Can citizen scientists help clean up UK's troubled waters?

• Volunteers testing rivers for chemicals
• Government agency struggles with resource cuts
• Citizen science aims to improve waterways

LONDON - The plight of Britain's polluted rivers is no secret, but this past weekend, an army of citizen scientists set out to measure the scale of the problem, hoping to plug knowledge gaps exacerbated by cutbacks at a key environmental regulator. 

Thousands of volunteers in 90 locations across the country took part in the Great UK WaterBlitz, organised by the environmental charity Earthwatch Europe, testing local rivers and lakes for nitrates, phosphates and other pollutants.

The charity will analyse the results and pass them onto the Environment Agency (EA), the government body responsible for waste management, conservation and managing water pollution, in a bid to improve the health of the country's water.

The state of Britain's waterways has become a public scandal with privatised water companies widely condemned for pumping raw sewage into rivers and seas.

The National Audit Office, an independent parliamentary body, said in a new report water infrastructure needed an estimated 47 billion pounds ($62.5 billion) of investment over the next five years to fix infrastructure and tackle pollution in rivers and seas.

"The EA is doing what it can to monitor and manage our waterways. They have increased the number of boots on the ground ... but realistically they just don't have the resources – time, tests or people," Earthwatch Europe's director of science and policy, Sasha Woods, told Context. 

"This is where citizen science is so incredibly powerful. It is the catalyst for meaningful environmental change - ordinary people coming together in their thousands to create something extraordinary," Woods said.

Earthwatch Europe said it would also use the results of the mass testing to hold water companies to account for not keeping waterways clean.

The last Earthwatch Europe testing blitz in September revealed significant levels of drugs, including antidepressants, as well as agricultural contaminants and even traces of stimulants like nicotine, which the EA started monitoring based on the findings, and caffeine. 

Degrading infrastructure

Lawmakers accused the companies late last year of prioritising dividends and management bonuses over investment, leaving critical infrastructure to degrade.

In October, Britain's regulator ordered water companies to return millions of pounds to customers for failing to meet environmental regulations. Water company bosses can now also face criminal charges if they break environmental rules.

Water UK, which represents the companies, said in October that performance was not what it should be, but improvements had been made.

Polluted waterways can harm wildlife, ecosystems and human health and activities, like farming and fishing.

"More polluted water requires more treatment, and if we don't monitor what is going into our rivers, we won't know exactly what contaminants we need to remove," said Woods.

Britain's drinking water is among the safest in the world, she added. "But if we don't stop polluting our freshwater systems, this may not always be the case."

Meanwhile, significant cuts to the EA have made statutory monitoring more difficult, according to Earthwatch Europe and environmental charity The Rivers Trust.

Funding for the EA's enforcement work fell by 80%, from 117 million pounds in 2010 to 23 million pounds in 2020, the National Audit Office said.

The EA said it was intensifying efforts to hold water companies accountable, testing 4,536 sites last year and aiming for 10,000 inspections this year.

'Love where you live'

For Keri and Annette Lloyd, who run the non-profit community Friends of Bilbrook in South Staffordshire in central England, this blitz builds on work they are already doing.

Every month, they test their local river for ammonia, water temperature and acidity and pass on the information to water supplier Severn Trent and to open-sourced data platforms such as FreshWater Watch, also run by Earthwatch Europe. 

They would like to see a stronger relationship between authorities and residents and said the EA has not been to Bilbrook to sample the water since 2022.

"(We use) the old mantra of 'love where you live'," said Keri Lloyd, explaining that he felt the data they collected was not always being used effectively. "We want it to be valued." 

The EA said there were several sampling points near Bilbrook, and the site was monitored on a five-year cycle, to be re-sampled in 2027. 

"We are unable to carry out monitoring at all of our sampling points every year," it said.

Michelle Walker, technical director of The Rivers Trust, said citizen science provided valuable resources, especially as government agencies tighten budgets.

"The government doesn't collect much (national data) anymore, and the national data sets are full of holes in time and space," she said. 

The trust is working with other organisations to develop national standards for citizen testing, including methods for monitoring water quality, fish populations, macroinvertebrates, bacteria, soil and more, and give citizen science more credibility.

The hope is that this will give citizen science more credibility. 

"We encourage an open approach to data gathering and are collaborating across the country with citizen scientists ... but this can't replace all of the other reasons we monitor," the EA said. 

Further funding to improve citizen research could come from the billions of pounds set to be spent on monitoring combined sewer overflows, which are pipes that release raw sewage into the environment during heavy rain, Walker said. 

Building a standardised citizen science programme “would cost a fraction of what the EA already spend on their monitoring and what the water industry is about to spend on theirs," she added. 

"You (can) start to engage people about rivers (and) they become advocates for their river. They form friends of the river groups and start to raise funding locally to do habitat improvements. It will return that investment so many times over." 

(Reporting by Adam Smith; Editing by Ayla Jean Yackley)