Dr. Deirdre Lynn:

We submitted a report under the habitats directive in 2019. The biggest pressure on biodiversity related to pollution arising from agricultural practices. We also see this in EPA reports on water quality. Hopefully, the next round of river basin management planning will address many of these issues and will be able to scale up its programme of measures for our fresh waters. In the context of biodiversity in some areas, we need even higher water quality than is required by the broader framework directive. In some areas we will need to focus our efforts to ensure that we retain some of our really precious habitats, particularly some of our marl lakes and also some of our species that require very clean water, especially freshwater pearl mussel. We certainly have considerable work ahead of us to ensure we continue to improve the condition of our freshwater systems.