Urgent and targeted action is required to reduce nitrogen emissions from agriculture in parts of the country, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report has said.

The Water Quality in Ireland Report 2016-2021 has found that the deterioration in estuaries and coastal waters is “mostly along the southeast and southern seaboards and is due to agricultural run-off”.

The EPA is calling for urgent and targeted action to protect and restore water quality in the next River Basin Management Plan (2022-2027) and full implementation of and compliance with the Good Agricultural Practice Regulations.

It said that water quality in Ireland has further declined and while improvements are being made in some areas, these are being offset by declines in water quality elsewhere.

“At the current level of progress, Ireland will fail to meet the EU and national goal of restoring all waters to good or better status by 2027,” it warned.

Only just over half of surface waters (rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters) are in satisfactory condition, that is they are achieving good or high ecological status and are able to sustain healthy ecosystems for fish, insects and plants.

Main pressures

The EPA report found that that main pressures on water quality are agriculture, physical changes such as land drainage and dredging, forestry activities and discharges from urban wastewater. These activities can lead to run-off of nutrients, sediment and pesticides and damage to the physical habitat of waterbodies, it said.

“The number of waterbodies impacted by urban wastewater remains high, but it is reducing, and the trend is going in the right direction. The number of waterbodies impacted by agriculture has, however, increased in recent years,” it found.

Ecological health

“The overall ecological health of these surface waters has declined across all water body types since the last assessment (2013-2018).

“While the decline in water quality of our rivers and lakes is relatively small (1% and 3% of waterbodies respectively), the number of estuaries and coastal water bodies in satisfactory condition has decreased by almost 16% and 10% respectively.

“These declines are mostly along the southeast and southern coasts, where nitrogen emissions from agricultural activities are having a significant negative impact on water quality. Excess nitrogen causes algal blooms in our estuaries, which can damage the ecosystem, and excess nitrogen in drinking water can pose a risk to human health,” it said.

Scale of decline

Eimear Cotter, director of the EPA’s office of evidence and assessment, said that the scale of the declines in estuaries and coastal waters is alarming.

“In recent years, the EPA highlighted that nutrient levels in our rivers and groundwaters are too high and that trends were going in the wrong direction. We are now seeing the impact of these emissions on our estuaries and coastal waters."