00:00Many rivers in the UK are struggling with with their health. What's got us to that point?
00:09I think not understanding the value of rivers and how we need a lot of the things that a healthy
00:16river and healthy floodplain delivers. Rivers and floodplains and wetlands provide our carbon
00:21sequestration and our flood relief and our drought relief and a home for a lot of our nature. So
00:27they're really important. For hundreds of years we've been chipping away at that to allow us to
00:32farm well and in some cases quite successfully. But that's just built up and built up and built
00:37up over literally centuries and we've got to the point where our rivers are squeezed and
00:42canalised and drained, broken up by weirs and sluices and mills and now more recently pollution
00:49from sewage in particular and agriculture. They're in a pretty bad state but it's all stuff that we
00:54can address and we can make them healthy again.
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