Thames River Watch: celebrating collaborative efforts to protect our rivers

Published

4,000! That’s the round-up figure of the number of volunteers that we have engaged in our Thames River Watch programme in recent years. These volunteers form the heart of Thames River Watch, which is a Thames21 citizen science programme focused on the Tidal Thames between Sands End in west London and the Isle of Dogs peninsula in the east of the city. 

Members of the Thames River Watch and volunteers on the foreshore.

Here, we would like to celebrate the achievements of this unique programme and the initiative’s next steps. 

But first, let’s look at the background. 

The programme encourages local communities to enjoy the river, learn more about their blue spaces and protect these spaces over the long term. The community engagement aspect of the programme aims to build strong links with grassroots groups and organisations, fostering collaboration and a connection with nature.  

One of the key engagement points of the past three years has been to address the historical imbalances of representation in our volunteer base. We worked with and boosted representation of underrepresented groups who are often overlooked in the environmental sector.  

By connecting diverse groups of people around a common environmental cause, building knowledge and skills through workshops and training, the project aimed to increase a sense of belonging to their area, support social cohesion, decrease loneliness and isolation, and empower people to take environmental action in their local area. Over the past three years, Thames River Watch co-produced 63 foreshore events including walks, talks, learning workshops and creative sessions; participated in 12 community festivals and led school sessions that engaged 971 pupils. Overall, 3,600 participants got involved in our events! 

One way the project is bringing people closer to their riverside area is by providing opportunities for them to get involved in citizen science to monitor plastic litter along the Thames foreshore. The data collected is fed into the Tidal Thames Live Litter Map, which provides an up-to-date record of litter in the river, and informs and influences decision makers, playing a crucial role in advocating for legislation and behavioural changes.  

We monitored eight key locations along the Thames, chosen to represent a sample of plastic pollution sites within the footprint of the Thames Tideway Tunnel – a new super sewer which will aim to significantly reduce sewage spills into the Thames. The last three years of the programme, from June 2021 to 2024, have been co-funded by Tideway and Thames Water. The data collected increased the understanding about the scale and types of plastic pollution and allowed Thames Water and Tideway to baseline the state of plastic pollution on the foreshore before the tunnel became fully operational this year. We continue to monitor the impact of the new super sewer on sewage-derived litter in the river. 

Mudlarker Nicola White and volunteers on the foreshore during an event organised by Thames River Watch.

In addition to the eight sites mentioned above, Hammersmith Bridge has also been monitored due to the high volume of wet wipes accumulating in this section of the foreshore. Five Big Wet Wipe Counts were held from 2021 to 2024, removing 4,393 wet wipes from the river. This data was instrumental in the success of the campaign to ban plastic in wet wipes, announced by the government in April 2024.  

We carried out 62 surveys along the Thames and organised 202 clean-up sessions from 2021 to 2024. 68 citizen scientists were trained through the Leading Action for Healthy Rivers course, which supports people to create their own River Action Groups and safely run community events in their local rivers. By supporting community-led citizen science on the tidal Thames, we enable communities to become custodians of and advocates for their local river space. 

We are extremely proud of all that the Thames River Watch programme has accomplished in its ten-year history, and especially of the key highlighted achievements of the past three years.  We would like to send a massive thank you to our volunteers, citizen scientists and partners for supporting us in our mission to improve and protect the Tidal Thames. We couldn’t do it without you.  

Read full report here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4fb7a611309942058003f90e3db8fbe2