Proudly announcing Essential Environmental’s reincarnation: Urbaqua Ltd
As 2016 draws to a close, we are very excited to announce the launch of Urbaqua – a not-for-profit organisation that will work to support agencies in WA to deliver a water and environmentally sensitive future for our great state!
Urbaqua is an evolution of the services provided by our existing and well-established consultancy Essential Environmental.
Perhaps you’ve worked or collaborated with us whilst we’ve been wearing our ‘Essential Environmental’ hats. If so, you’ll no doubt know us as leaders in our field and super passionate about what we do. We’ve always sought to operate our business with a strong focus on social purpose activities and have undertaken a lot of pro-bono and not-for-profit work for organisations such as New WAter Ways, Stormwater WA as well as a number of local and state government agencies.
And whilst we really love wearing our ‘Essential Environmental’ consulting hats – our passion for the environment and water management in particular has often meant that whilst we’re keen to advise and guide projects as consultants, we also want to bring people together to deliver good outcomes on the ground that are a win-win for everyone!
So to that end, we’ve decided to set up a new enterprise, as a way to channel our passion to continually improve and support the creation of truly liveable communities.
Urbaqua will provide us a formal structure and a greater ability to extend beyond consultancy services to help form partnerships and support research to deliver better outcomes on the ground, providing support at all levels to government, industry and the community.
We are also delighted to announce that we have been joined by Dr Garry Middle, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University’s Centre for Sport and Recreation Research, as Chair of our Board of Directors. Garry brings a wealth of strategic environmental planning knowledge and will help guide Urbaqua to deliver great outcomes.
Our strategy has been developed to deliver elements of the Perth and Peel Green Growth Plan for 3.5 million (Dec 2015), the Minister for Water’s Water Innovation Advisory Group Report and Shaping Perth as a Water Sensitive City: Outcomes and perspectives from a participatory process to develop a vision and strategic transition framework (CRCWSC Project 4.2). We will identify opportunities to access grant funding and form partnerships based on win-win outcomes.
What we value:
Strong Networks – We are committed to developing and maintaining strong relationships with community, government and industry. These networks will be used to form partnerships to drive the uptake of water sensitive urban design approaches and facilitate knowledge sharing between practitioners.
Sustainable outcomes – We believe that environmental management systems and strategies should be functional, affordable and resilient so that we create assets for the future community and not liabilities.
Technical excellence – We strive for continuous development of our own technical skills through innovative thinking, robust processes and knowledge sharing based on leading research.
The official launch of Urbaqua will take place on Tuesday, 29th November 2016, at 5pm for a 5.30pm start at the University Club of WA (Hackett Entrance #1, Crawley).
Please contact us on info@urbaqua.org.au to RSVP for our launch, or if we can provide you with any advice on opportunities to move towards a water sensitive city.
So please join Urbaqua in this journey! And don’t worry, we will still be available as consultants providing all our usual services with the same brilliant team! We can assist you to optimise solutions and retrofits with monitoring, technical advice and modeling, developing partnerships and seeking funding/resources for project delivery.
Further information will be available on the Urbaqua website very soon:
We look forward to hearing from you!