Plagued by pollution, and with too much water extracted for use by society, not a single waterbody in England is in ‘Good’ status overall. The Government set a date of 22^nd December 2021 for waters in England and Wales to be brought up to standard, after an initial 2015 deadline was missed.[i] But this Christmas there is little to celebrate… progress towards these targets has been painfully slow, with some waters in such a poor state that recently-drafted plans don’t envisage them recovering until the 2060s.[ii]   

Not a single waterbody in England is in ‘Good’ status overall.

The health of our waters is assessed on two fronts – ecology and chemistry. Ecology considers the health of wildlife itself, such as fish and aquatic insects, and things that can cause them harm, like excess nutrients from wastewater and farming. In England only 14% of rivers achieve ‘good ecological status’. In Wales it is higher, at 46%.

The dire state of our waters’ ‘chemical status’ is even more concerning. Data published by the Environment Agency last year showed that every single waterbody in England failed to meet standards for pollutants known as ‘priority hazardous substances’[iii]. These are a motley crew of chemicals, from the seemingly benign – used in batteries, detergents, stain repellents and flame retardants in furniture – to the intentionally harmful, including fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. What they have in common is that all harm aquatic wildlife.

They are often long-lived so once released into the environment they persist, and are very hard to clean up – even though many are long-since banned, these pollutants are still causing problems in our waters today. As a result, the regulations allow longer for waters polluted by such chemicals to recover[iv]; they should be healthy by the 2030s – but based on current progress it’s likely that even these longer deadlines will not be met.

Why have we failed so dramatically?

It is cold comfort that we have a good understanding of the pressures affecting the health of our waters. To move forward, we must extract key lessons from these depressing statistics:

Firstly, we need far better controls on chemicals

There may be relatively little we can do to remove chemicals once they are already in water, but we can control what ends up there in future. New chemical substances are being put on the market at a rapid pace yet safe ‘thresholds’ have been established for very few.

We need to adopt a grouping process and establish thresholds for groups of chemicals much more rapidly, treating all in the group as if they have the properties of the most damaging, and regulating them accordingly. Where identified as ‘very persistent’, these chemicals will accumulate in the environment, meaning that if use continues, any threshold will be exceeded at some point – so we must place early controls on these chemicals to prevent these thresholds being reached.

Secondly we must tackle nutrient pollution.

Phosphates and nitrates act as a fertiliser, promoting the growth of algae and causing knock-on impacts for the creatures that rely on the aquatic plants that the algae outcompete. One of the main sources of nutrient pollution is fertiliser and soil run-off from farming.

In Wales, new country-wide rules that restrict slurry (manure mixed with water) and fertiliser applications to prevent pollution from nitrates are being challenged by farmers who want ‘more flexibility’. In England, similar ‘Farming Rules for Water’ were introduced in 2018 yet there is a lack of awareness of the rules, and many farmers are in breach of them. There needs to be time-limited support to help bring farmers up to standard, including by looking at how we manage one of the biggest risks; excessive volumes of slurry.

Nutrients in wastewater are the other major source. Public and political pressure as the Environment Act passed through parliament has seen new requirements placed upon water companies to tackle storm overflows – these ‘safety valves’ in the sewage system release untreated sewage into rivers when the system is overwhelmed by rainwater, but monitoring by companies and ‘citizen scientists’ has demonstrated that they are operating not just during storm conditions, but quite frequently.

However, enlarging sewers or building new storm tanks to rectify this could harm natural habitats and be energy and carbon-intensive. To avoid such trade-offs, nature-based solutions must be a key part of the plan, using sustainable drainage schemes to keep rainwater out of the sewage system in the first place. And we must not overlook sewage treatment works – if not equipped with nutrient stripping capabilities, they are a significant and constant source of nutrient pollution.

Justifying the investment to improve these sites has been a barrier in the past, but adopting ‘natural capital accounting’ will help overcome the bias of considering monetary costs alone, ensuring that the wider benefits of enhanced treatment are factored in. These could include benefits far afield, such as improving the health of seagrass beds, which can absorb vast quantities of carbon when in good condition but suffer when receiving nutrient pollution from upstream. 

And thirdly, we need to consider the whole water environment.

The regulations that set the ecological and chemical targets encourage a whole-system view of how the water environment operates, but fall short of embedding this approach fully. At the moment we consider the pressures acting only upon a particular stretch of river, lake, or coastal water and can overlook wider parts of the water environment.

There’s so much nature in smaller lakes, ponds and wetlands that are a key part of the overall catchment system, yet are not a focus of the targets, or of the River Basin Management Plans that set out how we will achieve them. And so we struggle to bring our waters into good health because we are ignoring crucial parts of the system. 

A live consultation on these plans is a key opportunity to rethink our approach. Those responding should consider: What’s missing from the proposed set of actions – how can we more quickly bring our waters into the condition that society expects and wildlife so badly needs?

In particular, do the plans advocate for new controls on chemicals? Do they embrace nature-based solutions? Will they see us taking action to restore small waters and wetlands? And if not – how do we expect that they will make any difference?

The state of our waters is abysmal – do we really have to wait another 40 years for this special part of our natural world to improve?