Meridian Water is Enfield Council’s £6 billion 25-year regeneration project which will create 10,000 homes, and 6,000 jobs for local people in Enfield. Meridian Water will be an exemplar of sustainable development and create a truly special piece of London.

The Council has set an environmental vision for Meridian Water which has used the ‘doughnut economics’ approach to create a place where social opportunities, environmental impact and economics all work together to produce combined benefits. Community and social value will be enhanced as people lead active and happy lifestyles within a clean, healthy and well-connected environment.

Challenges

Meridian Water has many goals, including local communities being its principal beneficiaries, it has three ecological goals (Carbon Positive, Environment Positive, Zero Waste & Circular) that respond to the significant global environmental challenges of climate change, mass extinction of species and resource depletion. Together, these goals provide a framework against which objectives and requirements can be set, and progress monitored and reported.

Meridian Water faces other challenges amplified by the scale of the development. The project aims not only to keep in line with varying international, national, regional and local policy contexts, benchmarks and reporting standards, but to go beyond them.  

OnePlanet technology at Meridian Water

Enfield Council world with Useful Projects to develop the Environmental Sustainability Strategy (ESS) which outlines the shared co-benefits, actions and goals across the development. Meridian Water is complex and made up of many separate projects. The OnePlanet platform is being used to track progress across these projects to ensure the ESS and other key Meridian Water goals and objectives are delivered. The OnePlanet platform achieves this through:

  • ‘Ecosystem Plan’. The Meridian Water online Ecosystem Plan is the overall vision for the Meridian Water development, incorporating the key aspirations and targets of each project. It is made up of Shared Outcomes and Shared Indicators which multiple team members can adopt into their individual Project Action Plans.
  • Collaboration. The OnePlanet platform helps the teams collaborate in one place where all their resources, updates and plans are stored. Teams can be allowed to view each other’s plans, share and adopt successful ideas and celebrate each other’s successes. This unlocks the collective creativity and experience of the team as an ‘ecosystem’.
  • Graph database technology. OnePlanet uses graph database technology to visualise data and reveal information about connections and relationships. Meridian Water teams are able to see the co-benefits and interconnectedness of the development in a visually engaging and intuitive way. 
  • Lenses. The ‘Lens’ function in the platform allows users to reorganise and visualise data in multiple different frameworks such as the UN Sustainability Goals, One Planet Living, GRESB and the RiBA stages. Project leads and team members of Meridian Water have the ability to continually track their alignment with the ESS throughout the development’s life cycle. 
  • Automated reports. The adoption of Shared Outcomes and Shared Indicators from the Ecosystem Plan into Project Action Plans allows updates from all projects to be automatically pulled together into a report. Meridian Water is able to produce development wide alignment and compliance reports regularly and share these with stakeholders as needed.

Rafe Bertram,  Meridian Water – Sustainability Facilitator says,

Sustainability is complex and involves lots of stakeholders. OnePlanet has allowed us to collaborate with wider project teams unlocking their experience and creativity as opposed to us having to drive the agenda on our own. By allowing performance to be viewed through different ‘lenses’ the requirements are understandable to all audiences, who understand how they are contributing to our ambitious targets.’ 

Expanding use of OnePlanet with Enfield Council as a whole 

The success of using OnePlanet at Meridian Water has led to Enfield Council using  the platform to help revise and manage its council-wide ‘Climate Action Plan’. Different departmental strategies are aligned across the borough around climate action, as well as the co-benefits of health, job creation and inclusivity. Enfield have also joined London Borough of Haringey and Watford Council to form a leadership cohort, pioneering the use of OnePlanet technology for aligning and integrating climate action across departments.

Ben Gill, OnePlanet’s Head of Customer Success says,

‘We are very grateful to Meridian Water and London Borough of Enfield for taking the lead and showing how OnePlanet technology can support collaboration around sustainability and untangle complexity.’

Join us at Footprint+

FOOTPRINT+ is a new event being held in Brighton on 7-9th June 2022. Representatives from every sector of the UK property market will gather to discuss and discover innovative methods to achieve Net Zero in real estate. OnePlanet’s founder, Pooran Desai OBE, will be joining a panel led by Enfield Council to discuss their Meridian Water regeneration project.

Find out about our Local Government Leadership Cohort

If you would like to find out how OnePlanet is supporting Local Governments to implement sustainability and climate action, you can either click here or contact us directly at: customersuccess@oneplanet.com.