Our rivers are among our most iconic landscapes, but in England, at least, all is not well. Rob Cunningham, our head of Water Policy here at the RSPB looks at the numbers and they don't look good ... and you have a chance to add your voice.
How healthy are English rivers? Sounds like a question we should be able to answer given thousands of monitoring results the Environment Agency gather across the river network annually. But the recent announcement that just 17% of river waterbodies are meeting the Good Status target set by the Water Framework Directive (WFD) leaves me more confused than enlightened. After all just 6 years ago we were told by the EA that 22% of English rivers were at Good and that this would improve to 32% by 2015 – have things gone so terribly wrongs since then?
Well the EA are unsurprisingly keen to paint a positive picture and it is true that our rivers are far cleaner than they were in the 1970s thanks in large part to massive investment from the water industry and, less positively, the decline in heavy industry. And yes our beaches have improved and Salmon have returned to the once lifeless Tyne. But this has to be set against a context of the State of Nature Report which found 40% of native fish in decline, overall salmon stocks at an all time low; around 10% of wetland plants threatened with extinction while EA figures showing pollution incidents on the increase.
So how can we make sense of these figures? Critics of the WFD have also been quick to point the finger of blame at the Directive's “one out-all out” approach to classification means failure of just one quality element marks the whole waterbody down. Well I’m not sure it is entirely unreasonable to expect enough water of the right quality with (heaven forbid) wildlife in it but there is a germ of truth that the one-out all-out rule does mask progress. Something the RSPB and other NGOs are keen to look at ways of reporting progress towards full ecological health.
But the fact that these figures have dropped so sharply is as predictable as it is depressing. Back in 2012 we demonstrated the original results were hugely over-optimistic because biological elements – the fish, plants and invertebrates that people most want to see in their rivers – weren’t monitored in most water bodies and so assumed to be at Good while water quality standards for others (notably phosphate – the key nutrient for freshwater eutrophication) were set so high that rivers were passing even though the unmonitored biology was almost certainly failing.
So overall the lurch from 23% to 17% at “Good” should be understood in the context of the tightening of standards known to be too lax as well as a far more comprehensive monitoring network that means we now have a much better picture of overall ecological health - and it's not pretty
I'd like to think things would be better for our internationally important water and wetland sites – places where Good Status is simply not good enough to protect the rare and precious habitats and species. But unfortunately WWF’s State of England’s Chalk Streams report have shown the most highly protected Natura 2000 chalk streams fare no better than any others while of the 124 wetland Natura 2000 Protected Areas that were listed as not meeting their conservation objectives in the last River Basin Management Plans, 89% were expected to have recovered by the end of 2015, the latest figures suggest that only 36% will make that deadline. The same figures show that whilst in 2009 only two sites were still expected to be in unfavourable conservation status beyond 2021, that figure is now 69. (Natura 2000 is a label that identifies our finest wildlife sites across the European Union)..
One positive thing not reflected in these figures is the fact we have a much better handle on what and who is driving the problems buried away on page 61 of the current consultation . This breaks down to about a third water industry, a third farming and a third everything else (roads, urban runoff, flood defence etc). Contrast this with the distribution of costs of fixing the problem which according to Defra has seen the water industry bear 89% of the costs and farming just 0.1%.
We also know from the EAs recent economic studies that meeting Good status is not just the right thing to do for nature but could bring in excess of 8billion pounds of benefits to the country. It also shows that if we actually implemented the polluter pays principle we would end up saving water customers money- around £230M per annum according to Environment Agency figures
Despite this the current consultation on updating River Basin Management Plans offers no substantive new measures to tackle sources of diffuse pollution, abstraction or urban pollution that are choking the life from our rivers.
Against this backdrop the technical debate about just how small a percentage of our rivers are healthy looks like an irrelevance. The truth is we know enough to understand that the way we are managing our rivers, lakes and wetlands is failing nature and people.
So I would encourage you to take a few moments drive this message home by visiting the Save our Waters website - the simplest way to respond live consultation on the future of river basin management. Ask your friends to get involved and maybe even mention it to your new MP when they arrive in June because if the incoming Government doesn’t know this matters to you we shouldn’t expect anything to change.