The Rivers Trust's State of our Rivers report, to which CIWEM offered contributions, was welcomed across the board at a live presentation this morning, writes Miriam Habtesellasie.
CIWEM’s head of policy Alastair Chisholm had this to say:
"I’m delighted that we’ve been able to contribute to the State of the Rivers report. Rivers are at the forefront of how we in the UK will experience both the climate and nature crises. Healthy rivers, as part of a well-functioning water cycle will help us bear what climate change is going to bring in coming decades. They’re vital to our health and wellbeing and critical to our ability to recover nature.
"There’s a complex web of factors behind the parlous state our rivers are in and those complexities aren’t always clear. The State of our Rivers is a fantastic tool which brings a lot of complex data into one place and brings it to life – distilling it into the important messages that we all need to grips with and understand.
"Our settlements were born on rivers that teemed with life and let us prosper – our arteries and capillaries. They can keep doing that but only if we value them and nurture them."
The report and accompanying interactive resource is foremost a great one-stop shop to help the public, and even those in the water and environmental industry, access exisiting data on water quality in rivers, with 'nerd buttons' including statistics on sewer overflows.
I gave the tool a go myself and discovered that my local river, The Wandle, had an overall 'moderate' status in 2019. Though I'm not exactly sure what this means – it is a relief to know the water body I occassionally take a dip in has escaped 'bad' or 'poor' labels – and whether that classification still stands today, two years later.
The Rivers Trust director for partnerships and communications Christine Colvin readily admitted that the data the organisation shares may well be under reported by the water firms and more that provide them to the Environment Agency.
This was one point honed in on by broadcast journalist Joe Crowley. While welcoming the efforts of both Rebecca Power MP and Philip Dunne MP, and applauding The River's Trust achievement in putting such a comprehensive report together, he argued that "the data we have right now, is a shadow of the data we should have" and that the government has to take responsibility for "taking water quality samples reliably and regularly".
The good news? The Environment Bill is focusing on increasing the amount of real-time data that is available. Great, says Olivia MP, as the Labour party is keen to democratise this data, but she argues that what is currently missing from policy is how people can use it to hold polluters to account.
The legacy
River Action UK founder and chairman Charles Watson argued that the key question we should ask is: "what will the legacy of this report be?". While acknowledging that is a great tool for citizen scientists, he also questioned whether the report will be "an obituary column" for dying UK rivers.
Will we scroll over the River Wye, he said, in months or years to come and find that "there is nothing positive to be seen".
An important, if challenging point. No one report can address everything, but what is key to The State of our Rivers is that it begins to answer the question of 'what are we going to do about it?', with decidated sections for Big Problems and Big Solutions.
Unspurprisingly, the report concludes that water and agricultural sectors are 'two of the greatest threats to our rivers' and goes on to outline what we can begin to do to address this. You could argue that some headway had already been made with the latter with announcements such as Catchment Sensitive Farming funding being almost doubled and the additions to the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme.
And as Environment Agency chief of staff John Leyland pointed out, it's not always that farmers don't want to adjust their practices to support the health of the environment, it's that they don't always have the tools or resources to do so. 'It’s really hard to be green when you’re in the red,’ he recalls one farmer saying to him.
Ulitimately the report's last tab 'take action' is what we should focus on. Taking action together, including key strides forward such as the State of our Rivers, is the only way we can begin to tackle the complexities and intricacies involved in truly reviving and restoring our rivers.
To learn what the State of Our Rivers Report is and how it will benefit you, why not attend the free State of Our Rivers Report: Stakeholder Webinar?
Related articles:
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Reviving our rivers: can interconnected problems in water management reveal solutions?
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