Water Miracle

Our waterways are in crisis. Only about 1% of Ireland’s rivers and streams are pristine; down from nearly 15% in the 1980s. Despite a legal obligation to achieve “good” status for our waterways by 2027, we’ve hovered around only 55% of waterways at this status since 1987. The targets aren’t just to keep within EU law; they are essential to being rebuilding habitat for vulnerable aquatic wildlife and for helping support Irish biodiversity and for our own water quality needs.

So if we’ve tried for nearly 30 years to achieve improvements in water quality with essentially zero success, why should we try now? Well, there has been a sea change in our attitude to the natural world. We are seeing greater engagement than ever before in the interwoven areas of biodiversity, climate action and water quality. There is also funding for creating change in these areas that simply has not been prioritised up until now. There has never been a better time to stand up and take action for water quality at every level and scale.

What we need is a miracle. Specifically a miraculous shift in values and priorities; and the budgets and local action to support them. With this in mind, change is completely within our grasp.

In order to achieve “good” status (Q4 on an improving scale of 1 to 5) the following areas need urgent attention at every level:

1. Sewage and industrial effluents
2. Stormwater
3. Farming
4. Forestry
5. Hydromorphology
6. Policy
7. Global considerations

Imagine if we prioritised water for each of the above areas:

1. By embracing nutrient cycling and excellent treatment standards, pollution by sewage and industrial effluents would simply be a thing of the past.
2. No stormwater would flow from streets, roads or yards without first passing through a planted natural filter system, providing habitat, improving water quality reducing flooding and storing carbon.
3. Farming would use water quality as a metric of success, seeing that food growing and ecological recovery can go hand in hand.
4. Forestry likewise would shift to continuous cover forestry practices that actively support nature, carbon storage, water protections and economic diversity of this sector.
5. River channels would flow freely again as we remove unused dams and weirs; channel drainage would take account of biodiversity and water filtration freely offered by recovering plant growth and become richer in wildlife and more effective at their natural flood/drought resilience measures.
6. Policy would shift to actively reward the benefits across every one of the above, providing a monetary reward for doing the right thing rather than the usual thing, and would remove obstacles to forward movement, instead actively helping to shift the changes forward that we need to see.
7. As global citizens we would recognise the impact of our purchases, supply chains and food web around the planet and would buy with as much care for people and water far away as we would for people and water living in our own communities.

All these things should be relatively straightforward to implement across the country immediately, with sufficient political will and with a careful communication process to ensure that local communities are able to fully participate in the progress being made and that potential concerns are addressed early on. Buy-in is critical to any large process of change, so the measures will need to be discussed and agreed with the personnel involved (home owners, farmers, foresters, state and semi-state bodies) and there should be built-in scope for exceptions based on specific circumstances in all cases.

This website shows a map to the practical changes that can be made for each of the items raised above. This is by no means complete, and should be regarded as a work in progress – but it is intended as a useful tool for home owners, farmers, local communities, businesses, local authorities and state bodies for achieving the miracle of good water quality in all our rivers and streams in record time.

Sewage – solutions for domestic scale

• Use source separation technologies to recoup biomass and nutrients and minimise nutrient losses to groundwater and waterways.
• Apply adequate septic tank maintenance to protect percolation area functioning.
• Use willows to mop up N and P on both failed and functioning systems (with appropriate pipe modifications).
• Develop clear guidelines for existing systems on poor sites. (notably constructed wetlands and willows where cost is minimised on sites with poor percolation).
• Use Nature Based Solutions to provide high degrees of treatment, power shortage resilience and lower carbon footprint.

Sewage – solutions for municipal scale

• Use source separation technologies to recoup biomass and nutrients at municipal scale. (Converting pollution to fertiliser).
• Employ adequate sewage system inspection and maintenance to ensure ongoing high degrees of treatment throughout the country.
• Use willows to mop up N and P following every municipal sewage system.
• Use Nature Based Solutions such as wetlands and willow systems down-gradient of every town and village to provide high degrees of treatment for both ongoing discharges and storm surge overflows to rivers and seas.

Industrial effluents – solutions

• Filter all industrial effluents using NBS to a high quality; and both filter and attenuate all stormwater runoff from paved yard and roof surfaces.
• Assess the process effluents for microplastics, toxins etc. and explore the potential for eliminating toxins from the supply chain by replacing with natural products that will be possible to treat and/or biodegrade.
• Remember that there is no waste in nature – everything that looks like waste is a raw material for another species. Explore this nature based thinking in your industry and apply it to both you waste stream out and raw material streams in.
• Provide exemplar treatment of all remaining effluents, using willows to cycle nutrients to agriculture or nature based solutions to provide habitat at the same time as exceptional water quality discharges.

Stormwater – solutions

• Route storm surge overflow points (think toilet contents diverted to rivers and the sea during very heavy rainfall) through a constructed wetland or other nature based solutions filter system.
• Eliminate surge overflows by repairing sewers in places where filter wetland solutions are too large to get water fully clean.
• Identify and remedy grey water misconnections.
• Route all stormwater runoff via constructed wetlands or other planted SUDS system to provide effective attenuation and filtration of all runoff from street, road and yard surfaces.
• Install rain gardens, raised rain planters or other SUDS system for all urban roof water runoff to reduce hydrological loading on storm sewers (minimising both flood risk and storm surge overflows).
• Encourage the introduction of ponds, wetlands, woodlands, contour hedgerows and other habitat space in gardens, farms and public green spaces as a hydrological buffer measures to catch water during storm events and be a source of both surface water and groundwater during droughts.

Farming – yard runoff solutions

• Contain all slurry, silage effluent and holding yard and parlour washings as per standard guidance ton contain the high levels of nutrients, organic loading (which leads to fish kills in excess amounts) and silt, and spread during appropriate spreading windows.
• Consider using an integrated constructed wetland system to filter parlour washings and dirty yard washings after milking to minimise the storage requirements for spreading purposes. The ICW needs to be 200% of the total yard and roof runoff area.
• Filter runoff from cleaner yard areas through a wetland planted buffer zone to provide filtration of residual contaminants such as soil, silt, straw and occasional nutrients and BOD loading. Area requirements are typically 10-15% of the runoff area.
• Consider dry housing and farm scale composting as an alternative to slurry generation. Compost is much more stable when returned to the land, and much lower in pollution potential. It also supports soil biology and microbiology, helping to create deeper, healthier soils and better crops and livestock.
• Fully contain potential hazards such as biocides and/or find ways to phase them out as much as possible via substitutions for less damaging products.
• Adequately bund diesel and oil storage to prevent spillages.
• For stormwater spikes for yard and roof runoff, ensure that the buffer zone areas adopted have a hydrological storage element, such as in-channel leaky brash dams in farm drains, farm ponds with variable flow exit points for gradual drawdown etc.

Farming – field runoff solutions

• Buffer zones can be an effective filter method for reducing soil, silt, slurry and artificial nutrients and agrochemicals in field runoff water. They also help ease hydrological cycle disruptions. These can be riparian (river edge) buffer strips of grasses or trees; in-channel ponds or wetlands in farm drains; contour swales for water collection, storage and filtration or other measures.
• To reduce the movement of slurry, fertilisers and agrochemicals through the soil into groundwater and off the field into surface waters, first assess the potential for elimination at source by using stable compost applications instead.
• A fallback position is to ensure that application rates are appropriate and timing is during suitable weather windows and also to deepen the biologically active soil depth and root zone depth and root zone composition.
• Soil deepening may be achieved by a variety of methods including Effective Microorganism applications, KNF (Korean Natural Farming) methods, continuous cover cropping such as winter cover crops, no-plough methods of farming etc.
• Root zone depths and diversity may be achieved through multispecies sward, agroforestry, silvopasture etc.
• Introduce hydrological buffer measures in farm drains to reduce runoff rates to natural habitat runoff rate equivalents. Measures include farm ponds, buffer zones, in-channel wetlands and others.
• Introduce natural habitats to do the same job where possible, with benefits for biodiversity as well as local water quality.
• Step back from the use of artificial nitrogen to avoid stripping soil carbon. Explore ways to boost soil health and crop production that don’t deplete your long term savings account that is the soil carbon itself, such as the measures described for soil building above.
• Reintroduce habitat on suitable areas within the farm, such as boggy corners, steep inaccessible slopes, awkward shaped inaccessible areas and such like. These do not necessarily need to be out of bounds for periodic grazing if the animal impact is carefully timed to support the hydrological and ecological aims of the land.
• Leave farm drains to establish with vegetation to slow the flow and filter the water. Introduce in-channel buffer zones in the form of ponds and wetlands whenever carrying out routine maintenance. Maintain channels in 20m sections, with 20m sections between these untouched to allow plants, insects and frogs time to re-establish between maintenance years.

Forestry – solutions

• Soil, silt and nutrients released during forest establishment and felling can be reduced by digging pond, filter marshes or other buffer zones down-gradient of the works area. Also, natural regeneration of forests does not disrupt the soil and is thus better for waterways. Similarly transitioning to continuous cover forestry (CCF) is an effective way to protects soils and thus adjacent waterways from the heavy impacts of clear felling. This is a basic measure for particularly sensitive catchments such as freshwater pearl mussel areas.
• Hydrological disruption caused by forest drains can be remedied by digging in-channel buffer zones and careful maintenance procedures to ensure ongoing plant presence in at least 50% of any drain length.
• To protect aquatic habitats and species, fertilisers and biocides can often be removed in favour of careful soil testing and application of specific elements in natural form rather than the standard NPK mix; or by focusing on soil microbiology as a way to support natural pest resistance and plant health.
• A diversity of tree species will lead away from conifer acidification of waterways to a diversity of natural synergies that can occur with in soils, within local ecology and thus for waterways within the area. Going forward a more diverse forest cover is a way to enhance the ecological, hydrological, social and economic potentials of our forest legacy.

Policy – solutions

• Broaden the remit of CAP further to encompass payments that adequately reflect the value of water quality enhancement, biodiversity, flood control, drought resilience etc.
• Increase the pace of change around the Arterial Drainage Act to explore where in the drainage districts would be suitable for reflooding for filtration, habitat and hydrological benefit, with land-owner compensation and payments to reflect the value of same.
• Explore and amend other policies at state and local government level which either create active obstacles to ecological and water quality enhancement or which actively facilitate ecological or water quality destruction. One example is to prioritise the removal of physical obstacles in all waterways which pose a fish barrier. Easily done and invaluable for the species that they block.
• LAWPro and the Biodiversity Officers in local authorities, NPWS, IFI, OPW and others have a wealth of collective experience and expertise, however it can be very challenging to navigate these groups as an interested community group or land owner. Establish the role of a liaison officer in each catchment whose job it is to coordinate permissions such that projects to improve water quality can move much more quickly, effectively and at lower cost.
• Introduce beavers to Ireland as a matter of government policy. Although not currently thought to have been native to Ireland, they were native to Britain, the Eurasian landmass and the Americas and are phenomenal landscape engineers with a penchant for creating watery wonderlands for wildlife. They can play a crucial role in aquatic habitat creation, water filtration, fish stock enhancement, flood prevention and drought resilience.
• Reprioritise water, habitat, soil, human health and the health of society at large rather than remaining wedded to policies that exclusively hold the economy as a reference point. These can all feed back towards policies and practices that will help to enhance waterway health and ecological repair.
• Explore models for social structures that do not put the economy as the central guiding focus. Mechanisms such as Universal Basic Income, Financial Transaction Taxes, collective budgeting for a proportion of Local Authorities and national budgets are just some of the many ideas which can help refocus our attention away from economy at all costs and explore some of the many options which may yield a shift in values towards a world that works – for water and every other thing that matters.

Global considerations – solutions

• While the Water Framework Directive puts a focus on our own waterways we would be better global neighbours by considering our impacts on the wider world, even as we take the actions needed at home. To this end, the following are worth considering:
• Don’t import water from dry countries. Conventionally grown, irrigated crops from arid regions essentially export scarce groundwater to Ireland. Explore which are the heaviest water users in your shopping basket and find local alternatives.
• One of the largest wetland habitats on the planet is the Amazon basin. This area is drying up due to reduced rainfall, caused in great part by the removal of the continuous tree cover from coast to continent interior which acts as a biotic pump for water movement. By avoiding Brazilian soy (beef nuts etc.) in Ireland we would play our part in helping to reduce deforestation of this region.
• Plastic pollution is a major issue for some of the worlds largest rivers and in the planets oceans, caused in part by export of Irish plastics for recycling. Avoid plastics at source where possible (in packaging, products, clothing etc.) to minimise our contribution to this global water pollution issue.
• An easy way to address a lot of issues for the impacts of chemical pollution, eutrophication, soil erosion, flooding, wildfires, droughts and other water and land management related problems around the globe is to buy the food, clothing and products you use as close to home as possible. Preferably from Ireland, or at least within Europe.

Five ways to achieve good water quality:

So how do we go from the knowledge of the solutions needed to achieving practical change? Here are five things we can do in any given scenario listed above to help move the country towards the water miracle needed:

1 – Practice voluntary simplicity: How can that help? Well, by minimising the trail of stuff in our lives, right back to source, we can begin to live without unnecessary ingredients in our foodstuffs (avoiding food with chemicals added during growing, avoiding cosmetics and cleaning products with toxins and microplastics, avoiding artificial fibre clothing and the many thousands of individual plastic particles released into waterways with each wash). That all has direct benefits for water quality at the point of manufacture of each individual ingredient and also at the point of use (or specifically, downgradient of the point of use, when the septic tank effluent reaches the water table).

2 – Spend money consciously: Use the vote that is your spending power to support the world you want rather than going for the cheapest option. Thus we can support local regenerative farmers in the market, or suppliers who use ecofriendly methods of manufacture which minimise water pollution.

3 – Engage in advocacy: Speak truth to power. While groundswell, bottom-up actions are what will probably see us herald in a new future, sometimes that means flagging the top-down changes that are needed. People generally want to do the right thing, and sometimes a letter, an email or a phone call can be the nudge needed to push through policies that are actively beneficial for water quality.

4 – Hold hands: Link in with others. Many heads are generally better than one when it comes to bringing about change, and it’s certainly more encouraging to have company in any endeavour. Whether it’s learning from others about Korean Natural Farming, linking in with your local Tidy Towns group to put in community rain gardens or working together to build a large stormwater community wetland for radically improving your local river water quality, having others to share the process with is well worth while.

5 – Hold the vision: Imagine the future you want. See the waterways alive with salmon; smell the tangy salty air of the estuary after the wastewater system has been upgraded and overhauled; taste the freshness of the mountain stream, clean and clear and safe to drink; Hear the birdsong along the riverbanks on your farm, where they nest and breed in the new riparian woodland. The newest developments in the area of quantum physics, consciousness studies and healing all point towards a certain magic in the world that responds to our thoughts and intentions (call it science if you prefer, but remember that it’s not Newtonian cause and effect as we learned it at school!). The clearer the vision, the surer the outcome. Now is a time for clarity of a beautiful vision of what could be. Go ahead, nurture the miracle. Expect the amazing!