Editorial Perspectives: achieving real-world impact

Since I started as an Associate Editor of Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology in January 2018 I've been struck by the number of manuscript submissions in which the potential impact of the reported research is not clearly explained, either in the Water Impact Statement or the manuscript itself. By ‘impact’, here I mean real-world application of the research, not academic impact. Examples might include research that changes the policies or practices of the water sector, influences regulations or guidelines, leads to new technologies that make it into use in the water sector, or results in the water sector adapting or optimizing their existing technologies or processes to improve performance.

Of course, not all research will necessarily achieve immediate real-world impacts like these, but the pathways towards achieving that impact in future should at least be envisioned and explained. Otherwise, why are we doing research if there is no realistic prospect of it ever being adopted in the water sector and benefitting society or the environment? I sometimes wonder if we were to go back and look at papers published 5, 10 or even 20 years ago in our field, what percentage of them could be clearly demonstrated to have actually changed anything in the water sector, either directly or indirectly?

I certainly do not claim to be an expert in always achieving high levels of impact through my own research! However, from having now read through a large number of submissions to our journal and having had many discussions in my career with a range of collaborators, water sector practitioners, and intended technology end users about the key water-related challenges and how we could potentially solve them, a few recurring tips for maximizing impact come to mind:

• Collaborate and co-author with people from other disciplines whenever possible. Very few problems are ones that can be solved by a single discipline, and for most problems in our field there are valuable inputs needed from engineers, chemists, microbiologists, social scientists, public health specialists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, environmental scientists, product designers, data scientists, and economists, to name but a few. Partnering with them allows a more holistic examination of the problem and is therefore more likely to lead to outputs that will bring us much closer to having an impact on solving the problem than if we only study our little part of the problem on our own.

• Collaborate and co-author with people who work in the water sector whenever possible. This will inform the design of your research to maximize the impact in the water sector and ensure that your research represents the real situations that they encounter there. It also allows you to find out the research that they may have already done themselves. We want to publish the results of these kinds of collaborations, since innovation is not just about creating something ‘new’ but also translating research into practice. A good example of a paper in our journal resulting from such a collaboration in Australia is that by Fallowfield et al. (2018).¹

• Try to work across scales whenever possible. It's great if your treatment technology can degrade or remove a contaminant from water in a 100 ml beaker in the lab, but will it work at pilot scale or when treating millions of litres a day of flowing water? What would be the challenges of scaling up? Would it be cost-effective? How many chemicals or how much energy would that entail?

• Be honest about the downsides of your innovation, not just the advantages. There are no silver bullets, and papers should never be one-sided sales pitches. For example, what are the unintended by-products, energy consumption, chemical consumption, health/environmental hazards, or carbon footprint of your innovation? Are there intrinsic limits to what your innovation can achieve, and if so, what are the next steps needed to address these limitations? Are there emerging tools that could be used to investigate the potential downsides further, such as new analytical chemistry methods for determining chemical transformation products, new bioassays for considering various forms of toxicity, or new approaches in the field of life-cycle assessment?

• Benchmark how your new treatment process/sensor/measurement technique, etc., compares in a practical sense against existing alternatives that are already in use in the water sector. For example, if you are researching a new sorbent, how does it compare against granular activated carbon in terms of cost and performance? Authors often do a pretty good job of explaining the technical benefits of their innovative technology or process, but how does it compare in terms of cost, practicality of use, and other requirements that would be important to the water sector? What steps would be needed for the innovation to be developed to the stage that it could be adopted by the water sector? How realistic is it that those steps will take place?

• If designing a technology intended for an end user who is outside the water sector (e.g. a technology for use at home by someone living in a low-income country), involve them in the design of your technology from day one. This will allow you to ensure that the technology is filling a real need for them rather than simply a need that you perceive. It will also allow their preferences, practical constraints, and capabilities to be taken into account, for example their desire and ability to pay for the technology. There is no point creating a technology that is technically effective but which no one will ever want to use or be able to equitably and sustainably access. Our research should also explore the ways that we can improve this access.

• Don't only consider pure water matrices in your research. While indeed pure waters may often be needed to control variables and understand underlying fundamental processes, no treatment technology will ever make it into use in the water sector if it can't be demonstrated to work in a range of real water matrices. Why not consider both pure and real water matrices in your research? Similarly, don't only consider model contaminants (e.g. dyes) as targets for your new treatment technologies, since it isn't always clear whether the real-world target contaminants will behave similarly.

• Related to the tip immediately above, don't only consider concentrations of target contaminants that are vastly higher than the actual concentrations found in water or wastewater, if this can be avoided. For example, if your new treatment technology is able to reduce a contaminant from 50 to 1 mg l⁻¹, that's not really good enough if there are already regulations in place that set a maximum acceptable concentration limit of 0.1 mg l⁻¹ for the contaminant. Granted, it may sometimes be technically difficult to conduct research at the very low concentrations that are representative of real water matrices, however you should still comment on how your findings should be considered in light of this limitation of your research.

• If your study involves reporting the concentrations of an emerging contaminant in water, what knowledge exists about the potential health or environmental impacts of the contaminant at the levels being reported? What further information would need to be gathered to enable a regulator to set an evidence-based maximum contaminant level limit for the contaminant?

• Involve early career researchers as collaborators whenever possible. Impact isn't only about new innovations, it's also about training and encouraging the talented young people who will change our field and the water sector beyond the end of your career.

To summarise, there are lots of things that we can do to involve the right people and design our research in the right way to maximize real-world impact. Please don't get me wrong – academic impacts, i.e. making new contributions to fundamental knowledge in our field, are critically important, and all manuscripts submitted to our journal must demonstrate this kind of impact as well. That's the main business of university research, after all. I am not saying that we should move away from doing fundamental studies. Some fundamental studies may lead to game-changers in the real-world at some point. But even in such cases, the pathways to achieving that real-world impact someday should be explained, so that we can all dream together and start to put in place the actions needed to make those dreams a reality.

References

1. H. J. Fallowfield, P. Young, M. J. Taylor, N. Buchanan, N. Cromar, A. Keegan and P. Monis, Independent validation and regulatory agency approval for high rate algal ponds to treat wastewater from rural communities, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol., 2018, 4, 195–205.

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