Celebrating the crucial role of rivers in the carbon cycle and our ecosystem.
Join us for a special collaboration with Bristol’s 2025 Festival of Nature, to hear about rivers as the ancient ‘gut health’ of our planet – and what we can be doing to nurture and enjoy them in our cities and beyond.
The expert panel will be led by Professor Darren Reynolds (Director of the Centre for Research in Sustainable Agri-Food & Environment at UWE Bristol), with guests Emma Brisdion (Communications & Campaigns Manager, The Rivers Trust and UWE Bristol Alum), Dr Eva Perrin (Research Fellow in River Pollution, University of Plymouth and UWE Bristol Alum), Rob Passmore and Hedvig Lyche (Additive Catchments), and Mehbooba Ferdoush.
Links:
Bristol Distinguished Address Series: The Bristol Distinguished Address Series (BDAS) – Events | UWE Bristol
Festival of Nature 2025: Festival of Nature | The Natural History Consortium
Professor Darren Reynolds, UWE Bristol: Professor Darren Reynolds – UWE Bristol
Emma Brisdion, The Rivers Trust: (27) Emma Brisdion | LinkedIn
The Rivers Trust: Together, for Rivers | The Rivers Trust
Dr Eva Perrin, University of Plymouth: Dr Eva Perrin – University of Plymouth
Rob Passmore and Hedvig Lyche, Additive Catchments: https://additivecatchments.com/about
Additive Catchments: https://additivecatchments.com
Watershed: Watershed | Cultural cinema, talent development and creative technology in Bristol
44,000 minutes heat heat hallelujah heat heat heat heat hi everyone down is down heat heat this is a test test test julia is it all right if i just leave those suck very nice heat heat blue green blue good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is julia krisak and i’m one of the events team at ui bristol and i’m delighted to be bringing you our final spring bas event in collaboration with the festival of nature 2025 you are in for an incredible treat rarely do you get a panel so enthusiastic so very passionate and positive in their field tonight you’re going to hear all about rivers a swan song to the watery veins of our planet new ways of seeing our rivers the science going on to monitor and understand them better and importantly an exploration of the simple ways in which you can help support river research as well as how you can enjoy your local rivers more easily and more frequently before we proceed i wanted to advise you that there are no planned fire drills so if you do hear an alarm go off do please go through the exit here and the watershed staff will lead you out after the conversation in wateride 3 right across the cafe bar to the other end we will have some lovely drinks together but without further ado as we have all of these lovely speakers to introduce to you i wanted to first welcome our host this evening possibly one of the most enthusiastic academics i have ever met you are going to be led academic you are going to be led on a journey of river discovery by ui bristol’s own professor darren reynolds pro- vice chancellor for research and knowledge exchange darren unashamedly describes himself as nuts about science and has spent over 30 years trying to turn human ideas into useful things that exist in real life especially those that can help people and the planet darren says that above all he is passionate about rivers and has spent much of his life being near them playing in them listening to and studying them the unsung heroes in the carbon cycle it is such a wonderful world says darren and on that marvelously positive note i would like to invite ellie turner wallace head of programs from the natural history consortium up onto the stage to tell you more about the festival of nature and introduce our speakers properly thank you [Applause] thank you julia and welcome everyone um so i’m ellie turner wallace from the natural history consortium uh which is a charitable partnership of 13 organizations as one of our founding partners ui have been helping us to run the festival of nature for over 20 years each year they help us to curate a packed program full of events including this wonderful panel um and also i have to mention it our fantastic world weekend event which is this saturday and sunday down at millennium square so lots of free family activities and also an opportunity to come and meet other ueie researchers as well so we hope hope to see you there too this year for the first time we’re exploring the theme of water yui have leapt to the challenge and put together this incredible panel of speakers all passionate about rivers and it’s my absolute pleasure to introduce them to you so um in no particular order um we have me buba federouch um is a single mother of three children two of whom have special needs and is a survivor of domestic abuse she lives with a range of health conditions including fibromyalgia anxiety depression long covid ibs and migraines in 2021 she took up swimming which became a turning point helping her to manage pain reduce stress and reconnect with herself me buba has a great love for nature and open water swimming especially in rivers and lakes giving her a profound sense of calm and connection um next we have emma brisian um she is the campaigns and communications manager at the rivers trust a podcaster and also a keen kayaker spending most of her time with the river avon walking beside it or paddling along it a yui alum having completed her masters in science communication several years previously she now delivers campaigns that connect communities with river health and citizen science and lean on policy makers to create a healthier future for our waterways dr eva perin um is also a yuri alum a freshwater scientist with a background in river pollution eva completed her phd in 2023 focusing on bacterial processes in rivers and their implications for ecosystems health eva is currently a post-doal research fellow in river pollution at the university of plymouth developing a catchment monitoring framework to explore more integrated approaches to pollution monitoring involving citizen scientists community groups diverse stakeholders and multiple data types using novel technologies eva also has experience in environmental campaigning seeking to influence local legislation and improve water quality for recreational use and last but not least we have ha la um she is the chief sustainability and social impact officer at additive catchments there she leads the esg social license and net zero programs designing strategies and driving solutions for sustainability across our ecosystem heder’s additive catchments communications and community engagement activities ensuring greater cross- sector collaborations for environmental stewardship she has held global leadership roles across sustainability and communications working with clients in government corporations and foundations passionate about giving nature a voice and a seat at the table she’s always exploring ways to define more circular empathetic collaborative and regenerative solutions that work for and with nature it now gives me the great pleasure to hand this panel over to professor darren reynolds um to explore rivers together thank you thank you very much that’s great uh welcome everybody good evening to you all uh really pleased that we’ve managed to pull you in out of the incredible weather that’s just descended upon us uh i almost felt like jumping into the river a little bit earlier on because i was a little little bit hot and bothered uh okay so we we’ll we’ll just crack on shall we so i’ll try and make a splash early on um and that’s the last one i promise um i mean uh i i had the uh i mean i remember as a kid you know i used to go down to the reservoir the rivers and i used to go frogging and do all that sort of stuff and that’s a really vivid memory i have of of of growing up you know and and i came from a very industrial part of uh the uk so kind of uh you know south yorkshire lots of coal lots of steel and that was a real sort of break through for me that was a real sort of you know space where i could go and sort of enjoy enjoy nature and s in my professional life i’ve been very lucky to go all over the place um including india and i thought i knew rivers well but having explored the ganges and in particularly not just the enormous the enormity of it but the connection it has with people uh really struck me to the core actually i i was really really shocked about that and i just thought this connection that we have with our rivers we all fundamentally in a really complex way connected you know not just individually but as communities look like communities growing on great river banks and all that kind of stuff uh so i’m just interested to sort of hear some of your views around that connectedness with with people and rivers and i was very struck with the introduction about uh the role that rivers play um for for you and yeah i just you know from where i came uh i didn’t never learn to swim so 2021 i learned to swim and then someone tell me that if you go to the you know cold water swimming it is good for your fibromyalgia so i thought let’s give a try and first time i was in the cold water it was shocking like you know it was a real shock but after that i feel so relaxed so calm uh mentally i was so much depressed because i was going through a abusive relationship so i was you know with the special need children it was like a lot lots going on in my life and suddenly i feel like that water makes me relieve all the stress when when i’m in the water i’m not thinking about anything even my children i’m thinking about i’m just exploring the nature i’m feeling the nature and the you know the relaxation and nothing else like you know this is like a calmness in my mind so i feel like oh that’s the thing i have to do and do you access are you sort of uh accessing rivers locally so what where do you where do you go swimming in konham uh konham river aon yeah so but uh i was like you know it’s it’s lovely to be there to be honest the nature the smell the birds and you know everything i love because i’m a nature lover and do you brave that do you brave that water in the winter as well or yes winter all over the year yes or summer winter you know especially winter i love it it’s like so cold and it makes me more relaxed i don’t know why i love it do we have any more are we going to confess or do we have any more swimmers that head out in the rivers are we going to end up now i’m i’m well i’m a free diver but i don’t do that in rivers i do that in free but i did my love has always been for the ocean predominantly but i lived for quite a few years in in bali and around southeast asia and saw the the clogging of the rivers that fed into the ocean and the death of those rivers um based on pollution garbage and lack of understanding and education and we did a bit of research around some of the islands and showing um you know locals a picture of a beach with coconuts on it and leaves and then a picture of a beach with plastic you know garbage on it and they didn’t understand the difference and so it’s become so innate to them that garbage is just part of nature and it was such a frightening wakeup call that this is there’s no recognition that what we’re doing to nature is actually becoming normal to us and so that kind of really resonated with me because i saw all of that flowing into the ocean and i felt the oceans dying as i kind of you know swam around in it so yeah that kind of bit of a trigger for me that connected back to rivers from the love of oceans i guess yeah i’m sure you won’t mind me but where were you from originally i’m norwegian norwegian so is do you get a sense that there’s a quite a different approach to how norwegians view their wonderful fjords and rivers and that kind of stuff as to what maybe we do here in the uk i think we have a because there’s so few of us and there’s so much nature we have a very natural relationship to the the the nature around us we’re not as confined by concrete and buildings that you are here we’re not channeling our rivers in the same way that you are there’s a lot more open flow there’s a lot more life but i’m not sure i think we talked about kind of the shifting baseline syndrome that we spoke about a bit i think we still have that as well i think we becoming used to our rivers dying to our fjords dying to pollution being a natural part of our natural systems and we’re justifying that like a um cognitive dissonance a little bit we kind of feel like we should do something but it feels natural i saw that i think that’s a global phenomenon that we need to break right yeah and i guess you know how do you i mean do you think generally i mean are you do you feel safe about going in rivers and swimming do you feel are you happy to do that do you have any concerns about when you go into a river and swim it’s a very leaning question how do you feel well i do a lot of i do a lot of science so i’m not yeah i i’m quite wary these days about about a lot a lot of rivers uh i’m very uh pick and choose you know a lot of it’s about context about whether they’re urban um check out the kind of maps you know whether they’re sewage out that kind of stuff so uh so so it’s much more of a for me a much more of a logistical kind of ruins it a bit actually because you can’t kind of just want to you know go out and do it so but now i have a little checklist where i think should i go there no no no uh so yeah i’m a bit more i’m a lot more cautious i’m certainly cautious and i was you know i’ve got a couple of kids and i definitely was a lot more cautious with my kids uh and stuff like that you you do a lot of swimming don’t you eva yeah how how do you well i i feel really lucky like a bit like heather i grew up in north wales um goth um and yeah like swimming there was just like a thing to do because there wasn’t much else to do that and climbing mountains basically so yeah i feel like it felt like very integrated with our culture um and to be honest growing up i never thought about pollution river pollution um agricultural pollution sewision i’d like never thought about it i just loved water um and the sea too um and yeah it wasn’t until like rivers became more of an empirical thing for me because i studied environmental science and i did my phd with darren um at ui and yeah i think that is actually when i learned to learned about pollution um in rivers and yeah and at that point i was obviously living in bristol it was lockdown um i lived in like a little flat um in st paul’s like without a garden and obviously we couldn’t go outside um and so i think up until that point like i’d never really swam in rivers in bristol and i sort of always associated it with this pristine you know type of environment that we have in north wales um and yeah that’s when i started swimming in the avon um and we’ll talk more about like the community group sort of stuff that’s happening in bristol later and um the like group that we formed um on the avon to kind of protest against sewage pollution but um but yeah i think it was kind of a really important like crutch for me to be able to like access nature and water at the same time as doing the phd it kind of like brought the empirical side of it out a little bit but still like contextualized um the science as well um and yeah and i haven’t saw in the avon probably in a couple of months because i no longer live in bristol but yeah so you’re here now aren’t you only 45 more minutes to go and figureate a punch but uh so uh i mean i think you know obviously i mean i’ve sort of been doing this sort of stuff for a long time really and nobody really listens to scientists i find not generally i’m not not feeling sorry for myself but i i i think they’re much more inclined to listen to communities and and that kind of stuff um and i know obviously now it’s much more uh the discussion is really really out there you know there’s all sorts of it’s very emotional as well i find the disc very emotional um and sometimes i think it’s quite difficult for people certainly with the chats i’ve had to really get to the bottom of things or to to kind of get to the facts you know to sort of understand clearly you know what this is and it’s a complicated problem complicated space um but emma i know you’re you’re uh one of your roles is communications isn’t it in you know at the rivers trust so i mean how have we i don’t know why how have we arrived at this this place you know why are we talking about it so much well i mean there are so many reasons why we’re worried about our rivers right and i think basically the underpinning thing to remember is everything that happens on land affects our waterways and there’s that disconnect i think we don’t really tend to think about okay you know farmers spreading stuff on fields why would you ever make the link with that kind of going into our rivers until you sit and think about it or someone shows you that our soil and everything on or in our soil gets washed into our rivers if you drop a piece of litter in a city often that’s kind of the last thing you think about right apart from perhaps oh well somebody maybe will put that in the bin let’s hope so often the thought isn’t well that’s probably also going to get washed into our rivers at some point in heavy rain um so there are so many reasons why our rivers are suffering based like even if we’re just you know just looking at sources of pollution but also like historically we’ve not treated them as something to love i mean we’ve set up our settlements and the way in the places that we live we’ve always lived alongside rivers because they’ve offered us like a way to get from a to b a way to connect with communities a way to trade a way to provide us with food so we’ve all living kind of in and on rivers but then we’ve tried to contain them we’ve tried to you know make them into very tight channels we’ve not given them space to breathe as they should because they’re these living amazing ecosystems we don’t give them room to flood on their natural flood planes anymore because we’re building up on them we’ve put like drainage ditches in our land which has really helped agriculture for a period of time but now we’ve learned that actually that’s really you know degraded our kind of soils um that we’ve done so many things to rivers that haven’t treated them for the amazing space they are that now they’re basically crying out for help and we’re starting to listen which is really positive and i think a lot of people are now starting to realize oh my god we really do need rivers but they really need us and that’s what’s been amazing like all of us we were saying earlier before the last couple of years have been amazing in terms of like a ground swell of like community voices coming through and saying like what can i do why why have we got into this mess um we’re starting to understand that now i mean there are still gaps in our knowledge we don’t necessarily know all of the messes that our rivers are in but we know enough to go “my god we need to get on with it.” and we do know enough about some of it that we’ve got some amazing tools to start treating our rivers right i mean how so maybe when you when you go swimming is it sort of um do you do you worry about these things or are you more in the moment you live for the moment you’re you get there off you go you’re in there and you know you’re upstream sort of doing that so especially on the river i can’t dip my face i can’t dip my head this is very frustrating because i want to feel everything in the lake when i swim lake water is clear so you can dip your head and you know you can feel all the thing so in the river i feel so sad like you know that you are there you’re swimming but you can pollution is there so if you want you can’t do that and how do you know it’s there what what sort of what sort of is the water is not clear you know you can see that also because i i don’t swim alone i swim with a group also we talk about these things so this is and also when i did the documentary for the aon so i came to know lots of things about the pollution of this so first time when i said can i dip my head they said no i can’t you can swim only but you can’t dip your so you’re very upright when you’re that’s very correct that’s a very correct technique yeah but that that is a genuine sort of discussion that that you as a group uh you have when you when you’re using uh when you’re using these places that’s i think it’s interesting though with like what was saying that we kind of we’re we’re treating the rivers have become like i think you mentioned earlier a a commodity it’s it’s a product that we use for our benefit it’s not an ally to us anymore what it should be you know and i think it’s know you’ve read is a river alive i don’t know if anyone has read that book but i mean robert mcfall in that one isn’t it yeah yeah it’s a it’s a beautiful book but one thing that kind of stood out to me was like the so many of indigenous people in like new zealand canada across the world they relate to rivers as persons so they say this river who is alive and in english we don’t use that relatable wording with nature we kind of we detached ourselves and that justifies us killing it in a sense because it’s there for us to use not for us to live in harmony and i think that’s a lot of the work that we have to do is recognize that we are all interconnected and we all do depend on each other and that lesson that that that pivoting that change i think is what will help everyone kind of recognize okay we are in synergy we are in symbiosis and we all depend on each other it’s not something for us to use it’s something that feeds us and helps us and we have to strengthen and nurture it back i think that’s a lot of i find that quite an instinctive thing to you know somebody says is a river alive my you know i don’t think i would have to think about it very long they are literally alive yeah it’s not yeah like literally it’s not figurative even um i find it really nice though that i think you know like we think from a scientific perspective like we actually know they are alive but also you know people who maybe haven’t even studied the science behind it just know instinctively anyway and that’s why we have this huge movement about what you were just talking about like you rights of nature legal personhood for rivers and things and yeah i think it just makes sense doesn’t it that people instinctively know that we spend a lot of time around rivers and you know they’re friends and we get to know them and yeah they i mean and also from a scientific perspective like they are alive um you know they play a massive like disproportionately huge role in global cycles not just on a local scale for that catchment but you know they regulate global systems um and nutrient cycles you know essential nutrients for life um bacteria in rivers a lot of the like research that darren and i did um during my phd was you know showed that the bacteria and rivers are hugely impacted by whatever we put in uh to rivers in the same way that like you know our guts and our bodies are impacted by anything that we put in it um and yeah i mean like emma was saying whatever happens on the land ends up in a river ultimately but yeah also where i live in nuki uh in coral now um we have like had these two humpback whales like hanging around loads in like the bay um and everyone’s like obsessed with them and i find it a really interesting kind of that’s like a pipeline between you know whatever you put on the land affects the rivers but actually ultimately whatever happens in the rivers that’s like will eventually feed up to the top of the food chain but nobody thinks about i don’t know the link between the beginning and the end of that kind of pipeline um i mean just for the record you did pretty much all the research on that i was just i just provided the old cup of coffee i’m pretty that’s how i remembered it but thanks for the the attack i mean that so that that living stuff yeah i mean i i find that really quite um i find that immensely uh really really i mean can i ask the i can do this can i can i ask the audience who is that something that is what we’re talking about a bit strange who thinks rivers are alive if you could show me your hand and and who put them down now that’s good and who thinks who thinks that that’s a bit of a strange concept great yeah that’s fair enough that’s good yeah okay that’s right yeah yeah i mean so so i i think we have the very sort of this very strong human thing don’t we with rivers you know how um and i think one of the things that i am mindful of i don’t know there’s a bit of me that thinks we’re quite selfish as well you know i say is what what rivers do do for us as humans you know and i think there are some really amazing things you know like that sort of uh that well-being that sort of calmness that sort of connection i think it’s really important but i think the other thing i really am interested is like rivers do a they do a lot of stuff right which is they would do without humans you know like they’re incredibly important for um uh biodiversity for example they’re really you know they move around a lot of carbon and stuff don’t they and nutrients and things like that um and and to me they like kind of represent like a gut you know they’re like sort of what our guts do we chuck um i did put something in the intro which julie didn’t put in which which was uh that you know rivers are very good at sort of they take this carbon from from old carbon yeah from landscapes and then they move it and ultimately ends up uh somewhere along the line uh as a as a as a as a molecule as a humpback whale yeah as a as a molecule that that’s out there and of course that whole kind of thing kind of kind of um that kind of that whole thing starts again and you know and i think in the in the when you ask me for information i put it’s a bit like sprouts at christmas uh but at scale isn’t it you know we’re all putting these sprouts in and then you know before too long they’re they’re appearing somewhere else uh you usually round about the king speech or something like that i don’t know uh but that’s actually what that’s actually what rivers do they’re kind of living guts i guess water what has anyone got any thoughts about or can we just do you want to just move on but they all kind of watery guts i’m not i’m not going to comment on the sprout thing but you’re missing out there hannah you’re missing out there but they are you know we talk about rivers as the veins of our planet right and it’s the same with our bodies if we clog our veins obviously going to end up with you know in cardiac arrest or you know massive obesity or any kind of all of the diseases that flow with it and it’s the same with rivers like we’ve chuck all this stuff into it not the good stuff but the bad stuff and we clog them up and we hold them in and we basically slow the flow kill the bodiversity and we basically kill the body which is the planet and with the planet goes us so it’s like a self-enlightenment really like self-preservation looking after the veins of our planet because they’re ultimately the ones that keep us alive i think at the end of the day so i think it’s self-enlightenment i think it’s kind of just there’s lots of uh i guess appreciation of rivers outside of you know the kind of recreational side the well-being side the kind of keen bird watchers you know anglers you know there’s there’s that stuff that happens underneath isn’t there that is almost invisible because it’s so small and you know we don’t um i think we were chatting before uh we came in and we don’t get any deliveries right on earth so we we just uh the only we sunlight everything that we have is fixed fixed carbon nitrogen all that kind of stuff and rivers are one of those things that play that kind of really useful role in in sort of moving stuff around and you know making humpback whales eventually or or whatever you know that kind of stuff um do you think there’s enough enough sort of appreciation of those kind of things or does there have to be even i don’t know you know something that interests me is i was speaking to a friend the other day and she was you know interests like kind of knows that i’m a bit obsessed with rivers so very kindly spoke to me gently about rivers for a bit um and obviously wants to talk about sewage because that’s the thing that’s grabbing headlines but we as we were chatting like i realized she didn’t even have a like and she’s by far from alone in this didn’t even think about the fact that our tap water comes from our rivers they offer us so many things not just as recreational spaces we literally depend on them to you know drink and to be clean and they’re just i think there’s a breakdown in communication and the way that rivers are celebrated because at the moment they’re not vilified i mean the pollution of them is vilified and we’re constantly talking about how damaged they are but we don’t also talk about why we need to protect them so much like yes we talk about wildlife but like we’re going to run out of water in the next like like the rate of water use like independently and by businesses in the uk is is higher than some of our european neighbors and we are facing like a water scarcity crisis and it’s not that you’re you know it’s not just rain water that is going into reservoirs that that is filled up this lovely bottle here a lot of it’s abstracted from our rivers and they’re under so much pressure from so many things but we don’t celebrate them and go “thank you god thank you rivers for giving us water that we literally need for every facet of our lives.” so i think there’s a huge communication piece as well that should be like way less focused on the negative because that can be so depressing and then nobody wants to do anything about it because it seems like a mountain we also need to celebrate and start at the very basics and connect people with the concept of rivers being just wonderful i mean i think most of us in the room based on the fact that almost everyone put their hands up to say “yes a river’s alive.” like we all love rivers right but we need everybody else to do that as well like we’re in a bit of an echo chamber here like we need to spread those ripples and bring more people into this club of like rivers are great let’s look after them i also think like even within the scientific community rivers have been overlooked for years like like we were talking about those important processes that they play in you know underpinning global cycles but for years rivers were literally just seen as a bit of a black box like in global carbon budgets nobody really knew what they did or understood it and they’re a bit too complicated and that’s because of the disproportionate role that they play they’re so complicated because they’re such dynamic systems things happen a lot quicker than they do like in the ocean for example and there’s constantly inputs that constantly changing throughout seasons and you know as a result of pollution events and human activities building and catchments and things and yeah i think for years and even still to a certain extent yeah they are kind of just a bit of a black box and they were massively overlooked um and anything obviously that impacts you know the catchment and anything that’s going into the rivers is going to impact those processes as well and it’s constantly changing and so we can’t really keep up with it um but yeah i think yeah certainly even within the scientific community it was they have always been quite overlooked i think it’s i think that’s interesting to your point as well is that we can’t really change what we can’t see and we can’t really understand or protect what we can’t measure or you know we we lack insights really and understanding as to what’s actually happening in the rivers right like i mean we work a lot on data you know like real-time data monitoring of the health of the river to actually understand what’s going on in there but it goes to everything that you guys doing like like citizen science like we need to understand before we can act and i think that’s where we’re getting to as society now like okay let’s understand what’s happening here and then what do we need to do to change that and that’s i feel like really positive about that shift from like an industry perspective from a science perspective from a organizational kind of ngo perspective it’s like okay let’s understand what’s going on and then let’s together because it takes all of us let’s together then figure out what our role go to schools are to help address these issues that we now have transparency and visibility of which we haven’t had before and that to me is really hopeful message that we’re getting to that point now where we’re starting to understand what’s going on in the environment around us you’re dealing in lots of can i say the word is aidriven technology right ai yeah um but isn’t that sort of i mean i mean surely is there not sort of a um an opportunity to really capture lots of data so some of that data could be really really it could be from planners it could be from councils it could be from scientists but it also could be from communities and swimmers you know and that and the citizen base uh and a way of kind of organizing that information in a way that’s kind of useful to us some in some way you so i i’ve got these um i’ve already got got this dream of of giving a boob a super sensing swimsuit right with lots of tech yeah while he can swim uh at the aon and back and then we can get all this data uh triangulate it and and shove it up to to the cloud and do some ai stuff 100% we need all of that we need our ai data and our river data we need citizen science data we need community data this is why it’s not a one no one can do this alone right and i think this is where we’re kind of getting to and i love the fact that there’s like four women up here because i think it takes a bit of a feminine lens value systems change to drive that that shift because it does take collaboration it takes empathy it takes care it takes kind of interconnectedness to really understand that we need all of us and all the data that comes from you know personal experience what i feel and see and you know experience when i’m in the river you know what you learn from the citizen science what you get from the community is telling you this is what i want this is what i feel and from you know data data you know and i think we need all of these layers to get the full picture what’s going on and then then everyone gets agency you know everyone feels like there’s contribution because i think a lot of the anger that i’m sensing is communities going or people going well all of this is just happening kind of to me or to my river and to something that i love and i don’t have a role to play in what we do about that and i think we need to shift that we need to give if i was to sort of gently sort of push a little on that i mean push back i suppose i mean i mean do you think we take enough responsibility individually you know i mean i think it’s sometimes quite you know it’s good isn’t i mean it’s satisfying to kind of point and and and blame but do you think do do we take enough responsibility in the stuff that in our actions in the stuff that that that we do are we sort of trusting everything that in the state is looking after everything and we shouldn’t really have to worry about everything but you know we wash our cars don’t we in drinking water we you know water our plants and drinking or we do we do lots of things i think don’t we which maybe on reflection we maybe could do a bit differently i don’t think we’re given the opportunity a lot of the time to be or feel included in like all of this kind of stuff like i there’s two main ways that rivers are monitored and they are very very separate to how people interact with rivers like i just think everything is so separate and like yeah like the main ways that rivers are monitored are two like official frameworks called the water framework directive and also kind of the bathing water um directive i guess um and none of it uses third party data um so citizen science data isn’t included local knowledge isn’t included um yeah and i think it’s a lot of the time been community groups and um nos’s people like the rivers trust and local rivers trust local catchment partnerships that have been like plugging that gap and kind of galvanizing the support that um people want to give um and the energy that people have you know to give to this cause um and yeah have been essentially using that to try and yeah move the issue forward but i think in terms of like official monitoring frameworks there isn’t really an opportunity for people to feel like they can do much um or that they can be involved um because it just doesn’t really use that type of it doesn’t really think in that way it’s quite rigid i think i i agree and i think this is where the change happening i mean we work with the rivers trust and we work with university women and we’re trying to like bring all these data together because i think you’re 100% right people don’t it’s too detached right nature’s detach and the agency to do something about it is detached there is too many barriers between me and what’s actually going on in that river and so it’s being done to me and i don’t have any say in it and i think that’s where the work for trust work of science work of like community groups groups come in and have to have a voice at that table right it’s imperative that we listen to all these groups who are there living and breathing in and at the moment it’s not really happening but there’s change here right i feel like there’s there’s momentum now for these conversations there’s a massive uh fundamental shift in local action i mean i’ve never seen anything like it i mean i used to dream of maybe in the wrong way but i used to dream of uh rivers being front page uh news you know be being at the right you know in in in the consciousness of everybody talking about them and i think that’s really really happened uh a lot you know the last few few years that and that’s to me is quite interesting but i’m but i think also as well the kind of like that that ability to think that you’re moving forward and come up with good solutions i’m i don’t know i don’t get a sense that we’re always moving in a purposeful way and in a really sort of sensible way uh because there’s you know well yeah do we ever that’s a good point yeah it’s always seems to be quite reactionary you know to to sort of uh and i know there’s like loads of really boring details you know um in terms of legislation and monitoring and things like that but you know we’re not really it seems to me having a real fundamental like you know nobody wants to pay more for their water bills for example um but why why not you know i mean like or should nobody pay i don’t know i mean it’s sort of this and it’s funny that you were talking earlier about the uh you know this like commoditization because i was driving you know i coming into bristol um and uh i saw that kind of congestion zone sign and then i think yeah so we’re obviously commoditizing clean air and then there’s all these issues around water bills that are going up and you think well we’re commoditizing clean water uh and then you start thinking you know what is that kind of is that where we’re heading where you and i think i was very interested in i think way back in the ‘ 90s i guess maybe mid 90s a lot of scientists were very keen on commoditizing things because it felt we felt at that time that we could use it as a lever to drive change but actually when you commoditize something it can it’s like anything else it can be it can be bought or it loses its value or that you think there’s something bit bit in that or no [Laughter] well that was a bit of a tumble weed moment wasn’t it we’ll be back after a short break everyone no i think i think this is like comes back to what we’ve been talking about it’s around the whole is a river alive kind of question again right i mean if we treat our natural resources as commodities we have kind of answered that question as a society and we say no you know because otherwise it’s slavery right i mean and we kind of abolished that a while ago and so our our societal answer seems to be no because we can monetize this but our human kind of hearts and emotion feeling all of us are saying yes so there’s a massive again cognitive dissonance in terms of how we treat our natural resources what’s what we actually think that they should be and i think that’s we need to i don’t know how we do that because i don’t know the answer but that’s what we need to break we need to bring that aleness interconnectedness that kind of that that collaboration between us and nature more closer to reality in a way like and we do that by understanding it by listening to it by kind of recognizing the value that it offers us but as much as that as much as that anger is bubbled up right um and there’s been lots of people that have gone on marches and protests and all that kind of stuff there’s also a lot of love you know i’ve also seen a lot of love that’s the you know going back to your point about you know how you feel a lot of people showing a lot of care you know for their for their rivers and it drives me bonkers you know when you go around places and you can’t even see the river because we’ve decided we’re going to build a five foot wall yeah that’s it uh and then you have a pier over the top and there’s a mandatory traffic cone you know a sort of a small bike uh and then a shopping trolley and then a fridge and it’s it’s like the i forgot what that game show was but it’s like that conveyor belt of things going in uh and there’s something isn’t it i mean like you know you go down the docks uh as a lovely development you know and that’s obviously linked in with maybe house prices but you just go out of bristol a little bit you go into i don’t know eastern for example um or on the outskirts and all of a sudden it really changes you know that kind of that that show of rivers and how rivers connect yeah with our uh that changes a lot but that love i think and we’ve got some we’ve got a little clip somewhere we’ve got a little about something what’s this that was a really bad a little thing about something yeah we do the mermaid getting married to the river mrs a doesn’t look like it sometimes worse than others this i believe used to say prohibited when did this first arrive possibly in response to the commotion we’ve been causing by the campaign [Music] petition debate to address sewage pollution in the may not paying his bills because he’s not getting service i don’t agree that that’s the case with water and we can talk about water okay or swim river most days rain or snow if i don’t do this i’m going to go nuts we’re just there for each other and takes a clean [Music] i like to go under and i’m just [Music] going to take care of us do you want the any possess to raise awareness of the issues facing this river i did [Music] that was quite good so we got two star stars of that uh that trailer there do you want to tell us rave on the avon right i’ve got that right now i’m a bit late contextualiz yeah okay but um do you want to tell us a little bit about that you two yeah um yeah i can go first yeah um yeah so that was a clip um from a film which i feel like probably quite a few people here have already seen um or maybe will be familiar with but it’s called ravon for the avon um it was produced by like a really really close friend of ours uh called charlotte sawyer um and yeah it’s just the story of like everybody in bristol who feels connected to the river um like the threads that the river has that run through our city and kind of how yeah people came together over a period of years um kind of starting when charlotte started filming maybe 2021 i think 2020 um yeah for a couple of years to kind of advocate for the river and the connection that people have for the river um yeah as i was saying earlier when i was doing my phd um a group of us like local swimmers uh who swim at connum which probably most of you will recognize from the clips um kind of came became aware that essentially no water quality testing was happening um on the avon at connum even though like so many people swam there especially over lockdown because it was so hot um and yeah we basically had no data at all um there was a little bit of data um obviously for like ecological status kind of stuff so we knew that the river was you know fairly polluted obviously i mean we could see that anyway um but yeah there was no routine monitoring for um indicators of bacteria that are harmful to health basically um and so what we started doing was kind of set up like a citizen science program basically to do regular water quality testing every week at connum um and alongside that we were sort of campaigning um locally with like local counselors but also nationally uh to try and get it officially designated as a bathing water which would mean that the regulator would come and test it frequently rather than us um and yeah that wasn’t successful for reasons that is described in the film but um yeah charlotte just started filming us basically and then it kind of snowballed from there and um and yeah it was amazing and you know obviously features and also our beautiful first time i was in the river that the first time they captured your first dip yes wow well that’s come on that’s a bit of a that’s a bit of a revelation and there’s that real sense about how much some people really connect with it it’s it provides a a space maybe for people to go and i don’t know heal or to feel better and you know i realize that time is moving on a little bit and i’m sort of quite keen if if that’s all right with you lot is to so where do we go from here you know what what do we how do we move forward you know i mean it’s going to involve us it’s going to involve uh government it’s going to involve the water companies you know and i have to say you know i’m not defending anybody or anything but certainly in the conversations i’ve had with people in the industry and even in water industry there’s a lot of people who really care you know it’s not sort of this easy thing you know there are a lot of people there that really really care about um uh about about our rivers and absolutely don’t go out there you know to to sort of harm our rivers you know they really don’t i’ve really had some of those conversations with people but what do you what do you reckon what what is it technology is it community is it government i mean it’s going to be all of them but you know what what’s how do we how do you move on which one do you want to start with go for it emma go for i mean there we all have responsibilities right whether they’re personal things that we can do at home to adding our voice to big campaigns and creating that sort of community movement finding your community taking a job that does something that you feel passionate about that makes a difference or you know being part of sort of lobbying government or indeed we’ve talked about data quite a lot like every single one of us can become a citizen science become a citizen science become a citizen scientist and there’s loads of different sort of levels of which you can do that as well so um starting at the very bottom i run something called the big river watch which happens twice a year you literally just go look at a river we’ve got a survey on an app and you just tell us what you see and that not only helps people spend like a lovely bit of time getting to know their river which is really important like fall in love with your space you want to protect it but it helps us kind of build this nationwide picture of of river health but you don’t necessarily need to know what you’re looking at you know there’s guides in the app as well so the word citizen science can sometimes be a bit off-putting i think but it it really is quite entry level then you could go and do something like riverfly monitoring like learn to go and survey the insects that are living in our river not only are they absolutely some of the coolest things i’ve ever seen i did it last week with somebody one of our colleagues um so weird and amazing but they’re an amazing sort of well they can tell you what the health of the river is because they don’t survive in dirty water effectively so if you’re going out every month and looking for these amazingly cool creatures and you see them doing well or not doing well i mean it helps your connection with rivers but it also means that you’re getting a really important sort of baseline bit of understanding that can be then fed into like the environment agency for example if you don’t meet like a threshold number of these species in your survey you report that to the environment agency and they have to come out and look at it there are so many mechanisms that you can get involved in or then there’s like you know supporting campaigns so we’ve got petitions and things running at the moment like i’m launching one on friday that you should all sign it’s called making space for water um and it’s about like restoring our landscape with nature-based solutions and creating like long naturerich corridors alongside our rivers which is what they should have they should have this jacket of nature around them to interact with but they don’t so we’re basically asking government to provide more mechanisms of funding to support our farmers and land owners to do these things so while you yourself couldn’t necessarily i mean unless any of you are land owners here in which case please do just like slap up a lovely riparian corridor that’s not something we can do yeah plant plant stuff yeah you know uh well yeah i mean i’m absolutely with you on that but i’m also think technology has a role to play right as well i mean we’re not we should embrace those opportunities so the ability to collect loads of information you know and and provide things like digital twins of the world around us to inform simulations and uh predict and to help with planning and to help with all those things you know to really do the because we got tough choices haven’t we i mean we got to grow more food we’re going to need more i mean 70% of all our water that we abstract is is for growing food right so you know there there has to be some i guess some some thinking around that well i think i mean digital twin we’re doing digital twin for algae as well which is super exciting we can talk about that later but yes i think from from our perspective the the data the the kind of continuous water quality monitoring data which is like every 15 seconds taking you know the pulse of the river to understand what’s going on in it i think our mission with that from antiv’s perspective is to enable stakeholders like water companies and and land owners and uh highway authorities where it might be to make the better decisions in nature like that’s the ultimate goal right because at the moment we’re flying blind you know we kind of think we do something here and we’re not sure so having that total kind of transparent holistic map of what’s happening in our rivers and catchment enables this because like you said they don’t want to go out there and say oh yeah we’re going to pollute we’re going to be people like no one says that you know everybody wants to do something good they just don’t have the insights and the tools and the ability to do that and so that’s part of what we do is enable that you know here are insights for you here are actionable insights you can use to make better decision like use more naturebased solutions like that’s investment decisions for and also kind of bring in bring in some of the big states to bring in the water companies i mean sort of we’ve got to solve this together we got to reimagine a different way of working right a different way of collaborating and this is it you know if you can imagine it we can create it but i think this is like what section 82 you know the environment [Laughter] section 82 i’m not going to talk about that but i think we are there’s regulatory kind of regulations policies coming into place that puts the water companies at the moment but i think everyone else will follow saying you need to understand what’s going on in your region in your rivers in your catchments you have to monitor you have to get the data so that you are equipped with the right insights to make better decision in the long term not as an endpipe solution or just take a compliance box but for actual long-term when you say you what do you mean by that i mean is it sort of you at the moment are talking to water companies but i think it’s all stakeholders that have an impact on their vapor health it’s just at the moment water companies are being kind of regulated to have that role because rivers are you know they they don’t uh they don’t care for passports they don’t care for immigration control they don’t care for any of those things you know they they flow they move uh and if they can’t they will find a way yeah uh and you know it’s that for me certainly from in in my sort of challenges in a lot of stuff we i guess you’re the same it’s it’s doing it at scale i mean i’ve seen you i’ve seen you put in a lot of leg work trying to get up and down the river to do some some sampling and monitoring but the scale of things is real big challenge i think that’s where a lot of that technology and of course super sensing swimsuit that i’m going to develop uh over the coming months right love portrayed yeah well i’m i’m sort of being half serious actually but but uh but you know that but i think that it is a big scale problem so i i think it really needs a real concerted sort of buying by everybody do you do you reckon yeah i think i think there’s like an individual like thing that people can do and then there’s the wider structural problem that needs to be addressed like i think individuals could only operate within the systems that we’re given at the moment from a political and like legislation perspective um and so you know people can do things like apply for bathing water status for their local river to ensure that it actually gets um gets monitored uh it’s only in the last few years that there’s actually been any rivers that have bathing water status uh in the uk um which is the only way that they get kind of yeah officially monitored for harmful pathogens um and kind of get given a way of people understanding how risky it is for them to access the water um and you know obviously people can do citizen science programs and you know be involved in community groups but i think there’s also a wider conversation around the structures and the um the way that rivers are monitored and the type of data that we are acquiring um that i think it just needs to be much more holistic um we just don’t have enough data at the moment we don’t really understand what a healthy river should look like because we’re just not monitoring it enough um and that’s one of the things that uh we’re trying to do at the university of plymouth on the project that i’m working on at the moment is kind of develop a more holistic kind of model for uh a catch a framework for monitoring catchments basically that’s including data from lots of different sources uh including system science data you know local knowledge people who’ve lived in on that river their whole lives they know just as well as anyone when something’s off um you know diverse stakeholders um and different technology types as well i think is really important um yeah it’s quite difficult to kind of innovate new technologies at the same time as standardizing them and i think that that’s what’s often held us back in terms of technology development um in rivers and water quality specifically is that you know all of the frameworks that we use to monitor water quality is so standardized and they’ve been the way that they’ve been for so many years um and that’s just all we know um more accessible isn’t it so we’ve got like some of the things that you’re interested in you know who knows maybe you’ll be able to buy uh off amazon for a tenner or 20 quid or something like that we got i know there’s a guy in the audience who makes sort of um printed uh microscopes so you can you know look at those little um microbes and that kind of stuff so and then of course you’ve got access potentially to that big data cloud with your mobile phone and all that kind of stuff well yeah i mean we’re we’re partnering with like we got partnering with google to to access their kind of data lake and their tools to allow us to both innovate and scale these monitoring solutions these holistic monitoring solution bringing in the data science bringing in these other partners to create something that is sorry we didn’t see him we didn’t see him at all we didn’t see all right stealth jump in the river that’s like me exing one of my lectures but using the first five minutes to be fair to say so to because i agree with sort of we’re stuck in we need to reimagine the systems as well right and then we need innovators and big scale innovators like like google combined with you know people like us and like you to kind of create solutions that are applicable and usable for public as well as for industry as well as this is not like this is not some kind of you’re you’re in that space i think we might be at a time where we’re going for questions if anybody’s still with us thank you it’s been really fascinating and well done ladies girls um i went round wessix i went on the tour for wessex water today and asked some difficult questions i’m an ex-screen counselor so you know i had a reason for going and i was involved with conum as well yeah hi there so um i’d uh they didn’t they didn’t know what i was talking about um i really believe that this is about politics we have people really care about their rivers they love the swimming you know you’re a wonderful example of what’s going on but it’s about politics and i’m an ex local politician and i really think you need to contact everybody and you’ve got to keep doing it and that goes for everybody in this room contact your counselors contact your mp we have a bill going through at the moment which is going to change planning and is not good for the environment so you’ve got a job to do everybody don’t hold back [Applause] any yeah uh do i point them out do i uh we’ll go center we’ll go center i’ll try and to that lady there um our rivers alive is that the river alive is the river alive thank you if the river why had a legal status like we as citizens do or as corporations indeed enjoy would it be polluted by in the way that it shamefully is now by poultry the the the the chicken farms on the banks of that river do you think it’s just a question i don’t really know the ins and outs like legally of what legal personhood for rivers entails um i think um meg in the audience might be a really good person to sort through about that um over here she’s our river bride mrs avon um and meg works quite actively on that kind of stuff i think the one thing i’ll say with regards to the y is that there is actually a legal case ongoing with the y at the moment um which is being taken forward by lee day um who i was actually with yesterday and um yeah they’re essentially like representing the um constituents of the y in taking avara foods and welsh water is now a new defendant that’s been added to court for i think a public nuisance um essentially for the pollution from the chicken farms so yeah but um whether how different that would be rivers we do as people with it ever contemplated yeah it’s a good point i think that’s a good i i think that’s a good point i think there would certainly be more uh cause for legal challenge if that was the case i mean the thing that i find a bit disappointing about those kind of instances is they are entirely solvable there is nothing unsolvable uh about that about the the y situation and the great thing about rivers you know is is if we give them a bit of a space they will uh resurge they will uh you know they will quite not quite i’m not quite there to say that we can restore them but they will thrive if we allow them to um but the thing about you know managing waste from poultry and farms it’s all entirely solvable now you know it’s not it’s not a this is not a a you know a sort of a magic trick uh that needs to be performed uh so i guess that boils down to uh i mean i’m just thinking out loud that boils down to investment in infrastructure it boils down to good strong legislation boils down to consumers maybe you know do we want to do we want you know do we want to be producing chickens like that and then there’s a whole thing about uh the democracy of food because actually you know if you’re charging £15 for a chicken or 20 pounds for a chicken um does that mean that some people can’t buy chicken so i think these are really complicated spaces but the find yeah but you’re quite right madam the thing i find frustrating about that it is you know i i could see that being solved very very quickly if there was sufficient will and investment there’s also account there’s no one really accountable for the destruction of our rivers right and if you have legal rights you have the right to flow freely you have the right to be full of life you have the right like there are there are actual stipulated rights for rivers in like new zealand for example and in canada right and if you are you know harming like if you like we have with people if you if you kind of i don’t know what to how you’d say it but if you kind of harm the legal rights of the river you are accountable for that and so that changes how we perceive it and i think instead of just asking people to love your river it’s like it actually has life it has rights it has legal rights if you do something to harm those rights you will be held accountable i mean interesting oh sorry go on no i was just going to say i think it’s just to go on that like i think it’s really interesting how we’re all talking very emotionally about our rivers here but actually there’s an economic argument which is probably a bigger driver sometimes to change like we’re all here saying we want our rivers to be good like yes but also if we’re working on a framework where there are like legal ramifications and economic ramifications for polluting our waterways that can often be a bigger steer towards driving change because quite frankly if we’re up against massive corporations who are profit driven have got shareholders with different um ideologies perhaps than what some of us in the room would like them to have then sometimes it needs to be where you’re going to get heavily fined and that might be the driver instead for them changing practices to something that we’re more interested in naturebased solutions and restoring rivers one of the things we we’re doing just to kind of add to that is that we’re we’re now trying to well looking at how we put the river on our board because that to me is a very easy natural way to give that river a voice at a seat at a table and a voice and so that we have to listen to that voice in any decision that we make in and for and around nature and that’s something that all corporations actually can do you know to how would that voice be uh articulated so for us it’s a combination of organizations and people who will be coming together for that voice faith of nature does it a bit differently but nobody this is to me is such an obvious thing to put that voice and that seat front and center so that our decisions are shaped by that to a certain degree yes uh can’t quite see yes so i’ll come to you hi obvious question what do politicians and stakeholders drink do they have some special thing that the rest of us don’t know about good good question yeah well do you want us to answer it uh good point uh what what would they drink they drank the kool-aid a long time ago yeah i mean i’m a big fan of i’m a big fan of tap water i think there’s lots of myths i’ve done a lot of work on tap water it’s pretty good stuff uh and it saves saves on plastic bottles it i mean there’s just lots to like about good tap water um so i hope hopefully they should be drinking tap water uh i think i think yeah and i’ll swing back around i think i was gonna point to this oh okay oh no pressure no pressure we’ll we’ll be hanging around yeah i was going to ask you all because i’m a bit confused really because um i thought the environment agency was supposed to protect our rivers um that is obviously not the case but can you explain the role of the environment agency and whether you you interact with them uh who’s going who’s going who’s going to tackle that who’s going to tackle that hang on that’s a classic bristol rugby pass there yeah should we just keep we i don’t i don’t necessarily work with them on a regular basis we we have been involved with them over time you’re right i mean they are they are the the regulatory body um and they are to their job is to enforce those those regulations i mean i think what i must say is i’ve noticed um well it’s not noticed it’s happened there has been historically definitely a holing out of staff on the ground so i think you know if we’re going to expect these bodies to enforce we have to give them the tools to enforce and i would say that i think uh you know back in the day when it was a national rivers authority i think there was a big flow a big excitement uh decades passed cuts were made and a lot of those cuts were people on the ground i mean it’s a it’s a it’s a lot of effort you know without technology per se but going around taking samples monitoring is a lot of effort and i think it’s an impos it’s an impossible job to do effectively is what i would say um yeah and i guess they operate within the boundaries of they just enforce the legislation that exists basically so you know the shortfalls of the legislation uh not necessarily the environment agency’s shortcomings but yeah and also like darren said they are kind of hollowed out so um they have an obligation to do a certain amount of monitoring yeah they have to do as much monitoring as they’re required to do as the legislation i think the problem is the lack of requirement to do it like yeah we’re only required to test or do like the health check on our rivers once basically every five years it’s like the equivalent of us being able to go to the doctor once every five years um the environment agency do the monitoring um but the legislation says you know you only need to do it this often um unless it’s a bathing water in which case it’s more frequent but there are barely any bathing water rivers in the grand scheme of things um and you know even then it’s only in the summer months so collaborate yeah yeah we’re a partner in work we do a little bit uh we don’t they’re not particularly in a position to fund any work uh because they don’t have any money so often we engage with them as stakeholders i would say uh in the main uh but you know if you want if you want less crime right a possible way of doing that is to is to have more pe you know police on the ground you know if you as well as other things it’s not that’s not going to solve it alone and i would say you know i i don’t know i don’t i can’t put it i can’t put the blame on the ea i think i just think they’re like a lot of government departments they just simply don’t have the the person power uh or the capacity to really act in a way that i think the public expects back on that though is that where the politics comes in 100% yeah demanding that that is put right yeah yeah yeah i mean politics at the end of the day you know these decisions we’ve had decisions around the spending review uh you know announced today so governments make big decisions uh and we as citizens you know should uh expect some of our um needs and concerns to be addressed in that but i also think we have a personal responsibility as well uh i i think it’s easy to sort of say this this this one here’s to blame or this one’s here to blame i i think it’s a very you know we’re all in con we’re all complicit and we’re all part of the solution at the same time and we can add weightings to it i think yeah but i’m thinking how at the end of the day useful is that we just need to really work in a different way that achieves outcomes that’s what i’m interested in and that to me is is healthier rivers and how we do that unless i don’t know not i don’t it’s not i don’t care about it but i just think that’s what i really want to get on and do before you know i can’t do it anymore i’m still confused whether it’s us helping them to do their job or them helping us to help them do their job i still don’t get where they fit in a lot of the gaps are plugged by people like us and community groups and things like that essentially perception isn’t it because i my perception was that the environment agency was there to protect rivers and obviously yeah well they are but it’s whether or not they’re able to do that with the current resources they have perception if you think everything’s yeah the good thing is you’re going to have a chance to mingle with this wonderful panel alongside a glass of wine or a soft drink very shortly so we can take the discussion there thank you everyone thank you to our wonderful panel for tonight and for a very interesting discussion so yes through to wateride 3 at the very end of the watershed we’ve got some fabulous offerings we’ve got uh a bookstore from the ind independent book seller bookhouse who’ve gathered riverthemed texts for you to enjoy at home we’ve got bristol based poetry and performer megan trump megan give us a wave um who will be representing raven for the avon to answer all of your burning questions about the documentary film and her life as a river bride uh we’ve got professor simon jackson and alistister white from melendech who are going to um who work with um eva and who will be sharing their latest rapid water quality analysis device with anyone who’d like to see a demo and learn more we’ve also got a very thoughtprovoking exhibition from devonbased photographer and artist william joshua templeton whose work investigates connection the environment and our place within it so lots more to look forward to while we offer these events for free we would be really grateful in turn that you fill out one of our feedback forms that you’ll get at the end of the week so that we know what we can change for the better for the future and what you enjoyed thank you so much to our live stream audience for joining us this evening a huge thank you to the watershed and its staff for helping us put on another event so seamlessly mhm buba hedvig emma eva and darren thank you so much for helping us to appreciate rivers through fresh eyes and to the festival of nature for collaborating us with us once again this year and a final personal thanks from me as this is my last vas before i pass the baton on i’ve really enjoyed bringing these events to you and i look forward to attending them as an audience member in the future so thank you everyone for your support and your engagement and we’ll see you for a glass of something lovely in wateride 3 thank you [Applause]