Water quality in England and Wales has improved for the nineteenth year in a row the Environment Agency announced today. As a result, more rivers are becoming home for species that were once thought to be in terminal decline in them, such as salmon, eel and otters.
The improvement has been achieved mainly through investment by water companies, tougher action on polluters, changing farming practices and thousands of local projects. The Environment Agency also published ambitious new plans to revitalise and transform over 9,000 miles of river by 2015.

The Environment Agency has released its results on the state of rivers, which showed improvements in water quality. Figures from the Environment Agency’s annual General Quality Assessment (GQA) show that seven out of 10 English rivers and nine out of 10 Welsh rivers, achieved ‘very good’ or ‘good’ status in terms of chemical and biological water quality in 2008. Read the whole article here.