About this Event
Description
This summer’s hot dry weather focused concerns over water supplies in our region. One question raised widely was:“Why has the UK not built a reservoir for more than 30 years?”. The focus of this seminar is the proposed huge White Horse Reservoir (WHR), near Abingdon, in gestation for over 25 years. This large infrastructure investment has become a totemic project for this question and a battleground between large water companies, regulators, government and campaigners, ignoring whether the accompanying capital outlay is the most cost-effective and future-resilient way to spend customers’ money.
Speaker Dr Derek Stork is Chair of GARD, an organisation which campaigns against the reservoir and puts forward alternative programmes which would replace this scheme at lower cost and higher resilience. His talk will challenge the current approach to water resource planning, calling for increased public oversight at the regional level, rigorous guidelines and regulators with real teeth. Real issues for new water resources – climate-change and drought resilience, adaptive planning and environmental benefit – must be given prominence in objectively defined ways. Above all, key engineering issues must be settled early in the project approval process, something essential to keeping costs under control. He will conclude by describing GARD’s proposed alternative to the WHR proposal – a resource and operational programme to satisfy the water needs of the Thames Basin.
Speaker
Dr Derek Stork is the Chairman of the Campaign organization, “Group Against Reservoir Development” (https://groupagainstreservoirdevelopment.org/), an Oxfordshire-based community grouping which campaigns for a smarter, sustainable water strategy in the South East that ensures resilience against population growth, climate change, and drought. GARD opposes Thames Water proposals for a huge embanked reservoir near Abingdon and puts forward alternative programmes which would replace this scheme at lower cost and higher resilience.
Derek retired as a Nuclear Physicist in 2013 following a 40-year research career at CERN and the Culham Laboratory’s JET Project. He is an author on over 100 journal publications and was elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1997. At his retirement, he was Director of Technology at the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He believes passionately that putting appropriate technology to use offers the best route out of the current environmental crisis, and this underpins his commitment to GARD’s cause.
Other Information
This event is part of the Oxford Water Network Michaelmas Term 2026 Seminar Series on the Future of Water in the Thames Basin. Please email [email protected] if you have any specific requirements to be able to access this event.
Event venue & nearby stays
School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, United Kingdom
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