Flood and Coast 2024 Reflections

Volunteers from WiFCERM were once again invited back to the Flood and Coast Conference 2024 in Telford. This is not just an industry-leading annual event. It is an inclusive, diverse community of people working towards a sustainable future.

This year focusing on the theme of ‘Invest in Women; Accelerate Progress’, WiFCERM built on the success of previous years with a new exhibition stand, engaging networking event, and the highly anticipated WiFCERM Awards.

Photo of the WiFCERM committee and speakers at the Women in FCERM networking event — Flood and Coast networking event photo: WiFCERM Committee members and event speakers

Engaging with the Flood and Coast community
Stand sponsored by AtkinsRealis, CIWEM, Tetra Tech

Building on our success from previous years and with particular thanks to our stand sponsors, WiFCERM were honoured to exhibit at Flood and Coast with our new stand. We were delighted to talk to so many people at our stand, sharing who we are and what we do, including our networking events, our corporate affiliate membership, our successful mentoring programme. We heard of stories of men and women doing amazing things in their organisations to promote gender quality and expanded our networking group of professionals, connecting and re-connecting with wonderful people across the FCERM community.

Exhibition Hall: people engaging at the WiFCERM stand

Networking event
Sponsored by WSP Binnies

The WiFCERM networking event has been one of the most highly attended events at Flood and Coast in previous years, and this year was no different! With standing room only, we focused on the theme of ‘Invest in Women; Accelerate progress’. Our facilitators, Priscilla Haselhurst (Lower Medway IDB), and Kevin Simpson (Binnies) alongside our guest speakers, Joanne Barlow (Mott Macdonald), Jack Southon (WSP), and Caitlyn Davies (Binnies) talked openly and honestly about what investment in women they had seen or experienced in the FCERM sector that helped accelerate progress, and the challenges that still exist. The safe space they created by sharing their stories and reflections allowed the attendees to discuss and share their personal experiences about what opportunities and support they would like to see more of. This was no small challenge given we had 168 attendees! We want to say thank you to all our guest speakers and attendees for making this another engaging, inspiring and successful event. We will be analysing the feedback from the table discussions and building in this to our future activities and initiatives.

Awards
Sponsored by Jacobs

We were delighted to celebrate the winners and highly commended runners up of our annual WiFCERM awards at the Flood and Coast gala dinner. The awards celebrate professionals of all genders and organisations in the FCERM sector, who are making a real difference to gender equality in the workplace and across the industry. We had three awards this year: Rising Star Award, Equality Leadership Award and the Laura Baird Special Recognition Award.

For all these awards, the judges were looking for individuals who acted as a role model – showing leadership of gender equality, influenced change and promoted a culture of fairness, inclusion and respect. Judges also looked for those who stood out for proactively developing themselves, supported the empowerment of others and who shined a light on the great things women can achieve.

The winner of the Rising Star Award, an individual who is in the earlier stages of her career in FCERM, who has proactively influenced and promoted gender equity, was Param Kaur-Kingston (Jacobs).

Param Kaur-Kingston, winner of the Rising Star Award, who could not join us on the night

The winner of the Equality Leadership Award, an individual who has proactively influenced and promoted gender equality, diversity and inclusion across the FCERM sector, was Jane Tingay (Arcadis).

Jane Tingay receiving the Equality Leadership Award, presented by Amy Bentley

The winner of the Laura Baird Special Recognition Award was Sun Yan Evans (Mott MacDonald). This award recognises an individual who, throughout their career, has been and continues to be, an outstanding role model to all those around them in mentoring, guiding and raising the profile and achievements of women in the sector.

Sun Yan Evans receiving the Laura Baird Special Recognition Award, presented by Amy Bentley

As part of the WiFCERM awards we have 4 highly commended runners up. The judges wanted to recognise individuals in each category as highly commended for their significant achievements and the outstanding quality of all the nominees this year.

Rising Star – Clementine Walsh (Arcadis)

Equality Leadership – Chris Boon (Jacobs)

Equality Leadership – Eleanor Inglis (Volker Stevin)

Laura Baird Special Recognition Award – Joanne Barlow (Mott MacDonald)

Corporate affiliate membership

We were delighted to launch our new WiFCERM Corporate Affiliate Membership at our WiFCERM networking event at Flood and Coast 2024! Thank you, and welcome, to our 5 early adopter members JBA, Arup, Binnies, Jacobs and Tetra Tech!

Representatives from the early adopters. Marc Pinnell (JBA), Kevin Simpson (Binnies), Amy Bentley (Jacobs), Francesca Hurt (Tetra Tech), Jennifer Laight (Arup), Alex Cutler (WiFCERM – Affiliate Membership Co-Lead)

Our corporate affiliate membership is open to any organisations who work in, or support, the FCERM sector and would like to become recognised partners in contributing to gender equality across the FCERM sector.

For more information on our FREE corporate affiliate membership and how to sign up email: womeninfcerm@environment-agency.gov.uk or visit our page: Corporate Affiliate Membership (womeninfcerm.org)

A final thank you to our sponsors who help make these events happen.

Stand sponsors