Dr Geraldine Seguela
Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales, UKFrom Water Efficiency to Investable ESG Value: Optimising Water-Energy-Carbon Systems at Asset Level
Abstract:
Water scarcity in arid regions is increasingly addressed through energy-intensive desalination, embedding water supply within carbon-intensive infrastructure systems. While non-potable water reuse is widely promoted as a sustainability strategy, its environmental and financial performance at asset level remains insufficiently understood. Existing ESG reporting frameworks largely rely on entity-level metrics and do not capture the infrastructure systems through which environmental risks arise.
This keynote presents empirical evidence from a large healthcare facility in Abu Dhabi to examine how water system configuration drives both greenhouse gas emissions and financial performance. Using multi-year operational data, the analysis integrates water demand, water source, onsite energy use (Scope 2), and embedded desalination emissions (Scope 3) within a boundary-consistent framework. Three configurations are evaluated: a fully desalinated baseline, an observed mixed system, and an optimised non-potable water system combining demand reduction and full source substitution.
The results demonstrate that greenhouse gas intensity is governed primarily by water source and system configuration rather than volumetric water savings alone. While partial reuse delivers only marginal impact, full non-potable water substitution combined with system optimisation achieves significant decarbonisation and improved lifecycle financial performance.
The keynote introduces the Water-to-Carbon (W2C) metric as an asset-level indicator linking engineering performance to ESG value, demonstrating how infrastructure optimisation can translate environmental performance into decision-useful investment insight.
Biography:
Dr Geraldine Seguela is an architectural engineer and researcher with over a decade of experience in sustainable infrastructure, specialising in water resource management, non-potable water reuse, and the water-energy-carbon nexus in arid and water-stressed environments. Her work bridges building services engineering, environmental performance measurement, and lifecycle cost analysis to understand how infrastructure systems generate both environmental impacts and financial exposure.
Her research is grounded in a long-term empirical programme at a large healthcare facility in Abu Dhabi, where she developed and tested integrated strategies combining soil enhancement, irrigation optimisation, and alternative water sourcing. This work demonstrated how system configuration, rather than water savings alone, drives both greenhouse gas intensity and lifecycle financial performance in desalination-dependent contexts.
Her recent research extends into sustainable finance, where she develops asset-level environmental performance indicators, including the Water-to-Carbon (W2C) metric, to connect infrastructure engineering with ESG materiality, climate risk, and investment decision-making. Her work contributes to bridging the gap between physical system performance and sustainability disclosure frameworks, supporting more credible and decision-useful ESG reporting.
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