This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

It’s not all about the dirty spills. What is released out from our sewage system into our rivers, lochs and oceans has long bothered me as a wild swimmer – but the more I have looked into it, the more my concern has become less about human excrement than the the other things that end up there .

It has focussed more on other pollutants that affect the ecological health of Scotland’s waterways and bodies, and the many ways we impact on the life of those waters.

The question of how we protect our waters reaches far beyond how many combined sewage overflows are monitored. That's why it’s so good to see a fully-connected and holistic view on protecting Scotland’s waters in Scottish Environment LINK's Restoring Scotland's Waters report.

If we want to look at where things are going wrong, and what we need to do to get it right, this is a thorough examination. At the heart of this collection of recommendations for the next River Basin Management Plan is the idea that Scotland adopt a “source to sea” approach, creating “catchment-based management frameworks, that manage water from source to sea as complete systems rather than isolated segments”.

Our waters are connected, conduits for what we put in them. “Pollutants originating in freshwaters," the report observes, "transform and compound as they travel downstream, ultimately flowing into coastal waters where they impact marine ecosystems."

The Scottish Environment LINK report advises that metrics are developed “that measure ecological connectivity between freshwater, transitional, and marine environments” and that we “use flagship species like wild Atlantic........

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