Our policy is to manage estuarine and coastal waters so that water quality achieves a standard of 'good' under the Northern Ireland Estuarine and Coastal Waters classification schemes. We also aim to ensure that there is no disimprovement in the quality of water in these areas for any reason.
All surface waters are managed to ensure they meet the standards outlined under EU and international agreements.
We maintain an extensive network of estuarine and coastal water monitoring points around Northern Ireland.
There are over 40 stations, seven of which are part of the UK National Marine Monitoring Programme(.PDF 772Kb)
that sets the protocols for best practice in marine monitoring. These protocols are applied at all sampling sites.