Pollution of Jersey's water bodies (FOI)

​Request

Could you give the details of the number of streams, ponds and reservoirs which fail to meet European standards for pollution and biodiversity?

Response

In 2014 the Department of the Environment (DoE) completed a significant piece of work to classify Jersey’s water bodies (streams / ponds / reservoirs / groundwater and coastal waters) in accordance with EU Water Framework Directive (EU WFD) standards.

This formed the basis for the ‘Challenges for the Water Environment of Jersey’ report which is available on the government website at the link below.

Challenges for the Water Environment of Jersey

This includes all of the appendices but it is split into separate documents because of size.

DoE was only able to classify those water bodies for which it had a sufficient amount of monitoring data available.

The above request specifies European standards for pollution and biodiversity and whilst those aren’t specific standards under the EU WFD, Chemical status covers the “pollution” standard and the biological status will include some measures of biodiversity, although this is limited principally to macroinvertebrate monitoring.

This work was a pre-cursor to the report “Water Management Plan for Jersey 2017 to 2021”, DoE’s five year plan to tackle these water quality pressures, which was approved by The Minister for the Environment and States Assembly in 2016. This is also available on the Government website at the link below.

Water Management Plan for Jersey 2017 to 2021