The impact of  “pervasive” water pollution on human health has long been neglected in research, warned a British scientist who has been awarded the “Nobel prize for the environment”.

Sir Andy Haines, unveiled as the winner of the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement on Wednesday, warned in an interview that recent studies documenting the extent of chemical pollution in rivers across the globe are a “wake up call”.

“Cleaning up rivers has been a bit neglected in environmental health research,” Sir Andy said, backing the Telegraph’s Clean Rivers campaign – which calls for action to stop water companies, industrial agriculture and urban waste from polluting Britain’s beauty spots.

He added that a paper published earlier this month, which found the UK’s rivers are the worst in Europe for chemical pollution caused by prescription drugs, shows how widespread – and in some cases unanticipated – the problem is.

“Pollution by pharmaceuticals in water is pervasive in high income countries and, surprisingly, in low income countries as well,” Sir Andy said. “In some cases, the levels of pharmaceuticals appear to be high enough to actually be affecting ecosystems. And so that’s a worrying trend.

“I think that’s one example of an unanticipated source of pollution in our water supply,” he added.

“But then of course we have others – we have the overloading of freshwater and marine ecosystems with agricultural runoff, for example, fertilisers, causing eutrophication – in other words we get this low oxygen level and collapse in the ecosystem. So river pollution is a really important area and it needs more emphasis.”

‘Potentially catastrophic’ for health

Sir Andy was awarded the Tyler Prize for more than three decades of work exploring the link between a changing climate and health.

Although he started his career as a GP in North London, Sir Andy shifted into research and, in 1991, became one of the first physicians to warn of the “potentially catastrophic” consequences of global warming on humans in a piece in the British Medical Journal.

He later became a professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, and was the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 2001 to 2010.

But Sir Andy told The Telegraph that, although the health ramifications of global warming are better understood today than three decades ago, it is still a “marginalised” topic in climate change conversations, including the Conference of Parties (COP) – that took place in Glasgow last year – and the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“If we look at COP26, for example, the health community was better represented than a previous COPs. But essentially, that was mainly during a lot of side events… so I still think that in relative terms, health was marginalised. It wasn’t really a very key focus of preparations in the run up to COP, nor was it a key focus of the negotiations.”

As a result, he said, policy makers do not have the same “sense of urgency that there should be.”

“It’s not really appreciated by many decision makers that climate change has so many potential impacts on human health – the familiar ones of course, extreme heat and so on, but also many of these less direct pathways. Through infectious diseases, wildfires, the spread of vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria, and then the effects on crop yields.”

More recently Sir Andy’s work has focused on categorising the health benefits of low-carbon policies – including better insulation, a plant-based diet, and reducing reliance on cars – as well as the positive environmental impacts.

“A lightbulb moment for me was realising that it wasn’t sufficient just to say that climate change was going to have very bad effects on human health,” he said.

“So as well as saying climate change is a major threat… [we need to stress] there are big benefits, near term benefits are not just distant benefits, for human health. Because you can’t motivate change destiny just by scaring people, just by saying it’s all too terrible, it’s all catastrophic.”

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