Water

Water is an essential resource, but it can also cause conflict, expose people to pollution and put communities at risk in the form of flooding.

The world faces a series of deep and worsening crises that demand radical changes in how we understand, manage and use fresh water.

Strategies for collecting water from the atmosphere using minimal energy could fill a crucial gap in sustaining communities that have limited access to water.

Stubborn compounds called PFAS in drinking water put health at risk. Technologies based on plasmas, pressure, sound or fungus could finally degrade these chemicals.

Decisions about land use and infrastructure have left little space for water, amplifying the effects of natural disasters and climate change.

The use of hydrogen as an energy carrier is essential to decarbonizing economies. Industrial policies and technology developments could trim the water consumption involved in producing the gas, minimizing its cost and environmental impact.

Climate change could intensify the role of this vital and strategic asset in armed conflict.

A panel of specialists discuss the latest insights on protecting people, habitats and infrastructure from the risks of flooding.

Safe water and sanitation are among the UN’s sustainable development goals. Such fundamental needs require creative solutions across all levels of society. Three organizations in the global south are doing their bit to improve provision of clean water, from rural villages to cities.

The military actions in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia have far-reaching environmental consequences, especially with regard to water management. A study presents data showing the severe impacts on water resources, sanitation and infrastructure during the first three months of the war.

Sorbent-assisted atmospheric water harvesting is one of the technologies currently explored to produce clean water especially in dry land locations. A metal–organic framework harvester has been shown to harvest water effectively in the Death Valley.

Groundwater overdraft can lead to land subsidence and groundwater storage loss. Here, the authors develop a machine learning-based method to map subsidence globally, explore subsidence drivers, and identify regions under high groundwater stress.

While minimal in most host countries, the water needed to produce the food consumed by refugees can have a large effect on water stress in vulnerable countries. Small changes to food trade and refugee resettlement policies can alleviate this unequal burden.

Analysis of high-resolution annual data shows that global human settlements have expanded continuously and rapidly into flood zones, with those in the most hazardous zones increasing by 122% from 1985 to 2015.

Effective flood response management relies on rapid high-resolution and high-accuracy flood inundation predictions. This study develops a low-fidelity model and upskills its predictions, greatly reducing the computational time while maintaining a high resolution and accuracy comparable with a high-fidelity model.