THE WATERSHED POLLUTION MAP

Wondering what’s in your water? Now you can find out with Watershed’s new, first-of-its-kind Pollution Map.

As part of our investigations, we collect a lot of data from field research, from FOI/EIRs and from available official sources. We wanted to collate it, sort it and make it easily accessible so that as many people as possible can see the wide range of pollution and other environmental pressures taking place in their backyards, so they can better understand the challenges and perhaps even take steps to help improve it.

It contains more than 120 datasets, ranging from river health, bathing water health, to historic landfill sites, sewage dumping, intensive farming, heavy industry and a lot more. While it’s not going to show you any direct causation between a potential polluter and failing water body, it’s fascinating to see what our rivers, seas, wildlife and habitats are dealing with and it begs further investigation.

As journalists, the temptation is to hoard information until you’re ready to break a big story but nature in the UK is in crisis so we decided to to arm as many people as possible — other journalists, campaigners, communities, scientists, policymakers, regulators, lawyers and more — with as much open source data as we can.

We’ll keep adding to the map and we’ll update existing datasets once a year, where updates are available. If you have any ideas about datasets we should add, please get in touch and let us know how we can access them.

Watershed gains nothing from releasing this map. Of course it will attract traffic to our website but that is not among our priorities. We remain committed to high quality environmental investigative journalism for existing mainstream media outlets.

If you use data from the map, we would be grateful if you could mention it somewhere in your work, so we can track the impact it is having and know it was worth all the effort, but that of course is not obligatory and the main thing is that it is used and it is helpful.

Knowledge is power but shared knowledge is more powerful. Please share the map far and wide.

CLICK HERE TO LAUNCH THE WATERSHED POLLUTION MAP!

Here’s a short video showing you how to use it:

CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO LAUNCH THE POLLUTION MAP

(Best viewed on a large screen.)