Westcountry Rivers Trust

Alongside partners from Devon Wildlife Trust, Cornwall Wildlife Trust & Exmoor National Park Authority, the Westcountry Rivers Trust is currently delivering the second phase of the South West Water-funded Upstream Thinking project.

The main aim of the Upstream Thinking project is to improve the quality of water in our rivers, which are the primary source of drinking water in the South West, and so reduce the need for costly and resource-intensive treatment processes at the Water treatment works. Often water quality issues in the region are caused by thousands of small incidents throughout the catchment. While these individual incidents tend not to be severe enough to breach water standards, they can have a large cumulative effect on the river. The approach taken by the Westcountry Rivers Trust is to work with landowners to reduce or mitigate the pressures on the river system across 5 important river catchments in the Westcountry: the Fowey, Tamar, Exe, Dart and Otter. In addition to the benefits to South West Water and their customers, the Upstream Thinking projects brings benefits in terms of the general health of the rivers, their ecology, wider biodiversity and agricultural productivity.

The Trust delivered South West Water's funded Upstream Thinking project, which is a collaborative conservation project on a catchment scale working to deliver a sustainable approach to land and water resource management. The project targeted strategic catchments in the Westcountry, which supply reservoirs and abstraction points, in a move to significantly improve raw water quality. By doing so, it reduced the cost of treatment plant and continual upgrading which has become necessary due to the increased sediment and/or nutrient loading in watercourses. The Upstream Thinking initiative is collectively worth over £9m and was the first project of its kind in the UK. The project value to WRT was £3.2m in the PR09 period, which entails farm advice and tailored farm plans to identify and tackle diffuse pollution from agriculture across five catchments.

As part of Upstream Thinking the Trust ran a reverse auction run on the river Fowey in conjunction with the University or East Anglia (funded by the DEFRA Economics Team). The auction distributed £360k against competitive bids submitted by farmers for capital works and management actions enshrined in a contract and 25-year covenant. Bids were evaluated in terms of environmental value for money using an advisor devised scoring matrix to score different interventions and then weight them against the intensity of farming operations and geographical location and the inherent risk of their land.

The Trust delivered 5 CRF projects on the South Hams rivers, Dart & Teign, Exe & Axe, South Cornwall Rivers and on the Taw. The Taw River Improvement Project (TRIP – £1.8m) delivered Good Ecological Status for the Water Framework Directive on the river Taw. The predominant failures of these projects are addressing lack of fish and high phosphate levels. The projects included: – data assessment and surveying group that is apportioning sediment and phosphate using modelling programmes (SAGIS, SCIMAP, PSYCHIC, ECM, etc.) and novel tracing work; – fisheries work running walk over surveys and improving fish habitat and access; – agricultural work, linking with farmers to reduce sedimentation and phosphate loss; and – biodiversity work, delivering with landowners to use habitat to address WFD failures.

The Westcountry Rivers Trust has played host to several Catchment partnership but the longest is the Tamar Catchment Area Partnership, which consists of over 100 stakeholders representing over 30 organisations and groups. The initial pilot sought to address a failure in communication between the wants and needs of the stakeholders across a broad suite of ecosystem services, which historically has resulted in a multitude of sectorally focused management plans that at best do not articulate with, and at worse conflict against, each other. The Stakeholders formed six working groups that looked at water quality (both diffuse and point source), water quantity (both flooding and drought), carbon sequestration, habitats for wildlife and recreation/culture. Each group created a map(s) of the areas important in the provision of the service they were interested derived from a mutually agreed set of rules and assumptions. These maps where then combined to create a map of multifunctional areas that are important in the provision of several services. This allowed the wider partnership to understand the value of the catchment and where there were areas where complementary actions could lead to cost-benefit improvements.

This £2.6 million Project, from 2002 to 2006, was funded by the European Union (European Agriculture Guidance and Guarantee Fund) Objective 1 Programme and by the UK Government's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was aimed at those managing land in the catchments of these rivers and streams:

• River Allen, River Caerhays, River Camel, River Looe (East Looe River), (West Looe River), River Fal, River Fowey, River Gannel, Lerryn River, River Inny, River Lynher, River Menalhyl, River Mevagissey, River Neet, River Otter, River Seaton, River Strat, River Tiddy, River Tresilian, River White. Trust members visited over 870 landholdings in Cornwall to help improve farming practice, to protect the environment and to make economic savings. More than 1,380 km of watercourses were surveyed, and Integrated River Basin Resource Management Plans issued.

An End of Project leaflet was produced:

• Cornwall Rivers Project leaflet (PDF)