Save Britain’s Rivers: Why we’re campaigning to rescue UK waterways

The UK’s rivers are uncared for, polluted and over-exploited. In partnership with the i, New Scientist’s new marketing campaign will reveal what’s gone fallacious and the right way to restore them

RIVERS are the lifeblood of human civilisation. Our conurbations are constructed on them and have been for the reason that very first cities (in all probability) had been constructed alongside the programs of the Tigris and the Euphrates in what was then Mesopotamia. They stay vital: life relies upon simply as a lot on water now because it did then.

But within the crowded, urbanised world we stay in, they’re additionally more and more valued for his or her magnificence and restorative energy, attracting walkers, kayakers and wild swimmers. It is known that there are few issues extra uplifting to the human coronary heart than a wonderful river, whether or not it’s meandering by way of meadows or tumbling silver down rocks, and that such uplift has a substantial impression on our psychological and bodily well being. The UK is one in every of a handful of nations on the planet to quantify the helpful impression of being round freshwater: it saves the nation’s well being companies £870 million a yr.

So we’d like our rivers and we love them too – but we neglect them. We hinder them, making it inconceivable for wildlife equivalent to eels to journey upstream. We flip them into concrete canals, the place little can develop. We enable garbage to mount up on river seashores and catch on each fallen department, poisoning and typically actually strangling the creatures that stay within the water. We dump uncooked sewage into rivers, over and over. Pesticides and farm waste leach in off the land. Less visibly, previous mines seep poison into them.

In some locations, a lot water is extracted from the rivers themselves, or from the underground water caches they spring from, that they’re fairly merely disappearing. Recently, we reported on what has occurred to “the Nile of America”, the wonderful Colorado river, which now not reaches the ocean.

The state of the UK’s rivers

In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature revealed a report on the state of the UK and the Republic of Ireland’s rivers. It concluded that “truly natural environments that have escaped both direct and indirect human alteration no longer exist”. Things haven’t improved since. No rivers in England, Wales or Northern Ireland are thought-about to be in excessive ecological well being, and solely 14 per cent of England’s rivers qualify nearly as good. When you’re taking chemical air pollution under consideration, no rivers in these three nations are deemed as being good. Not one.

The UK has laws in place to guard its rivers, but it seems to make little distinction.

Why does this matter greater than the same befouling and despoiling of some patch of land close by? Why deal with rivers?

Rivers and different wetlands make up a really small fraction of Earth’s floor, however, in line with the United Nations, they’re residence to 40 per cent of all plant and animal species. In the UK, a tenth of biodiversity relies on them. Their significance to our biosphere is great. So how we deal with our watercourses has huge implications for our future, far past the poisoning of swimmers compelled to move by way of sewage, or ugly “wet wipe beaches”.

Save Britain’s Rivers marketing campaign

New Scientist hasn’t dedicated to a marketing campaign in lots of many years, however over the course of the following yr, we can be combating to save lots of the UK’s rivers. We are a worldwide journal, however for a marketing campaign to make sense, it will need to have achievable targets, so now we have determined to begin with the UK, a comparatively small and wealthy group of islands the place there isn’t any excuse in any respect for a way filthy its rivers are. Yet we can be aware at each step to ensure the tales we publish – whether or not they cowl the science of why rivers matter or the right way to discover out in case your native stream or river is wholesome – can be of curiosity to a worldwide viewers.

We are embarking on this marketing campaign, named Save Britain’s Rivers, with our sister publication, the i. Edited by Oliver Duff, it’s a newspaper with spectacular attain within the UK and a shared ardour for environmental causes.

Over the following yr, in tandem with the i, we can be doing deep dives into the science of what’s occurring to UK rivers, in addition to a number of hard-hitting news tales, movies, podcasts and occasions on the topic. We will even be celebrating the glory of our rivers, in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and asking readers to inform the story of their native watercourse. More on that later. We will even hunt down rivers all over the world which are exceptionally nicely cared for, and examine why and the way.

So what will we hope to realize over the following yr? Three issues.

First, we need to discover out what is actually occurring to the UK’s rivers and why.

Second, we need to construct on the excellent work that so many scientists and activists, equivalent to Feargal Sharkey, have already completed in bringing the plight of the UK’s rivers to public discover. We need extra folks to grasp what’s going on.

Third, we need to draw up a practical, apolitical manifesto for rivers, a blueprint for a way they are often a lot better taken care of. We hope this manifesto might be picked up and adopted by any political get together interested by saving our rivers.

The UK can take care of its rivers higher. Much higher. So let’s, collectively, make it occur.