KES Bath students report on their win at Bristol GA Competition

Olivia Baxter, Anya Whybrow, Charlotte Ghali and Kate Herridge reporting.

On 28th February 2017, schools from Bath and Bristol area came together to participate in the annual GA Decision Making Competition. After a hearty ‘Cheeky Nandos’ in nearby Clifton, we headed to the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, ready to accept our challenge.

After an informative lecture by Simon Killen (St. Mary Redcliffe and Temple School) about California’s water shortages, we quickly got to work on our poster presentation. After much deliberation, we decided to split up the work between researching and poster making. The huge pile of resources and articles about water shortages soon started to slow us down and when “thirty minutes left” was shouted at the room of competitors we started to panic, and made posters like there was no tomorrow!

We decided to make smaller posters with information on, surrounded by raindrops (commented on by all three judges!). Our solution was simple, to build a desalinisation plant on the west coast, with a view to supply water to cities on the coast, such as San Francisco and LA. To build a water transfer system of underground pipes to transport water from wetter states, such as Washington, to the driest areas of California and use the same infrastructure to transport water from desalinisation plants around the state. The third policy in our proposal was to put money into research and development, to improve GM crops and irrigation, further research would also lead to better innovations in the future. The final policy was to give grants and tax credits to consumers and farmers who use less water and invest in policies such as drip irrigation.

Overall, we really enjoyed the experience, the challenge and ambition behind the competition made it an enjoyable experience and we would like to thank the GA for organising such a great evening.