Water, Water Everywhere – Not a Drop to Drink!

On 3 November, thousands of people, including Knepp volunteers and staff from the Knepp Wildland Foundation, gathered in London for the March for Clean Water. The event was organised by the charity River Action, one of over 130 nature and water sport organisations represented on the day, including RSPB, The Wildlife Trusts, The Angling Trust, The Rivers Trust, The Soil Association and the Freshwater Habitats Trust. The protest was well-timed, as news from earlier this year revealed almost 4 million hours of raw sewage being pumped into the country’s rivers by water companies in 2023 – the equivalent of a thousand pumping events a day, and more than a hundred percent increase on the previous year’s total. Among a host of other environmental impacts, this led to the mass deaths of almost a quarter of a million fish in the past 2-3 years. Currently, only 14% of rivers in England are classified as having good ecological status and none have good chemical status (meaning sufficiently low amounts of pollutants present).

Staff from the Knepp Wildland Foundation and farmers from the Adur Recovery Project at the March for Clean Water

The key asks of those marching in London were simple: cut the pollution, reinforce regulatory systems to hold water companies to account, and make those companies invest more in modernising and maintaining outdated infrastructure. Last year, The Guardian revealed that over a quarter of water bills in London and the South East were, in effect, being directly syphoned into paying off the tens of millions pounds of debt accrued by water companies. It’s worth noting that England is the only country in the world with an entirely privatised water system. 

Water quality has been making headline news in the past year or two, for all these reasons. Whilst a degree of outflow during high rainfall events is a part of the drainage and wastewater recycling process, this is intended to only be used in exceptional circumstances when sewerage systems reach overflow levels. However, what has been happening increasingly is discharging of raw sewage into rivers even at times with no rainfall. The increase in scale and frequency of these outflow events has escalated significantly in recent years and many of us can now see (and smell!) the impacts in our own local watercourses. Some rivers here in Sussex, including our precious chalk streams in the South Downs, are now emblazoned with warning signs telling people to keep themselves and their pets away from the water. The Oxford-Cambridge boat race caused an upset earlier this year when several members of the Oxford crew went down with vomiting bugs having been exposed to dangerously high levels of E. coli in the Thames. The British public have clearly had enough. At last, there is concerted demand to hold water companies to account and stop the pumping of raw sewage into our freshwater water systems. 

But there are other ways we can tackle the problem, too. We can harness the natural characteristics of rivers by using Natural Flood Management. For centuries we have damaged or destroyed these natural features by forcing rivers into channels and draining floodplains for agriculture, industry and housing. Giving ‘Room for the River’ – an approach pioneered in the flood-prone Netherlands – is proving a powerful way of addressing the problems of flooding and pollution. This can include anything from restoring river margins, planting trees, and creating wetland mosaics in river valleys. All of this helps absorb, store and filter more water. 

Over a decade ago, here at Knepp, we partnered with the Environment Agency to restore a 1.5 mile stretch of the River Adur which runs through the estate. We filled in drainage ditches and the old, Victorian canal, removed weirs and introduced woody debris, returning the river to its natural course and, in the process, reconnecting it with 3.5 miles of restored floodplain upstream. Last winter – one of the wettest winters on record in the UK – drone footage of our river restoration showed just how much water was being retained in the landscape – water which would otherwise have rushed downstream at an intense rate, carrying pollutants and sediments with it and damaging roads, property and farmland.

A section of the restored River Adur on the Knepp Estate

Now, a collaboration of 27 farmers within the Adur catchment are working together to further enhance the ecological health of the river, all the way from Knepp to the sea at Shoreham. The facts are clear: a river which is wilder and more meandering and sinuous creates a wetland environment which is richer and more biodiverse, more resilient to extreme weather events such as flash flooding and droughts and has better water quality. 

We have another extremely powerful ally on our side – an ecosystem engineer whose role could not be more timely, whose work would cost us virtually nothing. The beaver is a native species to Britain. We hunted it to extinction around 400 years ago. Across Europe, where numbers have been reviving for decades, the beaver has been demonstrating how effectively it tackles all the challenges that are thrown into the water – quite literally, in the case of sewage.

A wild beaver in Kent. Currently most beavers are confined to enclosures, but are powerful ally in improving water quality and resilience of our rivers

In the UK, meticulous studies from the beaver trial on the River Otter in Devon have proved how beaver-created wetlands trap sediments, nitrates and a host of other pollutants, dramatically improving the quality of water leaving the beaver dam network. We understand more clearly than ever before the vital role that the beaver can play in restoring our damaged river systems. And yet, currently, Natural Flood Management makes up only around 1% of the annual flood budget in the UK. In England, beavers are still confined, quite literally, to a lifetime in enclosures as successive governments continue to delay a decision on allowing beavers back into our river systems. 

A host of nature-based solutions to the great challenges of recovering our rivers are available to us. We need the political will to make them a reality on a much greater scale.