in teaching and researching this subject one of the key areas that is a factor here is the progress that’s been made by corporations towards sustainable transformation and we need to take stock I think of corporate engagement with sustainability and as we were Hearing in the previous um presentation by my colleague Ian a lot of progress has been made around disclosure around corporate engagement with the issues but what I think these images do very well is illustrate another phenomenon that you’ve probably heard of which I would call greenwash okay and it’s really the idea that um the there is a risk that companies make false and misleading statements about their sustainable progress about their credentials and I think I I love these uh images you know that uh you know sustainable super Yorks um somebody said that um you know putting water in a plastic bottle in Polynesia and then putting it on a plane and flying it around the world and calling it carbon negative so you know I think um 25 years ago when I first got involved in this area it was a problem and I feel like actually it’s become an even bigger problem now so you know in the sense it’s not just climate denial that we’re dealing with it’s climate delay and the idea that corporations are actively delaying and and uh putting other obstacles in the way so for me corporate misconduct is not just about the actions that they take against people or the environment it’s also about their communication it’s about misinformation and we need to recognize the rule of misinformation as a key part of corporate misconduct so what um this idea of activism um is something that I want to focus on in the presentation and as you can see here activism is visual it’s uh it’s about subverting it’s about parody it’s also about expert knowledge um and so I’m interested in the role then of C campaigning organizations and social movements the practice of AC activism is a way to initiate conflict controversy exert influence in intervening situations where conduct is seen as unacceptable so I think knowledge has a big role to play in activism um but it’s also about communication Simplicity and subverting um official versions and official accounts and so it’s this theme of kind of subverting challenging and initiating conflict some of these themes are the things that really come to the for when we look at the role of accounting so here are some examples of where activist campaign groups have constructed their own accounts of uh Target entities or Target issues that they regard as being uh guilty or responsible for some kind of unacceptable conduct and a few things that jump out immediately first of all these documents tend to take the official um uh documents the official accounts produced by those organizations and kind of subvert them they use the ex the original imagery but they kind of subvert them and flip them round um you’ll also notice that these organiz these companies are they’re big companies and they operate in in uh industries that are controversial so mining um fast food oil and gas and so on and often these are the kind of environments where these kind of conflicts arise so another example of this that I’ve studied in addition to these is tobacco so U I’ve looked at various um uh examples of conflicts between campaigners and um and Industry um but this one is is one of my favorites so I’m going to I’m going to focus in on this um and anti-tobacco activism is you know here’s there two main protagonists um the campaigning uh charity action on smoking and health uh and one of the big tobacco companies I think there’s really only four big tobacco companies and one of these is British American Tobacco and um again this is a kind of image of one of the reports produced by action on smoking and health and you can see actually looks actually copies the the look and feel of the uh original social report that was produced by bat um and that’s really one of the things that’s interesting about this is that it was B itself that initiated a kind of program of social reporting in the early 20th century and as soon as Ash discovered that they immediately responded and what we realized about these situations is that you get these kind of uh engagements where accounts get exchanged between different protagonists in the field so you get this kind of process of conflict where accounting seems to play a really important role so what we did in the paper we tried to conceptualize the idea I’ve got my sort of Roman Arena here to represent a conflict Arena so we drew on literature in political science in Risk conflict in in similar kind of areas and we pull together this idea of of sort of an arena framework in which we have a number of different parties including business but also the media political institutions the public and the opposing um campaigners and and so accounting is something that really plays an important role in terms of um you know discursively kind of creating the conditions in which these Arenas conflicts are initiated um and escalated and so we we realize that the role of accounting depends upon the stage of conflict that is going on in these in these um in these controversies um and often of course large corporations will try to prevent or deny um the existence of C of countering evidence of of um challenges to their conduct and then what happens is that campaigners will then try to escalate that conflict they’ll try to actually initiate conflict in order to engage and uh challenge um their target entity sometimes conflicts don’t really get resolved so sometimes they just perpetuate and so we realize that depending on the stage of a conflict you see different tactical intentions on the part of these campaigning organizations sometimes they’re trying to confront organizations but sometimes they’re trying to cooperate with them so it’s this tension between confrontation and cooperation is a really interesting um sort of characteristic of the Dynamics involved in these um these conflicts so what we found in our work was that um campaigning organizations don’t produce one kind of they produce different multiple different kinds of account depending on what their Strate their tactical intention is and depending on the stage of the conflict that they’re at so these three accounts we we term systematic partisan and Contra governing and the reason they’re different is because they they provide different kinds of knowledge and they seek different kinds of transformation so we felt that that was a really important uh insight into the way campaigning activist s um change tactics depending on what it is they’re trying to do and what we found was that often conflicts are initiated and escalated using really partisan type accounts that have emotional narratives that try to um really uh draw people in and mobilize opinion uh to try to really delegitimize the conduct of a Target organization that call for the role of ruling enforcers and standard Setters and Regulators to come in and take action but as conflicts progress and if they move towards some kind of resolution um tar campaigners move towards more systematic approach where they actually seek more direct collaboration with the target entities so you actually end up with a kind of change of tactic we also discovered that you know depending on the nature of the conflict campaigning organizations can be much more more radical there isn’t a lot of evidence in our literature of this so far but at the moment I’m I’ve been working on uh research that looks at the de grth social movement and how radical movements like degrowth are trying to kind of construct alternative um imaginaries economic uh political imaginaries that take us to another place but so far there’s still uh relatively less well understood so um out of all of that you know I think we are in a situation where activists uh play an important role and to come back to what I was saying at the beginning of the presentation I think we have a a need to recognize that conflict and dissensus is a really important part of um bringing about change so we can’t just rely on us as academics to take evidence to policy makers for those policy makers to go oh that’s really interesting I Now understand the importance of this and to then make changes I think of often change comes about as we see in the post office Horizon Scandal through much more Grassroots action where we involve the media we mobilize public opinion we create pressure and I think that fundamentally that is really important it’s got to the stage now where activist accountants seem to the whole idea of activism we have we now have um investors we have shareholder activists we have hedge fund activists um we have um business leader activists we even have activist accountants and this is a still image from a a YouTube video that was produced by the Ft welcome to the era of the activist accountant I love this quote by Jillian T in the in the video where she says I used to assume that people who were going to change the world on issues like climate change were essentially a bunch of tie-dye wearing activists who chain themselves to bulldozers well new Flash I now believe it’s actually going to be the accountants who do more to change the world when it comes to Green issues now I think that’s probably a little bit glib but I think there’s maybe a deeper um Insight that we can draw from that and for me that comes to some of the issues that my colleague was talking about earlier in relation to the urgency that we have right now to address climate change given the carbon budgets that we have and the need to actually stick to those carbon budgets the the irony is that because we have taking out such a long time to address that and the the need for Action then becomes much more urgent so you know the the result of taking such a conservative stance up until now means that going forward we have to take a much more radical stance okay so in my view where does that that ultimately um lead us to if radical changes now needed I think the time has come for all of us to start thinking like activists and using our voice to help bring about change thank you thank you thank you Colin so now we’ve got um activism through data and accounts excellent so now um let’s move to Professor sari Sarah Henry who is chair of law um and who’s going to talk to us about water law that thank you Zan tough facts two tough facts to follow um water law what’s that it’s a question I get asked occasionally social occasions usually in a professional context if I say to the lawyers and there’s one or two in the room I’m a water lawyer they say that’s very specialized and when I say to the water scientists and there’s maybe one of them in the room um I’m a water lawyer they say but what do you specialize in and then the engineers say but how do you do research in law and I’m not sure I’ll answer the third question but I hope to be able to tell you a little bit about what water law is and how water law might be able to help with some of the problems of our time that have already been flagged we live on a watery planet and 70% of the planet and 70% of you is water but only a very tiny fraction of that water is available for human use and in theory it’s recyclable renewable but in reality it’s finite and it’s under a lot of pressure it’s over abstracted it’s over polluted and too often it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time too little too much if you’re really unlucky a country where it’s too little and too much interchangeably and climate change is making that hydrological cycle that we’re all broadly familiar with much more unpredictable in ways that we don’t fully understand so there’s certainly a Water Crisis going on along with the others water law is water for all I borrowed that from my PhD student uh PhD supervisor stole some might say so Professor Pat whiters was the professor here at dundi she was instrumental along with others in setting up the UNESCO Center for water law policy and Science and that Center is is still here and flourishing and the name of that Center indicates to us the interdisciplinary nature of water and that need to build water policy on the basis of the science and then to develop law to implement that policy and that law then has to strike the tricky balance of being rigid enough to be a law and flexible enough to cope with rapid change and plat was a transboundary lawyer she was interested in transboundary waters between States but I’m a National Water lawyer I’m interested in domestic law I like to prod the transboundary lawyers occasionally by reminding them that without the domestic law none of their treaties will be implemented and I think that broadly National Water lawyers would look at four main areas we’re interested in the legal structures for managing water in catch in river basins and none of the impacts that humans have on water they don’t generally happen in water they happen on land and and reach the water later we’re interested in rules on water allocation whether that’s through a right space system or licensing or some combination of the two it’s not particularly my specialism if I have to tell the scientists what I specialize in I’d probably see water pollution and water quality started as an Environmental Lawyer and that that’s really my my first interest but I guess I’ve spent most of my professional life in water looking at the regulation and the governance of water services Drinking Water waste water and sanitation so I’ll say a little bit more about both of them in a moment we’ve seen the stgs in all the talks today and that that’s a good thing I think you know they are meant to be um Universal in their appli ation and Universal in their scope and water has a goal and that goal covers all of the things of interest to National Water lawyers that covers allocation and pollution but quite properly the first two parts of that goal are on universal access to drinking water and universal access to sanitation but what is a crosscutting goal so whether we’re thinking about health or food or gender doesn’t matter which of the other 60 goals we pick water will be relevant to that managing water will be relevant to achieving that goal it’s a busy slide there are a couple of people in this audience who really don’t like this slide but I’ll put it up anyway to give some indication of the breadth and complexity of the legal regimes that are involved in managing both water and the environment so down at the bottom I’m not going to use the poter it will horribly wrong down at the bottom there’s core aspects of National Water law with iwrm Water Resource Management and then allocation and pollution and services and then on one side of the slide what I would call Strategic or structural regimes Environmental Management um land use planning governance regimes around information flows and participation on the other side some of the many sectoral uses of water whether that’s food or energy or mining there’s a lot of water in that table and Angela’s already referred to the amount of water it takes to run a Data Center and sometimes we Overlook that hidden water and people talk about virtual water in food but there’s virtual water in everything it’s a factor of production maybe it’s not valued quite right Callin yeah so it has a lot of sectoral uses there are a lot of interl policy and legal Frameworks and then at the top but it could be in a bubble around the whole the twin crisis the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis and at the moment it’s interesting the Scottish government has a wide program at the moment of legislative policy initiatives in the environmental space there’s a whole lot of things that are built in Parliament there are proposals for bills the biodiversity strategies just been finalized within that there will be targets for water quality amongst many other things and it’s really important that those policy targets are joined up in some way and joined up policy is a real problem in my world because there are so many policy spheres and so many sets of of legal arrangements and where targets are being created across a suite of interl policies whether that’s domestically or internationally and when those targets are also creating obligations on a wide set of public authorities who may or may not work well together the picture can get quite messy and quite a lot of what we do in water law and policy and science is about trying to match up those targets and those policy goals going to spend a little bit of time thinking about how lucky we are here in Scotland and in that first slide it is pretty well luck and geography we live in a small country with a low population density and lots and lots of fresh water our per capita water supply is is very very high and our population density is condensed in in the middle of the country which means that a lot of our water resources are in a pretty good state now data is not only big and messy it’s also unreliable and that’s certainly true for data on water um the data that the UN has is very different to the data that the EU has in terms of its reliability and the things that it’s trying to measure and the way that it’s reported on and the um consistency of that reporting so un says that around 60% of Global Water bodies have good ambient quality but not every country is reporting on those measures which are under the SGS the the indicators for the SGS EU wide there’s a much more rigid regime and much better reporting much Fuller reporting so the water framework directive sets standards and targets for good ecological status and eu-wide the last set of reports about 40% of surface water bodies were in at good ecological status and in Scotland where we’re using those same framework directive tests it’s 87% and it will be be up above 90 so we’re doing very well in terms of water quality and that’s as much a matter of luck and geography as it is our excellent practice although we do we do have good practice as well um but in the most recent EU report saying that didn’t involve the UK um a third of River Basin districts said that one of their big problems with governance um as opposed to to science or or other technical matters lucky but also privileged in relation to drinking water so Colin mentioned I love your graphic about the the own goals um certainly we’re failing to reach far too many of the sustainable development goals in the the 203 times scale we have made decent progress on the drinking water goal compared to some others but again we have to think about what we’re aiming towards so 91% of the global population on the data have a basic water supply that’s pretty basic and it’s not necessarily safe to drink 73% safe to drink and that is going up but it won’t meet it won’t be a universal universally achieved by 2030 without kind of tripling the current Global spend the payback on water and especially in waste water is actually very high so for every dollar spend you get a really high payback in terms of public and private Health in terms of development goals and so forth but that spend is not quite happening in Europe and that’s greater Europe and the figures are much the same for the northern Americas and it’s around 95% with safely managed water supply in Scotland almost everyone has Safe Water 99.96% of the public Supply um tested at really very high standards and 97% of us are on the public Supply but most of the rest will also have safe water so again lucky but privileged here in that we live in an advanced developed economy that invested heavily in their drinking water supply in the late 19th and early 20 20th centuries um generally with public money and that’s something that’s much less available to those parts of the world that are now trying to make up that Gap you might or might not know um it surprises my students that it wasn’t until the late 1980s here that there were mandatory technical standards for the quality of your drinking water in Scotland and across the UK and the EU also lucky and privileged although the are many problems around wastewater treatment so again globally 81% have basic sanitation well that’s really basic and it’s neither safe nor healthy nor adequate which are some of the other words that are sometimes used to measure Supply 50% 57% have a safely managed um sanitation system and that may or may not be Wastewater flushed Wastewater we could argue a lot we won’t do it today about the pluses and minuses of wasting lots of water flushing away very small amounts of human waste it probably wasn’t the best idea in resource terms in the late 19th century interestingly BME did a survey and it beat everything antibiotics everything else from doctors of the single greatest Public Health Initiative was sewers but it wastes a lot of water however for us as a consumer as an individual in household it’s absolutely the gold standards is it out of sight and out of mind and five% of the global population meantime have no sanitation facility at all and defecate in the open or into plastic bags which they throw away which is called a flying toilet but it’s not is it in terms of treatment of Wastewater about half of domestic Wastewater on about half of the country countries that report um is apparently treated collected and then treated but when you add Industrial Waste Water in Asel the figures are so poor that they’re not reported in 2017 the UN un water did do a survey and they said about 80% globally of all waste water is not collected and treated so things are pretty Grim globally we’re lucky and privileged almost everyone here has a safely managed Wastewater service again the requirement to collect and treat Wastewater here that’s relatively new that was the mid 1990s before anybody did anything about that it was collected and treated before that but there wasn’t a requirement and generally speaking um raw sewage and sewage sludge was simply pumped or shipped out to sea so I’ve concentrated on Wastewater and SE because it’s a easy thing to concentrate on there are many other Wicked problems with which water is involved and to which water law might be able to be part of the solution I often think that it’s it’s not just true in water but it certainly is true in water and especially in waste water that we have both 19th century and 21st century problems so we’ve all seen the coverage in the last year or two about sewer overflows which is a feature of that 19 Century design system and it’s unavoidable without digging up all the sewers and replacing them with two sewers or doing something different with our Wastewater these are Big tasks but that’s a 19th century problem and then added to that we’ve got Plastics we’ve got Pharmaceuticals we’ve got all the emerging pollutants that also have to be thought about both with and Wastewater and more generally in the water environment but that factor about not having had our our current rules that make our environment relatively clean in Scotland until really many recently when I started teaching environmental law water law and I was teaching young industry professionals Wastewater engineers and environmental scientists and their expectation and assumption was that sewage would be pumped out to sea and they saw nothing wrong with that and that’s what they’d been taught and that that’s fine but it was really really quick to turn around it was a very short period of time before they changed their minds on the back of that change in the law that drove a change in practice a change in technology everything changed in their professional worlds and their belief system changed with it so much less than 10 years it was no longer acceptable to them so I would just finish by saying that I think law is not just reactive and it’s not just punitive it’s a force for progress and a force for social change thank [Applause] you thank you that was absolutely fascinating um okay so um I’ve asked you to to remember all of your questions we’ve got hands up already excellent good to see some Keen people so first question up there if you can wait for the mic so that the people online can hear thank you very much for all to all three of you uh and unfortunately I have two questions one for the first speaker and one for the last I’m afraid I haven’t really got one for the middle but if I was pushed I’m sure I could think of one uh the the first one is about um the longterm or rather I should say very long-term storage of data uh I can’t believe that um a few hundred years well first of all I’ve mentioned this a number of times various people oh it’s all safe on the cloud uh no I can’t believe that the cloud is going to last all that long and all that it needs is a major failure in uh Electrical uh Prov or electricity provision in a number of these data sites and it would all just vanish that’s one thing and what can we do about it and then thirdly about the water law um does it water law I mean you mentioned all about fresh water yes does it also run us to into the into the sea what I was just thinking of listening to the news uh on Radio 4 this morning um about this problem with plastic nurdles on the beaches of North Spain I mean what could be done about that and is there any way that uh water law can let’s say uh manage that uh and hopefully prevent it thank you thank you very much for your question in short I share your concerns about um as was the um data including things like data formats becoming obsolete um the issues around resilience electricity supplies etc etc civilizational collapse with climate change perhaps too but putting that to one side um I think I feel that the pendulum is swinging back a little bit although how many people actually realize this or think that this is appropriate is another um concern but I think some kinds of records and documentation must be kept on paper still um and I think it was in India where um they were still going to type right or at least print out various uh case notes around legal cases to store them in archives because they thought that that would last longer than some of the digital files um I don’t have very good solutions to all of this because also that comes with other costs as well in terms of resources and space but I think it has to be born in mind and actually earlier today I was talking about the British Library hack that you may be a you may all be aware of I don’t know um but the British library has is suffering a serious Cyber attack and has had to revert to using things like paper cataloges to find books so I think that it’s clear that that at least backup is needed um well the water doesn’t know whether it’s Coastal Marine Fresh So that certainly joined up from that point of view and some legal regimes extend out into Coastal Waters uh what can the law do about plastic pollution yeah I mean most sunmarine pollution comes from activities in the sea but a lot of it comes from activities on land so it’s generally landbased run off whatever it might be use Plastics I think in terms of plastics we can spend a lot more money treating them out at wastewater treatment plant and that would solve a little bit of it but not not the rest or we could have much more rigorous control of what we what we make and what we sell and what we what we buy and to be honest I think that’s a more um effective solution although maybe not politically acceptable thank you okay um Rebecca here thank you thank you to all the speakers for really um very good and thought provoking uh talks it seems to me that that we’re in a situation where there’s so much data we’re swimming swimming in lots of it it’s difficult for us as individuals and as a research Community to know what we can trust whose data do we trust and what do we pick to support our arguments so if we’re to take up Colin’s challenge of becoming activists what dangers should we consider in the light of data gathered for us and about us [Laughter] I mean maybe just to come in on the the the broader issues because I’m sure Angela can speak to the some of the data concerns um I certainly think and I didn’t really get into this in the in the in the lecture much but when we look at uh controversies now we seem to have got to a point where things get very polarized and I think that opinion polarization is is a challenge is is a real issue so when opinions become so polarized that we can’t have we can have a lot of conflict but we can’t really resolve that conflict um you know that is an issue and um I think we we haven’t really learned how to kind of diffuse that sort of situation very well so I think there is a need to understand more more about how those polarized situations develop and it’s like a conflict stage maybe that is a form of escalation that you know is actually unhelpful so um I you know I think we we need to sensus and I think we need to have some kind of friction in our deliberations collectively but that friction has got to be productive somehow um so from my point of view that is a kind of direction that I think more work need to be to be done to really sort of do more work on the ground with activist groups to see how they engage and escalate in Conflict but try to figure out ways of actually moving them forward productively thanks I would say there’s so much to kind of be said about that and I don’t have very good Solutions I have to say uh but it is a growing concern also around things like deep faked AI technology um understanding at least on behalf of normal people rather than technical experts what is true and what is not um and what does something being true even mean as well um and so on and things like the provence of particular things that we see particularly in digital forms as well as data that has been collected about us what I would say on behalf of you know normal people I think is to kind of remain critically critically engaged and somewhat skeptical to um about kind of what we see and I think we have to uh do this much we will have to do this much more as we’re in going into an era of deep fakes but it did make me think about things more historically too um when talking to some colleagues about this um about I suppose how we kind of I think in many cases we sort of think a photograph or a video is reality but it’s often a very partial reality if it is reality as well so I think it’s not as if this is the first time that we have these issues but they’re certainly kind of Amplified by certain technological developments and I guess skills like critical thinking that universities teach or supposed to teach um should be very key kind of going forward um as well of course as technical capacities around sort of experts in it for sort of forensically looking at systems and understanding kind of where data particularly Digital Data comes from and I’m sure to there’s conversations to be had around kind of standardizations of data and protocols which might actually ref reflect some of the issues that Sarah mentioned in the Water World yeah data is very poor in the Water World um it’s poor here it’s much poorer globally and and often um I mean lawyers can’t interpret that data they can’t find it and they can’t interpret it and we have to work with the scientists and the engineers and and also perhaps the accountants the people who can valuing Waters contentious subject but um but nonetheless it does have numerous different values and we have to think about that too so it can’t be done in a in a disciplinary Silo excellent thank you Jeff hi I’ve got a question for Sarah please uh if or I should probably say when you are the president of the Republic of Scotland in the field of water what’s the one law that you would bring in or change first first I used to play a game with my super students from the environmental regulator and asked them what would what they would ban what would be the first thing that they would ban but the first thing I would ban would be antibacterial sprays for domestic use um because I think we it’s just not I mean some households might have a particular medical need for it um and then if you want a big solution then you’re rip up the Wastewater system I say around and replace it with a different Wastewater system that isn’t a Wastewater system but I think I’d probably start with more controls around some of the things that we routinely buy and use without thinking about the problems behind them right thank you and I think there’s a question here here yeah you another question about water um many conflicts are caused by climate change IND induced drought um many African countries uh farmin and and um Mass migration and it’s uh I just wondered what can be done there uh we see in uh flooding the effects of flooding um the import UK is importing more crops now from uh countries like Morocco where they use artisian water which is a limited resource and um you yeah I mean there there’s several issues in there I think specifically on water wars though it’s a phas that we’ve always tried to avoid we would be much more comfortable seeing water as a as a prompt for cooperation and working together I mean that’s yeah climate is certainly driving a migration crisis so would wouldn’t dispute that at all but in terms of water it’s interesting Israel and Palestine for a long time sure something there was a lot of Technic level cooperation under the radar of the political non-cooperation where the people who were collectively responsible for the water pipes into into Gaza were actually working together because they had to and I think that’s really positive a while ago but I think it’s very positive and much better to see water as a as a driver for cooperation than a a driver for conflict but that’s that’s not to Bel little and uh there would be many longer answers thank you you um another question from the flooor at the back here please okay thank you Sarah and and obviously I completely Echo your point about water and international corporation um since the lady at the front mentioned um Morocco I’m going to ask you about D Nation um so um in Morocco they they’ve had a green Evolution and increased agricultural output significantly but they’ve run up against the problem of of water um for both Agriculture and and drinking potable water so the they have big plans um to desalinate huge amounts of seawater so please may ask you about desalination thank you yeah you could ask me about desalination I mean I think one of the interesting things about desalination is the energy use and if it’s solar powered or if it’s not and if it is not solar powered then we’ve got a huge energy use much the same as big data and a huge accounting issue there as well I think it’s very problematic um the the water balancing countries where water is scarce it’s a competed for resource and and that is it’s not always conflict in a war sense but it’s certainly a conflict for the use of the resource uh and there are other big drains um hydrogen power for example uses a lot of water we’re not really taking that into account when we’re thinking of that as an energy source I think there are two things about diesel one is that it produces a salty brainy residue that has to be managed effectively as a sludgy waste and the other is that it uses a lot of water so um I’m not I’m not a fan but uh I couldn’t really say more I don’t think thank you we’ve got time for one more question from the floor and then I’ve got a question from online so of okay thanks Colin I’ve got a question for you about activism and our students um I always think of students in the past as being at the Vanguard of activism do you think our students have become too complacent and if they have how do we encourage them to become less complacent yeah I mean I thank you for the question grae that’s a great question um I think there is clearly a a place where activism and education meet and I think education is an incredibly important um vehicle for for Change and for transformation so you know much of the kind of uh focus of accounting research around um sustainability is has embraced that idea and there’s been a lot of um enthusiasm for it um but you’re right I mean I think it’s it’s it’s challenging especially when students come in with expectations that might be quite different in terms of what they see a subject like a accounting uh as being about and as as as in terms of what they value so um you know but I I’m I’m still extremely optimistic about the the role of um accounting and business uh education as a vehicle for um encouraging students to sort of reframe and reconfigure their expectations um and a lot I think a lot of excellent work has has been done um you know in our field and I think we we discussed a little bit in the previous session uh you know what we what we need to do and where we need to go and I think um you know I really think that we we we need to keep pushing we need to get more uh into the curriculum we need to think about the benchmarks that are in our curriculum and I think there will be work on ongoing in that area so you know I don’t dismiss the the difficulty but I think I think things are going in the right direction thank you um a question from um our audience online for you Angela might be a bit of an unfair question but um in your opinion who was at fault or to blame for the Post Office Scandal um I think there was a number many feelings on behalf of many institutions I’ve looked at it more from the kind of data digital evidence aspect but clearly there are huge problems with the post office as an institution uh with whoever was kind of overseeing the post office which I guess is the government um also the legal system particularly but not exclusively in England and Wales where there are presumptions in the system that data from computers is accurate and I think anyone who knows anything about computers would see that is that kind of absurd um uh presumption but that also um exists as well I mean Fujitsu were up to no good I would say too um so I think there’s a kind of a whole host of institutional failings and we’re beginning to kind of see that play out a lot more really thanks to the TV series because it’s been a slow burning obviously not for the people involved but not it’s not had a huge amount of publicity until now but suddenly things are beginning to happen uh politically around around this now but I think feelings on behalf of many many institutions and individuals within those institutions as well thank you thank and thank you all of our panel for I think you’ll agree have been a really good session and thank you all of you for your excellent questions that have allowed us to take forward the discussion this afternoon so thank you it it remains yeah