GHD technical conference: Data and Insights on the Manchester agenda
At a glance
GHD’s Data and Insights team showcased innovative data solutions across water, energy and environmental sectors.
At GHD’s UK Technical Conference in Manchester, the Data and Insights team showcased how data science, digital engineering and analytics are helping clients solve challenges across the water, energy and environmental sectors.
In November 2025, technical specialists from across GHD travelled to Manchester, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, for GHD’s first UK hosted Technical Conference. With previous conferences taking place in Manila, Abu Dhabi, Cannes, and Los Angeles, the Manchester programme offered a valuable setting for showcasing innovation within the UK’s infrastructure sector and learning from leading projects from across the world and across disciplines.
For the Data and Insights team, the conference was a chance to share how data-led services are being delivering impact across live sector priorities. It was also an opportunity to connect with engineers, advisors and strategists across GHD on where improved data management and modelling can enable bold decision-making in uncertain and complex systems.
Three sessions in particular captured that range:
Three sessions in particular captured that range:
- Water (Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival): Market Lead Jon Jarrit presented on the team’s work with the festival, which had around 3,000 attendees across 52 tents, and on workshops that developed a methodology for using water-company data to better measure and improve spills into watercourses.
- Energy (electricity network modelling): Senior Advisor Oscar Garcia Costa led a breakout on using smart geospatial analysis, implemented with FME, to clean and model a regional electricity network, showing how an energy distribution company could better use their data to to reduce power outages for its worst-served customers and prioritise network improvements.
- Environment (digital twin of England’s agriculture): Executive Advisor Ed Burrows reflected on a four-year collaboration with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on a technology transformation that produced a digital twin of England’s agriculture, built with open-source tools (Python, SQL, etc) in Defra’s computing environments. This innovation brings together software engineering, data science, and knowledge in the environmental domain.
Across these examples, the emphasis was on finding ways to adapt and apply established methods to new sectors where there is a clear and tangible benefit to clients, while remaining grounded in the realities of operational constraints.
I came away from the conference having learnt a lot more about the impactful projects GHD is involved with worldwide. Meeting domain specialists and figuring out new collaboration opportunities with Data and Insights team here in the UK was a major highlight.