Research articles

The rapid urbanization in China calls for an expansion of urban wastewater treatment systems, which in turn may exacerbate climate impacts. With an extensive and integrated application of existing low-carbon technologies for wastewater treatment, sludge disposal and water reuse, it is possible to substantially decouple urban water stress mitigation from greenhouse gas emissions.

This study reveals trade-offs in freshwater savings, cost and capacity shortfalls from deploying treated brackish water for wet thermoelectric cooling, as well as its cost-effectiveness, relative to dry cooling retrofit, in saving freshwater.

Heterogeneous water disinfection is a promising way to avoid secondary pollution, but it is not very efficient. The development of nanoflakes shows that a much higher efficiency than previously achieved can be achieved through solar-driven heterogeneous disinfection.

Physicochemical defluorination is arguably the best pathway to degrade polyfluoroalkyl substances. In the case of chlorinated polyfluorocarboxylic acids, it is shown that substantial defluorination can be achieved by an anaerobic microbial community via novel pathways triggered by anaerobic hydrolytic dechlorination.

It is challenging to treat emerging organic contaminants such as pharmaceutical compounds. Using the proposed plant-based zirconium–ellagate framework, this study demonstrates high removal efficiencies of emerging organic contaminants from real untampered municipal wastewater treatment plant effluent.

The exposure to both air pollution and cigarette smoke can trigger asthma. Wastewater surveillance was used to demonstrate the possibility of distinguishing between these two factors.

A national classification system of wetland hydrologic connectivity to streams, which could be applied globally, demonstrates and advances current understanding of how wetland connectivity affects surface water quality.

The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi has made recent news as a major environmental catastrophe. In this paper, the authors assess how boil water alerts disrupt student learning. They show that, each time a boil water alert is issued, unexcused absence rates increase by up to 10%.

Droughts pose a threat to water availability for food production, enhancing urban conflicts. This study explores the drought–conflict nexus by accounting for the effects of droughts on the food-security pillars of availability, economic access and stability.

Reverse osmosis of seawater is a popular though energy demanding process to produce freshwater. Interfacing reverse osmosis membranes with solar steam generation shows potential for a more efficient desalination process.

The achievement of almost complete defluorination of chlorinated polyfluoroalkyl substances reveals insight into the degradation pathways of these persistent contaminants.

How will climate change affect wet and dry extreme events around the world? On the basis of terrestrial water storage observations and a novel clustering algorithm, this study shows that the intensity of such events has been increasing with global warming.

Concentrations of dissolved oxygen are considered as comparably driven by light, temperature and flow regimes in individual rivers, although their continental-scale drivers remain elusive due to data scarcity. Results from data and a long short-term memory deep learning model suggests that temperature is the most predominant driver of daily DO in US rivers.

Membranes can be used not only for water filtration but also for solute–solute separation. Using the separation between lithium and magnesium, this analysis provides a platform for evaluating the performance of nanofiltration-based selective solute separation.

The development of advanced nanofiltration membranes should be compatible with existing manufacturing process to be practically useful. A process based on nanoemulsion-regulated interfacial polymerization allows the fabrication of low-cost and high-performance membranes.

One of the problems of water-treatment membranes based on two-dimensional materials is that they tend to swell once in operation in water. A new strategy is presented for the preparation of non-swelling, covalently functionalized molybdenum disulfide membranes with tunable interlayer space and cohesion energy of the laminates.

Low-arsenic aquifers are considered safeguarded against contamination as long as iron reduction does not occur. Combining field experiments in Bangladesh with reactive transport modelling, this study reveals that limited sulfate reduction instead can accelerate groundwater arsenic contamination.

Shanghai is a city facing the challenge for flood defence under climate change. This study proposes engineering solutions for mitigation flood risks in Shanghai by incorporating regret theory and decision science into the dynamic-adaptation-pathways framework.

Understanding the fate of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA in sewage is essential to develop reliable wastewater surveillance. Research employing a sewer reactor shows that biofilms affect the RNA stability and can act as reservoirs for accumulating, retaining and distributing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA under hydraulic changes.

Earth System Models are widely used for projecting future streamflow. The authors show that the models underestimate declines in global streamflow with climate change, indicating that a future water crisis could be more severe than previously estimated.