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Sandra Postel has worked for many years on the conservation of the environment with a focus on water, primarily as the founding director of the Global Water Policy Project. Nature Water talked to her about her vision of a holistic approach to meeting challenges related to the preservation of life in our natural environment, with water at its heart.
Pioneering empirical assessment shows decreases in aquifer thickness diminish the capacity of groundwater supplies to buffer agricultural production from drought.
Correlation between total suspended solids and plastic nanoparticles suggests a simple approach to measure the amount of nanoplastic in wastewater effluents.
The combination of advancements in evapotranspiration theory, eddy covariance flux measurements of water vapour and satellite remote sensing are putting technology on the verge of producing information on evapotranspiration with unprecedented coverage and resolution. The OpenET project provides this information to farmers and land and water managers for better water practice.
Production losses due to drought escalate progressively with the depletion of aquifers, underscoring the need for proactive measures in aquifer conservation.
Assessing the accuracy of evapotranspiration (ET) data is crucial for managing the water used by crops and natural vegetation. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of the accuracy of a remotely sensed ET model ensemble from the OpenET system using in situ ET measurements collected across the contiguous United States.
Although it is widely acknowledged that nanoplastic and microplastic contaminants are omnipresent in the environment, the role of water treatment plants in the fate of these contaminants is unclear. Correlating nanoplastic removal with total suspended solids removal in water is shown to be a reliable method for predicting how much nanoplastic can be removed by wastewater treatment plants.
Australia will not achieve SDG 6.1 (water for all) without improving drinking water quality in small, rural and remote communities. Australians are willing to pay AU$1.2–4.7 billion yr−1 to ensure good-quality drinking water, and the cost would be AU$0.2–1.3 billion.
Harnessing solar energy to generate electricity and provide water is recognized as a sustainable pathway to addressing water scarcity and electricity shortage. The integration of passive interfacial cooling in a hybrid system boosts the utilization of waste heat and latent heat from the hybrid modules and minimizes the energy loss to air.
Fe0-enabled nanotechnologies for the reduction of refractory organic contaminants have the limitations of poor selectivity and low stability during water treatment. A lattice doping technique based on Lewis acid–base chemistry to incorporate lattice Ni and S into crystalline Fe0 can achieve rapid and highly selective chemical reductions.
It is difficult to remove micropollutants in water due to their chemical diversity, low concentrations and slow uptake by industrial adsorbents. Here, a tailorable zwitterionic hydrogel is shown to rapidly and simultaneously absorb organic and inorganic micropollutants from water.
With rapidly increasing urbanization, a substantial portion of global freshwater is used for the manufacture of construction materials, such as steel and cement. This threatens to intensify competition over the allocation of blue water (from lakes, rivers and aquifers). However, much less attention has been paid to the virtual water content of materials, and the water–materials nexus.
Fabric distillation is proposed as a thermal desalination technique that employs hydrophilic fabrics to separate the vapour water from the feed water through capillary and Coandă effects.
