Published date: 25 October 2019

Closed opportunity - This means that the contract is currently closed. The buying department may be considering suppliers that have already applied, or no suitable offers were made.


Closing: 18 November 2019

Contract summary

Industry

  • Data-processing services - 72310000

  • Research and development consultancy services - 73200000

Location of contract

Any region

Value of contract

£0

Procurement reference

HEMforWCDP

Published date

25 October 2019

Closing date

18 November 2019

Contract start date

2 December 2019

Contract end date

31 March 2020

Contract type

Service contract

Procedure type

Open procedure (below threshold)

Any interested supplier may submit a tender in response to an opportunity notice.

This procedure can be used for procurements below the relevant contract value threshold.

Contract is suitable for SMEs?

Yes

Contract is suitable for VCSEs?

No

Description

Water companies are required to monitor, assess and, where possible, mitigate for the environmental impact of their supply side drought management actions. This includes setting out environmental assessment, monitoring plans and mitigation measures as part of the drought planning process. However, in our role as statutory consultee and advisor to Government on water company drought plans (WCDPs) we have identified that completing environmental assessment to understand the impact of supply side drought management actions (including drought permits/orders) is a significant challenge for many water companies.
Some of the key challenges include: limited time series of baseline environmental datasets to enable understanding of the environment under 'non-drought' and previous drought conditions; assessing the sensitivity of the environment to flow changes due to supply side drought management actions; predicting the likely effect on the environment of flow changes due to supply side drought management actions; ascribing a level of confidence/certainty.
Developing improved hydroecological modelling tools is essential in helping water companies to address these challenges and thus improve environmental assessment in the drought planning process.
This project will develop/refine an existing Environment Agency prototype tool (DRIED-UP - written in R code with a shiny app user interface) into a Hydroecological Modelling (HEM) tool for water companies to use to inform their environmental assessments in the next round of statutory drought plans.
The key functionality that will be developed as part of this project is: 1) quantifying ecological (macro-invertebrate) sensitivity to flow alteration (due to supply side drought management actions); 2) understand uncertainty associated with the environmental assessment/modelling results; 3) allow predictions of ecological (macro-invertebrate) response to alternative flow alteration scenarios due to implementation of different supply side drought management actions.
We expect that the development/refinement of this tool through this project will result in an improved functionality and usability through development of options/features and improved graphical displays.
Delivery of this hydroecological modelling tool will help water companies improve their environmental assessments whilst also having the potential to allow them to use their results to better inform choices around their drought management options.

More information

Attachments

Additional text

To apply please see the instructions in the attached RFQ (Request for Quotation) and associated documents. Email your response to jo.dennis@environment-agency.gov.uk. Tenders to be received no later than 17:00 hours on 18th November 2019.

About the buyer

Contact name

Jo Dennis

Address

Environment Agency
550 Streetsbrook Road
Solihull
B91 1QT
England

Telephone

02030 252 740

Email

jo.dennis@environment-agency.gov.uk