Pensions Goth speaks to Dr Izzy Bishop, a freshwater scientist from University College London whose work focuses on water quality, pollution, and ecosystem resilience, about why water risk matters for infrastructure, and long-term investment.
Pensions Goth: I want to start at the beginning. Not with regulation or climate models, but with how you came to work on water.
Dr Izzy Bishop: I grew up in rural South Shropshire with a pond at the bottom of the garden. I spent hours there as a child, watching insects, tadpoles, and plants change through the year. I did not think of it as environmental science. It was just somewhere exciting to explore.
When I went to university in London, I found myself returning home to Shropshire to study ponds and rivers for my undergraduate and master’s dissertations. That made the work feel personal rather than abstract. Shortly after that, the area was hit by a flash flood. It was not something anyone there had experienced before, and it caused real damage to homes. That was the point where water stopped being background scenery and became something you could see and feel – something that really matters to people’s lives and livelihoods.
Pensions Goth: That shift from background to lived risk feels important. In pensions, climate risk is well established, but water often sits behind it. Why is water so hard to see and manage?
Dr Izzy Bishop: Water is poorly monitored, and much of the data is uncertain. At the same time, water systems have been altered for thousands of years. Rivers were straightened, diverted, and engineered long before modern regulation. That makes it difficult to define what good looks like, or who is responsible for harm.
In urban rivers such as the River Lee in London (where I currently work), multiple pressures interact. Pollution from water companies, road runoff, abstraction, habitat loss, overfishing, and climate change all act together. Many industries depend on this water. Water companies are the obvious example, and pension funds are heavily invested in them. Agriculture and data centres also rely on water, but it is rarely treated as a material asset in company accounts.
Pensions Goth: Is the situation getting worse?
Dr Izzy Bishop: It depends on what you measure. Aquatic invertebrates are seen as an important indicator of water quality. Their abundance in English rivers declined until the 1990s, then recovered after the introduction of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Act in 1991, which hugely improved wastewater treatment. That recovery has now levelled off. Some chemical pollutants have fallen over the 20th and 21st centuries, including certain heavy metals. Others have increased, such as pharmaceuticals and persistent organic pollutants or ‘forever chemicals’.
Under the EU Water Framework Directive (introduced in 2000), all water bodies were meant to reach “good ecological status” by 2015. That target was missed and moved to 2027. In England, 16% of water bodies now meet the standard, down from 26% when monitoring began. Post-Brexit legislation is widely seen as weaker on targets and monitoring.
Pensions Goth: What does poor water quality mean in practical terms?
Dr Izzy Bishop: Health is the most direct impact. We take water from the environment to drink and return it as sewage or agricultural waste. Population growth and ageing infrastructure put treatment systems under strain, increasing the risk of water-borne disease, particularly for people who use water for recreational activities like swimming and boating.
Antibiotics entering rivers from farming and human waste create conditions for antibiotic-resistant microbes. Nutrient pollution causes algal blooms, which release toxins and raise the cost of treating drinking water.
Flooding and drought are also major risks. Rivers and wetlands once stored water naturally. Many have been disconnected from their floodplains, making flooding more frequent. Climate change increases both heavy rainfall and drought, increasing risk for homes, transport, healthcare, and water infrastructure. During floods, exposure to polluted water becomes a risk. During periods of drought, pollutants become more concentrated in waterways, with greater potential to damage the wider ecosystem.
Pensions Goth: Is regulation the answer?
Dr Izzy Bishop: Regulation is necessary but not sufficient. The recent Cunliffe review showed how current incentives push water companies to keep prices down rather than invest in infrastructure.
Renationalisation is one option being discussed, partly to remove the natural monopoly that currently exists (after all, water is not naturally bounded to regions managed by individual water companies). But ownership alone does not solve the problem. Strong, system-wide regulation is still essential. At present, regulation is siloed. Different sectors blame each other, while regulators lack the data to see how pressures interact. Water is shared across the economy, so governance needs to reflect that.
Pensions Goth: What would better data look like?
Dr Izzy Bishop: On rivers such as the River Wye, local volunteers have carried out regular sampling, species monitoring, and visual inspections over long periods. That has produced detailed, location-specific evidence on nutrient pollution, sewage discharges, and agricultural runoff that would not otherwise exist.
Because local people are present consistently, they often detect pollution events missed by periodic monitoring. In some catchments, citizen data has exposed gaps between official assessments and conditions on the ground. This evidence has been used to challenge regulatory conclusions, inform media reporting, and support legal and political pressure.
Citizen science does not replace regulation, but it fills gaps. It shows where monitoring is weak, helps identify pollution sources, and makes harm visible. It highlights the value of good quality data that is collected frequently enough to capture how water quality varies spatially and temporally.
Water companies will soon be required to install continuous monitoring at sewage works, creating large new data streams. The challenge is analysis, not collection. Methods borrowed from earthquake science and machine learning could help trace pollution sources in near real time, allowing behaviour to change and damage to be reduced.
Pensions Goth: What happens if we fail to act?
Dr Izzy Bishop: Pressures increase. Climate change and population growth mean more flooding, more drought, higher health risks, and greater biodiversity loss. Reduced biodiversity lowers resilience. In agriculture, fewer plant species mean fewer pollinators and higher risk of crop failure. The same logic applies across ecosystems that support food, materials, and water supply.
Pensions Goth: What should institutional investors be asking?
Dr Izzy Bishop: There is no standard water footprint like carbon, so investors need to look closely at company behaviour. Are firms abstracting large volumes of water, and is this sustainable? Are they managing waste responsibly?
Agriculture, water companies, and industrial producers are key sectors. Companies that treat climate risk seriously often address water risk as well, but this needs to be supported by evidence, not statements.
Pensions Goth: Finally, I have to ask. What happened to the garden pond?
Dr Izzy Bishop: The pond in my mum’s garden is now a patio, which I am not very happy about.
Pensions Goth: That is tragic.
Dr Izzy Bishop: I agree. But in compensation, my mum has become a citizen scientist. She lives in a village that was one of the first to add a wetland to a sewage works in the 1990s. She and her neighbours now monitor the streams around it.
They discovered that pollution in the stream was not coming from the sewage works at all. It was actually my mum’s own septic tank, which was leaking into the river. She has since fixed it, so she is now part of the solution, even without a pond.
Pensions Goth: That may be the strongest case for citizen science I have heard.
Dr Izzy Bishop: She is completely mad, but very effective. I aspire to follow in her footsteps!
Link to Dr Bishop’s website: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/32646-izzy-bishop
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