01 Feb 2022

Bathing water classifications for 2021 show that 99% of bathing waters in England have passed water quality standards following testing by the Environment Agency at over 400 designated sites. Of these, 94.7% of beaches and inland waters gained an ‘Excellent’ or ‘Good’ rating while 4.3% achieved the minimum ‘Sufficient’ rating. This compares with 98.3% passing […]

01 Feb 2022

Lord Goldsmith announces UK will support the creation of the world’s biggest transboundary marine protected area. The UK will help to protect some of the world’s most important and biodiverse marine environments in the Eastern Pacific, including key migratory routes for sea turtles, whales, sharks, and rays. At COP26 in Glasgow, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, […]

01 Feb 2022

The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) is launching a new challenge in collaboration with Geovation – a start-up accelerator programme and initiative of Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency for Great Britain – to find a sustainable solution to diffuse coastal pollution. ‘Diffuse’ pollution is pollution from multiple and often unidentified sources which causes significant […]

01 Feb 2022

Bluefin tuna have been tagged with state-of-the-art acoustic tracking tags for the first time in UK waters. The huge fish, which in UK waters can be up to 2.5 m long, are commercially valuable and biologically fascinating. The 7cm long tags send individually coded sound (acoustic) messages to listening stations moored on the seabed, allowing […]

01 Feb 2022

Underwater videos could help explain why thousands of starfish are stranded on Welsh beaches   Storms this winter have left thousands of starfish lying stranded along the Welsh coast. Many starfish are still alive when they get washed ashore but many will die as they cannot survive being exposed in the air for too long. A recent discovery […]

25 Jan 2022

Defra  ‘On 18 January, Defra’s Environment Minister Rebecca Pow MP gave the keynote speech to the Coastal Futures 2022 conference. This series of conferences on coastal and marine environment issues has been running since 1994. In her speech Minister Pow gave an outline of the various pieces of work which Defra Group is delivering to […]

25 Jan 2022

2022: The Year of Climate Adaptation Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency speech to the Coastal Futures conference “Thank you for inviting me to speak at this year’s Coastal Futures conference. In 1953, 307 lives were lost on land and more than 177 people were lost at sea in the east coast surge. […]