Richard Fenner

Dr Richard Fenner is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Sustainable Development in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University. He is a Chartered Civil Engineer and a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management specialising in water, sanitation and sustainability issues, with a longstanding focus on developing country issues. Currently he is examining the inter-relationships between water, land and energy issues with respect to food security in sub Saharan Africa using the Foreseer tool developed initially for BP (on California) and is now being modified to explore the relationships between resource sectors initially in Uganda. He is also supervising work investigating desludging of pit latrines through the characterisation of synthetic sludges and the performance of equipment required to remove them, and separately using a Material Flow Analysis and risk approach to study the environmental and health impacts of resource recovery systems in developing countries (including pit latrine sludge) . He is a committee member of the Cambridge in Africa Programme, and the engineering representative on the Cambridge Africa Partnership in Research Excellence (CAPREx) funded by the Carnegie Corporation. He has also studied the use of system dynamics to understand the barriers to the implementation of household water treatment systems in southern India, Nepal and Ghana, and the use of a life cycle assessment of dry compost toilets in Durban South Africa and the Erdos Ecotown in China. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 papers, has been a founder member and Deputy Chairman of the Editorial Panel for the ICE Journal Engineering Sustainability and is the recipient of several awards from the Institution of Civil Engineers including the George Stephenson Gold Medal, the R A Carr Prize and the James Watt Medal.