Charter for Small Waters
10th December 2024
In the Charter for Small Waters, we’ve joined forces with a coalition of environmental charities, including The Wildlife Trusts and National Trust, calling on Government to recognise the vital importance of small freshwaters, and promote their protection, restoration and creation in reformed programmes of freshwater monitoring and management.
In this blog, Sam Tasker explains how, by cherishing our small waters, we could drive nature recovery across the entire freshwater network.
As a country, we’ve spent the past decades looking the wrong way at water management. We’ve focused on rivers and big lakes, assuming that because they’re bigger, they must be more important. In doing so, we’ve overlooked the most numerous and most biodiverse freshwater habitats – the small ones.
What image is brought to your mind by the word ‘pond’? Perhaps a garden feature, with a little fountain in the middle and a few goldfish. Nice, but probably not very important. How about ‘flush’? For most people – perhaps even the environmentally-conscious readership of this blog – the word ‘flush’ is associated only with water of the most distasteful kind.
And therein lies the problem. Small freshwater habitats are generally either thought of as trivial, or not thought of at all.
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. 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 freshwater biodiversity in 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 along field boundaries. 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 management.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the Charter for Small Waters, we call on government to redress the historic neglect of small freshwater habitats. We provide a roadmap for monitoring, protecting, restoring and creating small waters across England’s landscapes. By adopting these recommendations, the 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 freshwaters.
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.
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.