Protecting Our Rivers Together

Standing up for rivers in law, policy, and public debate.

Backed by data. Grounded in ecology. Specific about the harm.

Advocate for Rivers is our policy and campaign programme. We campaign on sewage discharge, abstraction licensing, agricultural runoff, and the government’s Nature Recovery Network commitments. Our advocacy is built on data from our own 2,800-strong monitoring network — not on general concern, but on specific evidence of specific harm.

Our current campaigns

Rivers Restored

Species Protected

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Three issues. Specific evidence. Concrete asks.

I signed the abstraction petition and then read the evidence behind it. I had no idea licences from the 1960s were still running at volumes that dry rivers out in August. That is not an abstract problem — that is a specific failure of specific policy.

We submitted the runoff data from our monitoring site to the Environment Agency three times. On the third submission, they opened an investigation. That is the whole point.

The sewage discharge data changed how my local council thinks about the river. They did not know how often events were happening. Numbers make the case where stories sometimes don't.

How we campaign

Evidence first, action second.

Support our advocacy

Add your voice to the evidence.

Seven years on the Afon Cothi

April 24, 2026 No Comments

In 2017, the upper Afon Cothi in Carmarthenshire was a degraded agricultural drain. Seven years later, it is one of our most successful restoration sites.

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The Water Quality Watch catches a slurry incident on the Kennet

April 24, 2026 No Comments

Citizen science monitoring on the River Kennet detected elevated nitrate and phosphate levels three weeks before an official inspection identified the source.

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Sewage in rivers

Water companies discharged sewage into UK rivers on 464,056 occasions in 2024. Our Water Quality Watch volunteers recorded elevated pathogen indicators at 218 of our monitored sites following storm overflow events. We are publishing a site-level report and submitting evidence to the Environmental Performance Assessment process.

Our ask: mandatory real-time monitoring at all storm overflow points, with data published to the same standard as our citizen-science network. We are coordinating with The Rivers Trust, Surfers Against Sewage, and Wild Fish on a joint submission to Ofwat’s next price review.

Abstraction licensing

Licences granted in the 1960s and 1970s allow water companies and large agricultural users to extract volumes that leave some chalk streams running dry in summer. We are supporting a legal review of abstraction licences on three named chalk streams, gathering hydrological data to demonstrate the harm.

We are working with the Environmental Law Foundation to establish legal precedent for ecological minimum flows. This is slow work — but the data we need for the legal case is exactly the data our monitoring network produces.

Agricultural runoff

Nitrates and phosphates from farming are the single largest source of river pollution in England by volume. We are building a catchment-level dataset comparing upstream and downstream water quality at agricultural boundaries, submitted quarterly to the Environment Agency.

We do not demonise farming. We work with farmers who want to manage runoff responsibly, and we campaign for regulatory frameworks that make responsible management the norm, not the exception. Our River Restoration programme works directly with land managers on riparian buffer strips.