Andrew Coleman – Welcome to a New Member of the Centre for Aquatic Environments

We would like to welcome a new member of the Centre for Aquatic Environments. Andrew Coleman has been a Senior Lecturer on the MSc Town Planning course in the School of Architecture and Design since January 2017, but he has an interesting connection with the University going back a lot longer.

“I met Huw Taylor when I first became a local representative for Surfers Against Sewage in the early 1990s and we spent several boozy evenings in Hanover pubs discussing and debating the effect of bathing and surfing in sewage-polluted seawater”  Andrew recalls.

Andrew has been a town planner since the 1980’s and completed a MSc in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) at the University when he was working as an environmental planner at the London Borough of Croydon.  His Masters dissertation in 1996 was about the potential role of ecotoxicology in EIA to help determine the effects of coastal sewage treatment works on the marine environment. While on the course, he also met his wife.

He left Croydon in 1999 to work as a planner in Trinidad and Tobago for 3 years where he continued to develop his knowledge of the role of planning in managing marine resources, including being involved in Caribbean-wide projects on valuing ecosystems such as mangroves and reefs.

From 2003 to 2016 he worked as a national adviser for planning in the Environment Agency (EA)’s national team. He was particularly involved in developing English planning policy and guidance on flooding, water quality, air pollution and contaminated land.

The MSc Town Planning course specializes in coastal planning and climate change and is one of the first courses to offer a Chartered Apprenticeship route.   The course is accredited by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). Since 2017, Andrew has supervised several dissertations about coastal flooding and is developing links with the network of local authorities that manage coastal change and flood risk, with an aim to run an academic/practitioner workshop. He presented at a European conference of town planners last September about coastal change and planning and he has also been published in the journal of the RTPI about the impacts of Air BnB and similar ‘sharing platforms’.

As a part-time lecturer, Andrew has had time to develop consultancy work. He is a co-author of guidance on using the planning system to help deliver better water management, has worked on EA guidance on flood risk assessment and is currently part of a consortium reviewing non-statutory standards for sustainable drainage systems. He is also once again a local representative of Surfers Against Sewage.

‘I’m a firm believer that research should lead to improvements on the ground (or in the water). In that respect, I’m a ‘pracademic’. I’m looking forward to developing research with CAE colleagues on how planning can help deliver healthier and sustainable coastal environments’, Andrew said.