About us

Last updated: March 30, 2008.

The UK Rivers Network (UKRN) is an environmental group campaigning to protect rivers and inland waters across England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. We are a community-centered, grassroots organization and our emphasis has always been a very pragmatic one: we believe doing is always better than talking about doing.

Photo: River Itchen watermeadows, Winchester, Hampshire.

A bit of history

That attitute has been part of UKRN from the start. UKRN originally grew out of a successful 1997 campaign and 1998 public inquiry to prevent the diversion of the rivers Teign and Bovey to make way for an expanded clay quarry in the village of Teigngrace, Devon.

One of the things we noticed during that campaign was the difficulty in building a strong alliance of campaign groups to prevent damage to threatened rivers: lots of groups will rally around a threatened SSSI, AONB, rare species, or archaeological site, but no-one really looks out for rivers in quite the same way. People simply assume rivers can look after themselves. We'd found similar problems working on the Newbury bypass campaign, where two internationally important rivers were largely forgotten in the battle to defend other, no less important parts of the environment.

After campaigners won a public inquiry at Teigngrace in 1998, the idea of setting up a wider rivers network was suggested to us by Phil Williams, founder and former President of the International Rivers Network (IRN) and we remain very grateful to Phil for his support and encouragement over the last few years. UKRN was finally born in summer 1999 (our website followed soon after) and formally constituted in spring 2001. We held our first national conference in Salisbury in September 2001.

After working intensively on a number of campaigns between 2001 and 2004, we ran out of money and temporarily ceased our operations during 2005. In 2006, with a new injection of funding and enthusiasm, we're back!

A bit of respect

We know many groups and individuals have been working on river protection, conservation, and restoration in the UK for many years and we are very keen to learn from and share that wealth of experience. We're not interested in empire-building or reinventing wheels. Our mission is simply to help improve UK and Irish rivers by sharing best practices from community groups and river alliances around the world. We believe ordinary people and local communities must ultimately be at the center of any successful effort to protect the environment, so we encourage people to take positive action by maintaining a list of river groups and organizations.

Our objectives

Despite our name, the UK Rivers Network is not just interested in rivers. We get involved in all aspects of the freshwater environment, including canals, lakes, estuaries, and wetlands. We're interested in ecological protection, recreational uses of water (fishing, bathing, kayaking, and other watersports involving inland waterways), water quality issues, flood defence, impacts of climate change, implications of new national and European legislation/policy, river regeneration projects, developments that adversely affect rivers or groundwater, water pollution, and so on.

UKRN's objectives fall under four broad headings: campaigning, networking and community work, education, and policy:

Campaigning

• Defend, protect, and conserve UK rivers from various kinds of threats (e.g. major developments of various kinds, pollution, etc.).
• Adopt a variety of campaigning techniques from attending public inquiries to supporting peaceful protests.
• Help local groups by putting campaigners in touch with experts or others who have fought and won similar campaigns elsewhere.
  

Networking and community work

• Promote grassroots, community-centred projects for river restoration and regeneration. For example, helping local communities to "Adopt-a-river".
• Promote a "positive river culture": Help to shift the mindset of river activism from "defending against the negative" to "protecting the positive". For example, using rivers as the focus of environmental education activities in a local community, or using a river that has fought off a development threat (or been restored by a local community group) as an educational, recreational, or sustainable tourism resource.
• Get together with other groups and individuals to share experiences, expertise, and support, and cooperate on joint projects.
• Act as an informal information intechange for the UK rivers community.
  
• Act as a UK contact for international campaigns that concern the UK people or its government.

Education

• Maintain our popular website and continue to provide regularly updated UK river news.
• Extend our educational coverage to make connections between a range of environmental problems and solutions (for example, between cleaner rivers and organic farming).
• Help to communicate information of mutual interest between local community groups and the wider community.

Policy

• Help to formulate policies and legislation on riverine issues. This includes reviewing and contributing to consultations and attempting to influence legislation (both UK and European) in draft form.
• Help to communicate policy issues to the wider river community through our website.
• Raise the national profile (public and political) of river conservation issues by taking part in media debates, issuing press releases, and so on.

Please let us know if you're interested in what we're doing and you'd like to help us out. For a broader introduction to the project, look at our page of proposals for setting up the network.

Learning from the world of rivers

Think positive!

Campaigning against the negative" is only one part of saving the environment and only one part of what we want to achieve through the UKRN. An equally important part is promoting positive action for river protection, restoration, and regeneration, particularly through community initiatives.

In the United States, there is a notable culture of community involvement in river protection. Throughout the country, community groups, councils, and voluntary bodies work together on river improvement projects. One of the UKRN's major objectives will be to try to promote similar schemes in the UK—to get ordinary people involved in protecting rivers as a community resource rather than leaving that responsibility to government agencies, local councils, or other "official" bodies.

Adopt-a-river

Some parts of the US operate "adopt-a-river" and "adopt-a-stream" campaigns —some adopt whole river basins—and we'd like to work with local communities to set up similar initiatives here in the UK. We would like to be in the position where we can stop inappropriate river developments and long-term deterioration of rivers not through hastily organized campaigns or protests, but because of a well-established, positive culture of community river protection in the UK. You can find out how US groups operate community river protection and regeneration projects by looking at the ODP page "Rivers and Streams", which we helped to compile a few years ago. And if you have any ideas or you'd like to adopt your own river or stream, take a look at our guide Adopting a river: How to get out, get dirty, and make a difference!

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