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  • Review Article
  • Published:

Anthropogenic stresses on the world’s big rivers

An Author Correction to this article was published on 08 January 2019

This article has been updated

Abstract

The world’s big rivers and their floodplains were central to development of civilization and are now home to c. 2.7 billion people. They are economically vital whilst also constituting some of the most diverse habitats on Earth. However, a number of anthropogenic stressors, including large-scale damming, hydrological change, pollution, introduction of non-native species and sediment mining, challenge their integrity and future, as never before. The rapidity and extent of such change is so great that large-scale, and potentially irreparable, transformations may ensue in periods of years to decades, with ecosystem collapse being possible in some big rivers. Prioritizing the fate of the world’s great river corridors on an international political stage is imperative. Future sustainable management, and establishment of environmental flow requirements for the world’s big rivers, must be supported through co-ordinated international funding, and trans-continental political agreement to monitor these rivers, finance their continual upkeep and help ameliorate increasing anthropogenic pressures. To have any effect, all of these must be set within an inclusive governance framework across scales, organizations and local populace.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2: Sediment yield from the Huang He (Yellow) River.
Fig. 3: Consistency (percentage of all models) in the magnitude of estimated 100-year recurrence interval floods in 2050 from 21 climate models75, showing regions of increased (blue) and decreased (red) flow.
Fig. 4: The spread of non-native species within the River Rhine and other rivers in Europe155.

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Data availability

Data and data sources for some of the data discussed in this paper are given in Supplementary Table 1.

Change history

  • 08 January 2019

    In the version of this Review originally published, the author name ‘Arthington’ was misspelt in refs 216 and 218. Further, in the sentence that starts “Global warming has also been linked to potentially significant increases in the flow of Russia’s three great Artic rivers...”, ‘Artic’ should have been ‘Arctic’. These errors have now been corrected.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to C. Simpson for his exceptional graphical and database skills that were essential in preparing the figures, and I am very grateful for the provision of papers, figures and data from their own research by N. Arnell, P. Glennie, Y. Hirabayashi, D. Hoeinghaus, E. Latrubesse, H. Paltan and C. Zarfl.

I am also truly indebted to my colleagues who I have been incredibly fortunate to work with over many years, and who have provided considerable insights into, and opportunities to study, some of the world’s largest rivers. Writing of this paper was aided by a Diamond Jubilee International Visiting Fellowship at the University of Southampton, UK, and its publication has been supported by the Jack and Richard Threet Chair in Sedimentary Geology at the University of Illinois, USA.

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Data summary for world’s biggest rivers.

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Best, J. Anthropogenic stresses on the world’s big rivers. Nature Geosci 12, 7–21 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0262-x

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