At the recent meeting of the Stormwater Australia Directors, held on 14th July 2022, Queensland’s own Cath Thrupp was elected as the new President. Cath replaces Alan Hoban who announced that he would resign as President at mid-year but stay on the Stormwater Board until the end of 2022.

Cath has 20+ years’ experience in the water sector in Qld (west, north, central and SEQ), most recently spending 8 years as Manager of the Water Management consulting team at Brisbane City Council. The Water Management team works across Brisbane on diverse projects, including water sensitive urban design, waterway rehabilitation design and construction projects, coastal hazard adaptation, waterway health assessments and waterway asset planning.

We spoke with Cath about her new role and plans for the future:

“I was fortunate enough to virtually attend the recent Queensland Strategy session, which was helpful to understand what members saw as the most important challenges and issues. It also highlighted the need to improve relationships between Stormwater Queensland and Stormwater Australia.

We are all stronger together and we can have more impact when we work as stormwater team across all boundaries. So, let’s work through any outstanding concerns or issues from the past and once we have addressed those concerns, let’s turn our attention to the future. We have many water challenges ahead of us and we will all need to work together to solve those challenges!

As a President, the things that I am most passionate about are:

  1. Team-work: how do we create a sense of community, working more effectively as a stormwater ‘ecosystem’ across the country, sharing resources, data, designs and lessons?
  2. Innovation: how do we leverage technology to solve some of our most challenging stormwater problems, as well as scaling our catchment and waterway restoration efforts and helping our cities and communities to prepare for climate change and landuse change?
  3. Emerging leaders: there are many inspiring, passionate young stormwater leaders in our community and they deserve our full attention and support to start co-designing the future.
  4. New business models for the future: creating a more circular economy requires new thinking and new business models, especially for the management of natural resources and water/energy/waste infrastructure. As a team, we need to be working on new, more sustainable models that are viable across the lifecycle of assets, resilient in the face of climate change and supporting us to get to Net Zero.”

Cath Thrupp – Stormwater Australia President