Safe2Swim

Challenge

With the recent rise in recreational water use, from paddleboarding and kite surfing to wild swimming, the quality of the water across the 157 designated bathing waters in the South West has never been more important.

Bathing water quality alerts are critical for protecting public health. However, existing approaches are typically based on bacterial indicator organisms, simplified assumptions about pollutant transport and fixed advisory periods following sewage discharge events. While these methods have supported regulatory compliance and operational practice for many years, they offer only a partial representation of real-world risk. They are not designed to fully capture site-specific conditions, wider hazards such as viruses, or the way pollution disperses and dissipates over time.

Research

Safe2Swim will address the challenge by combining advances in environmental science, next-generation hydrodynamic modelling, quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA), data integration and predictive analytics to develop a new approach to bathing water risk forecasting.

Next-generation hydrodynamic and water-quality models will be used to predict how pollution from discharge events moves, disperses and decays within coastal environments, accounting for factors such as tides, currents, rainfall, river flows, weather and site-specific conditions. These predictions will be combined with pathogen data and QMRA to estimate the potential health risks to recreational water users, with a particular focus on key pathogens such as norovirus, which may present a significant health risk but are not captured by conventional bacterial indicator approaches. Combining hydrodynamic predictions with QMRA provides a way of translating environmental pollution events into quantitative estimates of human health risk, rather than relying solely on fixed post-discharge advisory periods.

By bringing these different sources of evidence together, Safe2Swim will develop an integrated forecasting framework capable of predicting where, when and for how long bathing water may present an elevated health risk following pollution events. The ultimate goal is to translate these predictions into a practical forecasting and decision-support tool that can inform bathing water alerts and provide more targeted, timely and evidence-based advice to recreational water users.

Research

Impact

The project will provide a stronger scientific evidence base for bathing water alert decisions, helping teams respond more consistently and proportionately to discharge events, changing weather conditions and site-specific risks across the South West.

Ultimately, Safe2Swim will move bathing water management from fixed, indicator-based advisory periods towards dynamic, risk-based forecasting, providing a clearer picture of actual health risk at individual bathing waters. The resulting forecasting tool will support decision-makers in determining when warnings are needed, where they should apply and when they can safely be lifted, helping to protect public health while avoiding unnecessary restrictions on recreational water use.