Autumn 2025

ACADEMIC CORNER
“I WOULD LOVE TO SEE A WORLD WHERE
HUMANS AND NATURE THRIVE TOGETHER”
In his latest column, Dr. Tom Young talks to Dr. Peter Marcus Bach, Founder and Director of EdenCT,
discussing his career, Blue-Green Infrastructure and creating sustainable cities...
I
was lucky enough to be introduced to Peter Bach and interviewed on his excellent
‘Grand Challengers’ podcast earlier this year. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience
and can highly recommend Peter’s extensive back catalogue for insightful
interviews with a wide range of professionals in the BGI world.
Naturally we spoke about our relative professional interests and I was struck at the
wide range of green and blue infrastructure (BGI) experience Peter has. He has
managed to straddle the divide between academia, consultancy and some pretty
hardcore modelling! We had a good long chat about Peter’s career, his inspirations
and how he gets involved in live BGI projects.
Tom Young (TY): What motivated
you to study engineering?
Peter Marcus Bach (PMB): As a child
I found myself playing a lot with Lego,
building imaginative environments and
narratives. I had a small collection but
made the most of the pieces I had. Had
I been able to draw better, I may have
become an architect. However, I was
good at maths, so engineering became
the natural choice. Studying in Australia,
you are given a chance in your first
year to explore different branches of
engineering, and I quickly I fell in love
with civil engineering.
TY: How did you end up in
academia?
PMB: I was offered a chance to
do research as part of a summer
internship in 2008/2009. My professor,
who became my PhD supervisor, Ana
Deletic, approached me with the chance
of doing some research. I worked
together with her and David McCarthy
on the first flush phenomenon, [the
idea] that the first part of runoff in
a storm event was often the most
polluted. We wanted to find a new way
of identifying it. Knowing how big this
first volume of runoff was would allow
solutions to be designed that can trap
this volume and protect downstream
catchments. The curiosity for research
grew from there. I had the opportunity
to then obtain a PhD scholarship and
decided to continue on the academic
path. It was not planned, but the chance
to work on a topic that interested me for
three years and develop something that
advances the industry and was uniquely
your own appealed to me.
TY: What was your
first encounter
with Blue-Green
Infrastructures?
PMB: At the end of
my undergraduate
engineering at Monash
University, I learned about
the concept of Water Sensitive
Urban Design, which is what Australia
calls it. Immediately, I fell in love with
how the use of nature synergized with
engineering infrastructure.
TY: What was your PhD about?
PMB: The practice of Water Sensitive
Urban Design or Blue-Green
Infrastructure (BGI) is great at helping
manage stormwater and also improving
wellbeing in cities. The problem was
that we lacked a strategic approach
to rolling out the practice across the
entire city. Often it was done in isolated
parts of the city. At the time (2010),
new developments were mostly the
places where such infrastructures
Biography:
Dr. Peter Marcus Bach is the Founder
and Director of EdenCT, specialising
in consulting, research and education
around planning sustainable cities and
leveraging the power of nature-based
solutions and AI in supporting their
implementation. Peter develops modelling
methodologies and software to support
planners to better capture the multiple
benefits that nature can provide in cities,
for example; smarter water management,
urban heat mitigation and biodiversity
enhancement
He obtained a Bachelor in Civil
Engineering and PhD in Water Systems
Modelling at Monash University in 2009
and 2014 respectively, and spent ten
years in academia. He is an Adjunct
Research Fellow at Monash University,
Editor of the journal Water Research
X, chair of the International Water
Association (IWA) Blue-Green
Infrastructures Working
Group and host of The Grand
Challengers Podcast.
Left: Dr. Peter Marcus Bach.
were implemented. To
guide the widespread
implementation of such
systems, particularly in retrofit
developments, I wanted to develop an
approach to support this process more
actively. The PhD developed a planningsupport
system, known as UrbanBEATS
(Urban Biophysical Environments and
Technologies Simulator), an integrated
model that spatially models urban
environments (to cope with data
scarcity of such information) to then
decide where it was best to place a
BGI to fulfill runoff volume reduction,
pollution reduction and stormwater
harvesting objectives.
TY: You have a planning-support
model, what next after the PhD?
PMB: As I developed the UrbanBEATS
10 GREENSCAPE AUTUMN 2025 • www.greenscapemag.co.uk