The Foundation is exploring these and other measures with food producers and their buyers, along with the water companies, to help solve the Wye’s elevated phosphorus levels. All of the proposals above could deliver reductions but it is imperative that they are also underpinned by regulation against bad practice. The Environment Agency has been allocated an additional two enforcement officers for the English Wye and we look forward to seeing the impact this has on compliance. However, for the health of the whole river to improve, it is also vital that such positive moves are replicated on the western side of the Wales/England border too.
We also need to continue to gather data and improve our understanding of the make-up of the algal blooms. The huge expansion in citizen scientists offering to help with monitoring is helping enormously and the Foundation is also installing more monitoring sondes in both rivers. While citizen scientists can monitor SRP levels, complex and expensive sondes are the only real way of sampling total phosphorus. Both, however, will be crucial in determining how successful the solutions described above will be in solving the problem. We will need everyone's support to install more sondes, maintain them, to analyse and disseminate the results and to devise and deliver the solutions.
Tackling the algae issue will take time. There is no quick, easy solution. Even if we stop all the phosphorus entering the river tomorrow, the high levels already within the catchment’s soils will take decades to run down. But despite everything else that is going on, the health of the UK’s rivers are firmly in the limelight at present and that gives us the opportunity to enable the changes required.
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