How a Cotswolds river may show the way to clean up England's
| Malcolm Blackmore |
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Fri 4 Feb 2022, 00:26 How a Cotswolds river may show the way to clean up England's waterways How a Cotswolds river may show the way to clean up England's waterways The Evenlode in Oxfordshire, UK, has been plagued by pollution, but farmers, the water industry and local volunteers are working together to clean it up Environment 2 February 2022 By Adam Vaughan “It’s depressing. It’s something we should be able to put right,” says Mark Purvis, standing next to a brook feeding the Evenlode, a river in the Cotswolds area of southern England that has been plagued with water pollution in recent years. “We’ve seen declines in numbers of fish, insects and weed growth in the river. And terrible turbidity [cloudiness] in summer,” he says. The Evenlode’s problems aren’t unique. England’s rivers are “a mess”, a report by MPs in the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) concluded last month, due to a lack of funding and monitoring and what was called “a ‘chemical cocktail’ of sewage, agricultural waste, and plastic”. But a special partnership between local people, the water industry, farmers and others means that the Evenlode could hold the answers to how the country can clean up its rivers. The pressure for action is growing: on 23 January, around 500 people protested in Oxford against sewage discharges in nearby rivers, in the wake of concerning footage of effluent flowing from a sewage works in a catchment area adjacent to the Evenlode. The Evenlode is a 75 kilometre-long river in the Cotswolds, England, plagued with water pollution in recent years. Aerial view of the Evenlode. An aerial view of the Evenlode David Stock Follow the brook upstream from where Purvis is standing and you get to the Milton-under-Wychwood sewage treatment works, one of 19 in the river’s catchment area that have sometimes struggled to keep up with a growing population. There were 96 occasions last year when untreated sewage spilled into the brook as the works ran out of holding capacity, for a total of 1406 hours. “It’s a very high spilling site,” says Andrew Scott at Thames Water as he overlooks a concrete storm tank at the works. The site is small, old and vulnerable not just to rainfall, but also to water “infiltrating” through the ground. Keeping up with new homes is an issue as well, says Purvis, who is a local resident. “The failure to keep the infrastructure up to to scratch as population has grown is unforgivable,” he says. Part of Thames Water’s answer is a £1.7 million upgrade due to take place by 2025, which should increase the volume of water the site can process per second by a third, meaning it doesn’t need to spill. “There’s a myriad of challenges to cleaning up a river. Definitely a large part of that is investment in assets,” says Helena Soteriou at Thames Water. But investment will always be limited by how much people are willing to pay for their water bills. The Evenlode’s problem pollutant is phosphorus, rather than nitrogen as in some other rivers. Around two-thirds of the phosphorus comes from sewage treatment works, including Milton-under-Wychwood. Another 28 per cent comes from agriculture and land use, such as cow dung and phosphate-laden soil that has washed off farms. Other sources include road run-off and private septic tanks. The Evenlode is a 75 kilometre-long river in the Cotswolds, England, plagued with water pollution in recent years. New trees are planted on Bruern Estate to slow water flow, and a series of ponds have also been created in one field to filter phosphorus out of the water. Ponds filter phosphorus out of the water at Bruern Farm David Stock Over in wheat fields at the nearby Bruern Estate, farm manager Matt Childs points to his efforts to stop that phosphorus reaching the Evenlode. Fences have been erected to keep cows and their dung away from streams where land is prone to flooding. Most of the phosphorus is locked in the soil, so a big focus is keeping that from reaching waterways around the 5-square-kilometre farm. The corners of some fields have been designated as buffer areas for flooding, while embankments have been raised around fields to keep water in and the soil is managed to help it retain water, such as by avoiding tilling in some fields. A series of ponds have also been created in one field to filter phosphorus out of the water. The estate’s biggest water quality issue turned out to be leaking septic tanks – now replaced – rather than food production. Water quality can be a low priority for some farmers due to how it is regulated, says Childs. “It’s very much, for me, a personal thing to do it properly. But you’re aware if you don’t, there’s not much of a downside.” Instead of blaming farmers for river pollution, critics should engage with them, he says. “We’re quite open. Come and visit farms, talk to farmers.” A new subsidy scheme to replace the European Union’s payments, set to begin this year, is intended to reward farmers for “public goods” including better water quality. However, the new regime has created uncertainty over farmers’ future income, which complicates their decisions about whether to invest in measures like these, says Childs. New Scientist Default Image Charlotte Henderson with a device for monitoring water quality David Stock Back in the brook by Purvis, local volunteers are pursuing another route to cleaner rivers: getting a better handle on what is actually happening. Monitoring of England’s rivers is “outdated, underfunded and inadequate”, the EAC said in its report. While community partnerships like the Evenlode catchment area’s one have been around in England since 2013, this is a new, enhanced version with serious resourcing: £3 million over five years from Thames Water. That means it can provide serious equipment, such as the £25,000 metal cylinder that Charlotte Henderson at the charity Earthwatch pulls out of the stream. It gauges pH levels, biological oxygen demand and faecal matter – and it will soon broadcast its measurements online in real time. “It’s about making the invisible visible to people,” says Henderson. Whether such beefed-up partnerships can be replicated nationally or even regionally remains to be seen, but Purvis is hopeful that a cleaner Evenlode is possible. “I’d like to see this river running clear through the summer, with children playing in the river safely, dogs able to swim without getting sick and with wonderful wildlife we should see on all our Cotswold rivers.” Sign up to our free Fix the Planet newsletter to get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday |