“If you Don’t Monitor it, you Can’t Manage it” wwem set to be the focus for uk water monitoring

‘If you don’t monitor it; you can’t manage it!’. That’s the ‘why’. WWEM will seek to deal with the ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’.

WWEM (Water and Wastewater Environmental Monitoring) is a new event designed to provide the latest news and information on how to monitor water quality and quantity. It is jointly organised by the Environment Agency, SWIG and Environmental Technology publications, and organiser Marcus Pattison has warned...

The EU Water Framework Directive requires river basin management plans to be published at the latest by 23 October 2009. As a result, EU member states are following a plan designed to meet this objective, and the agreed programme for 2005-2006 highlights a number of priorities including the completion of a register of all the water bodies deemed to require special protection in each river basin. A detailed analysis is required showing, for example, the human impacts upon the quality of ground and surface waters. Naturally the effective implementation of the Directive is heavily dependent on both the quality and quantity of water monitoring data.

The Environment Agency of England and Wales is in the process of placing a greater emphasis on self-monitoring for those organisations with discharges or emissions to the environment. The main reasons for this are to increase continuous monitoring, and at the same time increase the quality and quantity of data being collected. It follows therefore that a rigorous system must be in place to ensure that water quality and flow data is as accurate and as representative as possible, and this is the reasoning behind recent initiatives in the water monitoring sector.