The Environment Agency typically publish data on the state of waters every three years, using assessments that consider both chemical pollution and ecological health. Data from 2019 showed that every single site failed chemical standards, and less than a fifth were in good ecological condition.

New data has now been published for over 4,000 river, canal, lake, estuary and coastal sites, and it shows that England’s waters are still struggling under a plethora of threats. At the time of writing, summary statistics were not available, so we looked at the underlying to data to see what it shows¹.

Chemical status - no news is good news?

None of the published data concerns the chemical assessments, with no requirement to update chemical status until 2025. Until 2016 the information was published annually, with the next update in 2019 marking a shift to every three years. However this frequency is not obligatory, and it appears that the next full set of chemical status data will be published six years on from the last.

This is concerning because the last assessment found that every single site was polluted by long-lasting chemicals. Updated River Basin Management Plans published last year set out that all waters are expected to remain polluted with these substances until 2063. But does this mean we should stop looking?

We need to take action to tackle the pollutants that we can do something about, and monitoring will help us to understand the effectiveness of these actions.

It also allows us to identify any newly-emerging chemicals so that we can put measures in place to prevent their further release. In the absence of updated chemical assessments, this will all prove more difficult.   

What the published data does tell us about though is the other part of the assessment; that for ecological status.

Ecological status - the overarching and the underpinning

Of the 4,048 sites that have had their Ecological Status updated with 2022 data, only 587 (14.5%) achieve the standard of ‘good’ or above. Within this, the figure for rivers is ~14% - a figure which mirrors that from the 2019 assessment². Overall, well over four fifths of these newly-assessed waters are not in good enough condition to support the wildlife that should be found there.

Behind this headline figure lies the detail of the pressures our waters are facing. The ecology assessment considers a range of individual elements that collectively add up to tell us whether waters are healthy overall, or not. It looks at the physical and chemical conditions that affect wildlife, like dissolved oxygen levels and nutrient concentrations, and the health of wildlife populations themselves, such as insect and fish communities

Many of these underlying elements do meet the standard for ‘good’, but rightly, a site is not considered healthy unless it meets all of the relevant tests. Almost 80% of these tests are passed, and many achieve a harder-to-meet ‘high’ rather than the minimum standard of ‘good’.  What this tells us is that, to improve the state of our rivers, lakes and seas overall, we must look to those persistent problem elements that are continuing to drag down our waters’ overall health.

The single most common failure shown in the new data is for phosphate pollution, with more than half of the rivers assessed failing because of it. Phosphorus, measured as phosphate, is a nutrient needed by plants to grow, but excess levels allow thuggish species to take over, outcompeting river plant communities; these die back, depriving aquatic wildlife of food and shelter. Nutrient-fuelled ‘algal blooms’ can turn waters pea-green, smothering other plants and blocking out life-giving sunlight. In 2020, a particularly bad algal event on the River Wye, which straddles the England-Wales border, saw the key river plant, water crowfoot, wiped out over more than 70 miles^3,4.     

Phosphate comes from two major sources; sewage and farm pollution, but whilst sewage is very much in the public eye, there has been far less attention paid to agricultural pollution.

Farming failures

Treated and untreated wastewater have blighted our rivers and seas for decades, but investment to tackle this has been slowly making headway, putting the proportion of failures for which water companies are responsible on a downward trajectory.

Meanwhile, farming now holds the unenviable title of the sector responsible for the greatest number of failures against water standards overall.

Environment Agency data showed that farming activities caused failures in 45% of England’s waters, and farm pollution specifically, in 40%⁵.

Too many nutrients on farmland is a key issue. Applied as chemical fertiliser or in organic manures, excess nutrients leach away into rivers, causing problems there, and also on down to the sea, where they contribute to algal blooms that destroy seagrass meadows.

Due to repeated applications over time, nutrient levels in soils can be extremely high. A 2022 report by Lancaster and Leeds Universities found that in the Wye catchment, a phosphorus load 3000 tonnes in excess of what crops can take up is being added to land in the river’s catchment each year⁶. Soil testing can identify where there’s a reduced need, or even no need, to add more nutrients, because there’s already sufficient phosphate in the soils. Halting applications helps to reduce water pollution, and reduces our reliance on imported chemical fertilisers. But it’s more complicated where farmers are generating slurry or manure themselves, because if they don’t need it for their own land, then they either need to store it until they do, or export it from their farm to somewhere else. These options are complicated or expensive. There are large nutrient imbalances across the UK, but it’s currently difficult to transport manure or slurry from where it’s generated to areas where there’s a need. This results in animal waste instead being spread to land where it’s not needed, and when it’s not taken up by grass or arable crops, it is instead available to pollute our watercourses.       

More erratic weather due to climate change also makes these issues worse, with winter downpours washing soils, nutrients and pesticides into watercourses, whilst during low flows or drought, lower water volumes mean that pollutants are more concentrated.

The Wildlife Trusts are concerned that farm regulation and support is insufficient to tackle the issue of agricultural pollution. We’d like to see the new Environmental Land Management Scheme support farmers to put in place Nutrient Management Plans⁷ that set out how fertilisers, slurry and manure will be managed - nutrient budgeting should be established as a basic standard for all farmers. Grants for slurry storage, or land management payments for any land that has nutrients added to it, should be conditional on putting nutrient plans in place, and implementing their recommendations.

To do this, it's important that farmers are supported with access to high-quality, impartial advice, informed by the latest science, enabling them to reduce harm to the environment whilst maintaining profits.

Our recent report Farming at the Sweet Spot, published by the Nature Friendly Farming Network and The Wildlife Trusts, found that that the staged reduction of costly inputs, such as artificial fertiliser, pesticides, and imported feed concentrate, made farmers significantly better off across all the farms studied.  

Beyond these positive changes we also need increased funding for the Environment Agency to ensure that polluting farms can be inspected, and action taken against polluters where issues haven’t been rectified. Prosecutions by the Environment Agency’s predecessor for water-related offences numbered upwards of 250 a year, whereas now numbers are close to a tenth of that, and staffing levels declined by a quarter in the decade since 2010.

An underfunded regulator undermines Government’s ability to achieve its own targets on improving water quality and halting biodiversity loss.

In all, a range of measures, including regulatory change, financial incentives and learning and innovation, will be needed to meet this challenge.

Without this, we’re likely to see few improvements in the state of our rivers and seas, as efforts to repair damage cannot keep up with the rate of pollution and the pressures of climate change. We need to see more action on farm pollution in particular – advice and incentives to help farmers avoid polluting practices - if we are to have any hope of seeing our rivers restored to health. 

References

1. England | Catchment Data Explorer
2. State of the water environment indicator B3: supporting evidence - GOV.UK (data summary) – 16% of surface waters achieve Good Ecological Status. Within this, figures are 14% for rivers, 14% for Lakes, 19% for Estuaries and 45% for coastal waters.
3. River Action Blog - plea to save the Wye as algal blooms return
4. Herefordshire Council request urgent intervention on the Wye
5. State of the water environment indicator B3: supporting evidence - GOV.UK (sectors and issues)
6. Withers et al (2022) Re-focusing Phosphorus use in the Wye Catchment
7. Defra Farming Blog - Create and use a Nutrient Management Plan