Quality of Northern Ireland's Water Environment

New monitoring programmes and classification systems have been developed and applied for the first time to assess the impacts on the whole water environment, including rivers, lakes, transitional and coastal waters, and groundwaters.

We followed the UK Technical Advisory Group guidance to ensure Northern Ireland’s classification schemes are comparable with those of Europe. We have used different classification schemes for:

• Rivers in Northern Ireland
• Lakes across the region
• Coastal and Transitional Waters on Northern Ireland's coasts
• Groundwater
• Heavily Modified Water Bodies across the region