Chemical River Status
Indicator
Percentage of the County's rivers that are in each category of
the Water Framework Directive (WFD) classification scheme.
Status
Chemical River Quality is fair and is improving.
Overview
River water quality is affected by many factors. These can
generally be divided into point sources, which have a traceable
discharge point, and diffuse sources, which cannot usually be
traced back to a single discharge point. Examples of point sources
include domestic and industrial waste water; examples of diffuse
sources include polluted water and sediment washing off fields,
recreational areas, roads and pavements. There have been big
improvements in waste water discharges over recent years but
pollution from diffuse sources is becoming an increasing
threat.
To compare the quality of water, the Environment Agency uses
Water Framework Directive (WFD) classifications, which replaced the
General Quality Assessment (GQA) in 2007. Although a headline
dataset for GQA will still be produced until 2009, owing to changes
in this network, the results are only available at a regional, and
not county, level.
For surface waters there are two separate WFD classifications
for water bodies, ecological and chemical.
Chemical Status
The chemical status is assessed by compliance with environmental
standards for chemicals that are priority substances and priority
hazardous substances. Chemical status is recorded as good or fail.
The chemical status classification for the water body, and the
confidence in this, is determined by the worst scoring
chemical.
It should be noted that all water bodies, whether 'natural',
'artificial' or 'heavily modified', must meet chemical
standards.
Performance
36.7% of the river water bodies in Worcestershire were of good
chemical status in 2007, according to the Environment
Agency's Water Framework Directive classification. 22.3% of the
rivers failed to reach good chemical status and 41.0% were 'not yet
assessed'.
This dataset forms the baseline year for Chemical status.
Geographical Context
93.8% of the rivers measured in Worcestershire in 2006 were good
or fair chemical quality, compared with the regional figure of
93.4%. Therefore the recent rise in chemical river quality in
Worcestershire is in line with that in the West Midlands
region.
Actions
The largest challenge for those working to improve the quality
of Worcestershire's rivers is in tackling sources of run-off from
roads and fields. These diffuse sources of pollution are difficult
to attribute to a single discharge point and will not be affected
by the regulatory approach that has been successfully adopted to
reduce the impacts of point source pollution.
Further Information
The General Quality Assessment (GQA) has been superseded by the
Water Framework Directive (WFD) compliance. For information about
river quality see the Environment Agency's water
quality website.
For detailed information about your own area/river visit the
Environment Agency's What's
in your backyard? Page.
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