The new government has made water a central pillar of its legislative agenda, promising to ‘fundamentally transform’ the water system and improve outcomes for people and the environment. In the Charter for Small Waters, we urge the Government to make good on this promise by redressing a persistent regulatory oversight - the omission of small waters from statutory management. Small waters include ponds, headwater streams and small wetlands, that collectively are critical for our freshwater wildlife.
Through the Charter, we hope to shine a light on the untapped potential of managing small waters to drive improvement across the whole freshwater network. By embracing small waters in programmes of monitoring, protection and restoration, we can halt ongoing declines of freshwater wildlife. Small waters can also help terrestrial wildlife by providing important feeding and resting places, and connectivity through our landscapes. Small waters can accelerate progress towards our nature recovery goals.
Excluding garden ponds, there are about 250,000 ponds in England. Some have existed since the last ice age, created by the thawing of ice lenses as glaciers retreated. Many are of more recent provenance, like those created for traditional farming. But old or new, when added together across a landscape, these ponds often support more species of freshwater plants and animals than rivers or lakes. Small headwater streams make up over half of England’s running waters – about 150,000km – and support the vast majority of species found in larger rivers, as well as some which can only be found in headwaters.
Other small waters – including ditches, flushes, springs and small lakes – are similarly important at a landscape scale. Today, small waters are vital for those species which are most sensitive to pollution. This is because small waters have small catchments, which are more likely to be free of pollution sources. Because most freshwater plants and animals are found across multiple habitat types, small waters also play a role in supporting the freshwater biodiversity of larger habitats, increasing the resilience of freshwater ecosystems to threats including climate change.
Sadly, small waters of all kinds have been widely neglected. Ponds have been filled in or lost through mismanagement. Headwater streams have been modified beyond all recognition – moved across the landscape to run in straight lines and right angles as drainage ditches. Alongside physical neglect, small waters have been overlooked in environmental policy. The Water Framework Directive (WFD) - the legislation which drives monitoring and management of the UK’s freshwaters - excludes all ponds and all but the largest lakes, whilst small streams, if included at all, are often bundled with bigger downstream waters, and deprioritised in monitoring and management plans.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the Charter for Small Waters, we provide a roadmap for monitoring, protecting, restoring and creating small waters across England’s landscapes. By adopting these recommendations, government can unlock the power of small waters for nature recovery and begin reversing centuries of decline for our richest watery places.
Ongoing advances in monitoring mean we can now keep track of our small waters (or a sample of them) in much the same way as we do for larger waters, without undue expense or administrative burden. Doing so would enable us to identify the pressures affecting small waters, and spot opportunity areas where investment in creation and restoration could be targeted to create new, unpolluted freshwater habitats.
A new focus on small waters would drive fast, cost-effective progress towards our nature recovery goals. Because of their small catchments, it’s much easier to resolve pollution in small waters, and create refuges for our threatened freshwater species. Working on small waters would thus boost the integrity, connectivity and resilience of the whole freshwater network, and contribute significantly to landscape-scale nature recovery.
By strengthening the statutory consideration given to small waters, government could promote small water protection, restoration and creation at a whole new scale, with rapid benefits for freshwater wildlife. The opportunity is there for the taking – to unlock the superpower of small waters.
Read the Charter for Small Waters to find out more.
Ali Morse is Water Policy Manager at Wildlife Trusts. Follow @WildlifeTrusts
Stewart Clarke is National Specialist for Freshwater and Catchments with the National Trust. Follow @nationaltrust
Jeremy Biggs is CEO of Freshwater Habitats Trust. Follow @Freshwaterhabs
Sam Tasker is a Policy Officer at Freshwater Habitats Trust. Follow @Freshwaterhabs
The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors' and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.
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