Helping communities to help rivers

The world's rivers have never been under so much stress.

Even in the UK and Ireland, rivers are under huge pressure from water extraction ("abstraction"), climate change, pollution, and other human activities.

The UK Rivers Network brings people together to create a better future for rivers and inland waters in the UK and Ireland.

After a 10-year hiatus, we're currently working on relaunching the UK Rivers Network in an exciting new form.

Photo: The River Frome, Dorset, in summer.

How this website works

It's really easy to get involved in helping your local river. Here are five simple things you can do:

What's new?

The River Test at Mottisfont, Hampshire in summer.

Here are some new things on our website and elsewhere...

• Flooding: What to do: The BBC offers a useful summary of official advice for people unlucky enough to be caught by rising waters.
• Flooding: What you should do and how to claim on your insurance by Mark King, for The Guardian, has useful advice on tackling the aftermath of a flood.
• How clean and healthy are the UK's rivers?. We've been keeping tabs on official statistics for well over a decade. We've just (November 2012) published the latest EU statistics—and we also have historic data going back over the last 20 years or so.
• Climate change and rivers: Our brand new (Summer 2012) guide to how rivers might change in a warming world.

Don't forget these older pages:

• We're continuing to develop our educational pages. Most recently, we've collected together a page of climate change and global warming photos to add to our very popular pollution photos and river photos for students and researchers.
• Need to find out about water pollution? Check out our ever-popular Pollution page. Explain that Stuff! also have a good introductory article about water pollution.
• Want to get involved with local river conservation projects? Take a look at our ever-popular Network page. We've now (finally) got an interactive map of all the UK river groups we know about.

Latest UK rivers news

Our news feed will be back soon. In the meantime, you can search for news items yourself on our news page, where you can also find older news stories going all the way back to 1995.

More news...