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CIRIA – evolving and adapting to changing environments and industry needs


CIRIA’s new Chair of Council Jonathan Simm, Chief Technical Director of Resilience, HR Wallingford outlines his vision for CIRIA’s council and membership moving forward.

Having been a long-serving member of Council I have witnessed a great deal of evolution as CIRIA works to adapt to changing environments and industry needs. I have been privileged to support this work as Chair of the Water Panel and, as Doug Waters mentioned in last month’s Member blog, occasionally stepping in as the Council Chair. I am now looking forward to leading the Council and would like to extend my thanks to Doug for his contribution to the membership over the last four years.

My overall vision for Council is to support the progression of CIRIA’s vision to the benefit of both CIRIA and its membership. Personally I believe there are some specific challenges that could be addressed in a collaborative manner over the next two years:

  1. Seek to find new and innovative ways of engaging with members down the supply chain, including those involved in materials supply, off-site prefabrication, and supporting services such as surveying. This is linked to growing CIRIA membership into such organisations.
  2. Explore how, by delivering green infrastructure and biodiversity into the built environment, industry can actually deliver improved performance of infrastructure and not just improve our green credentials.
  3. Finally, building on the discussions over the last two years on the resilience of infrastructure, we should take a broader view of how we seek to improve engineering performance across the industry. Specifically, we should identify how we can make infrastructure better work for communities, both every day and in the crises brought on by natural and manmade extreme events.

These, and other issues of interest to members, can be explored at various levels both by discussions at council and member events, but also by identifying and implementing projects that address specific elements of these and are promoted under the auspices of our Advisory Panels. And whilst CIRIA does not normally take a lobbying role on policy or funding issues (in contrast to the engineering institutions), I would personally like to see Council supporting this process by identifying new areas of high quality collaboratively produced and peer-reviewed information and guidance that has been CIRIA’s hallmark over the years.


Find out more about how you can get involved with CIRIA’s collaboratively produced good practice guidance by visiting the project proposals and projects underway pages on the CIRIA website. Or, If you would be interested in contributing a blog or briefing get in touch with [email protected].