Understanding the issues:

Diagnose your river

Before you begin campaigning for your river, it’s essential to understand what issues it’s up against.

Rivers across Britain are under threat from a cocktail of agricultural, industrial, and sewage pollution, as well as pressures from climate change and an increasing population.

Conducting research, such as citizen science is a great first step in assessing your river’s health. To tackle the challenges it faces, it’s crucial to identify potential causes. Use the tools below to investigate pollution sources in your catchment.

Online tools

Start your investigation into understanding the key sources of pollution in your catchment with the resources below…

Watershed pollution map

Watershed investigations are an independent, not-for-profit, investigative journalism organisation and have created an interactive pollution map which combines multiple datasets to clearly reveal the ecological and chemical health of our nation’s waterways.

Using the Watershed Pollution Map, you can explore the extent of different types of pollution across our nation’s waterways. It allows you to examine a huge range of potential pollution sources and different variables, from intensity of agriculture to economic deprivation and road runoff.

View the tutorial video for how to use the map.

Catchment data explorer

Databases like the Environment Agency’s Catchment data explorer offer comprehensive datasets, graphs, and maps on the state of our waterways. This covers every single water body in the UK, and provides information on their ecological and chemical health.

Most usefully, it reveals the Reasons for not achieving good (RNAG) water quality levels, and reasons for deterioration (RFD) of waterbody health. This outlines the source, activity and sector involved in causing water quality indicators to be at less than good status.

To use the explorer enter your local stretch of river, a set of coordinates, or search by river basin, to reveal extensive data on various water quality indicators, from dissolved oxygen levels to flow regimes.

Next steps…

After checking the available data, don’t be afraid to dig deeper and do your own detective work to unveil who is responsible.

On the River Wye, a community-led investigation and subsequent court case into agricultural pollution exposed the staggering concentration of intensive poultry units operated by Avara – driven by supply chain demands from supermarkets like Tesco

Dive deeper into our sections on Sewage Pollution, Agricultural Pollution, and Water Scarcity to learn more about the problems and how to tackle them.

If your river is suffering from poor soil management, we recommend visiting our partners at the Soil Association for further resources.

Further reading

What are the biggest causes of river pollution and what’s being done about them? – Environment Agency

State of Our Rivers Report – The Rivers Trust

Stop Killing Our Rivers – Soil Association

Dairy Report: The Impact of Industrial Dairy Farming on UK Rivers – River Action

Environment Agency Publishes Storm Overflow Spill Data for 2024 – Gov.uk