Together towards a pollution-free aquatic environment

Brief-Summary:

Our partnership of 24 public, academic, government, charity, and business groups comprising 1709 members of the public address Yorkshire's aquatic pollution problem. Utilising the citizen science toolkit we co-produced, we will investigate six co-produced research questions and help prioritise upcoming investments in real-world, data-driven environmental solutions. Our inclusive/diverse community of practice will benefit national aquatic monitoring capacity and leave behind a legacy of accurate citizen science methodologies, build public capacity, and foster environmental leadership.



Details:

After centuries of manipulation and neglect, Yorkshire's rivers and lakes have a pollution problem involving a cocktail of anthropogenic chemicals and microbial contaminants.[1] Of the 982 regional water bodies, none currently achieve a high ecological or chemical status.[1][2]These are places of valued biodiversity, public health benefit, and resources from which we extract our drinking water.[3] Healthy aquatic environments positively impact both ecological and human health, as evidenced by surveys we conducted (n=152 responses) showing Yorkshire's public appreciation for social, recreational, spiritual, and mental health activities near water. However, increasing aquatic pollution hinders ecological health and public use of water bodies, jeopardising biodiversity and the positive benefits these environments foster in our communities.[4][5] This is exacerbated by recent reductions in funding for Environment Agency monitoring,[6] highlighting an urgent need for innovative approaches to environmental monitoring/management amid growing public outrage.[7]

We aim to create an inclusive and diverse Yorkshire community of practice using techniques new to citizen science that builds monitoring capacity and moves us towards achieving a non-toxic aquatic environment benefiting biodiversity and people. We co-developed six priority questions based on public concerns which form the basis of our proposed research. These questions not only cover the state of Yorkshire's aquatic environment and how it can be improved, but also how the process of aquatic citizen science can be made more trustworthy, inclusive, and sustainable. We already co-produced and trialled a novel citizen science toolkit of harmonised methodologies that goes beyond traditional citizen science determinants (e.g., nitrate, pH) to include priority micropollutants (e.g., pharmaceuticals, perfluorinated compounds) and bacterial species (e.g., faecal coliforms). The toolkit will underpin data generation across nine case-study waterbodies via approaches we successfully co-developed during the bursary stage.

By equipping the public with an accurate and easy-to-use environmental monitoring toolkit we can surpass the limited spatiotemporal capacity of academic and regulatory environmental monitoring. This will create a step-change in the data available to understand environmental pollution and we will use the this to quantify where and how environmental solutions can best mitigate the problem. These solutions will be nature-based (e.g., constructed wetlands), infrastructural (e.g., improvements to leaky combined sewage overflows), stewardship-based (e.g., working with farmers to reduce agricultural runoff), and community-based (e.g., unifying/elevating the public voice to lobby for change). Ensuring and verifying quality, we aim to create a paradigm shift that increases the value of citizen science data and opens the door for incorporation into already-stressed regulatory monitoring schemes.