Holly Foreman, the manager of Auckland Council’s Safeswim programme, explores how this World Health Organization-recognised and award-winning initiative is pioneering the management of bathing waters and public health risks. She highlights its role in enhancing institutional accountability and bolstering public trust.
With growing awareness of wastewater discharges to rivers, lakes, and beaches in the UK, important questions are being asked about the prevalence and acceptability of microbial contamination in those waterways and the public health risks it poses to recreational users.
While much attention has been given to overflows from combined sewer systems, microbial contamination also occurs from a range of other natural and human sources, including treated wastewater discharges, septic tank systems, farming, and natural reservoirs such as sediments, marshes, and wild animals (Krupska et. al. 2024, Newson 2024, RAE 2024). In addition to the risks of falling ill after swimming in contaminated waters, there are also concerns about the longer-term public health impacts of exposure to antimicrobial resistant bacteria (EAC 2022, RAE 2024).
The UK Government and the water industry have announced plans to reduce pollution and improve the health of waterways and the natural environment more broadly (DEFRA 2023a and 2023b, Water UK 2024). However, large-scale changes to physical infrastructure systems take time to plan and deliver and government policies can take time to bear fruit. Indeed, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) concluded in January 2024 that the government was “largely off track” in meeting its ambitions, targets and commitments for water (OEP 2024). Even if all goes according to plan, the timeframes over which the benefits of these interventions will be realised are relatively long, i.e., 2035 to 2050.
In the meantime, the pollution of the rivers, lakes, and beaches, and the public health risk to recreational users of those waters, continues. How, then, can the public health risk of bathing in the UK’s recreational waters be effectively managed in the interim?
This article highlights the example of Safeswim (safeswim.org.nz), which is a New Zealand programme managing public health risks to recreational water users. Safeswim enables people to make risk-informed decisions on when and where to swim by providing access to real-time, accurate, science-based information on both current and forecast water quality, swimming conditions, and safety hazards for popular coastal and freshwater swimming locations. The programme currently serves the Auckland and Northland regions of New Zealand.
In 2017, Auckland Council realised that its existing compliance monitoring regime, based on similar sampling protocols as those used in the UK, was not fit for purpose and deliberately sought a ‘beyond compliance’ solution for recreational water quality health risk monitoring.
This article provides a brief summary of Safeswim’s evolution and the benefits that the programme has delivered. It then makes the case that a similar approach could benefit the management of bathing waters in the UK.
Auckland and the evolution of Safeswim
Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, is a region for beach lovers, blessed with over 200 beaches across three harbours and over 3,200km of coastline (This is around 70% more coastline than Devon and Cornwall put together, see Figure 1 below).
Going to the beach and engaging in water-based recreation – such as swimming, surfing, sailing, or paddleboarding – is an essential part of summer life in the City of Sails. Around 5.1 million people live in New Zealand, with approximately 1.7 million living in Tāmaki Makaurau, as Auckland is known in te reo Māori (the indigenous language of New Zealand).