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Farmer livelihoods and food production are impacted by water shortages in many regions globally. These shortages can be mitigated by changing the mix of crops produced in water-scarce regions, potentially resulting in reduced irrigation needs of 28–57%.
Solar-powered interfacial system has emerged as a sustainable, efficient and CO2-neutral strategy to produce clean water. The solar-powered graphene/alginate hydrogel-based clean water extractor shows super resistance to the transport of complex contaminants and has an ultra-antifouling capacity.
Sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting has the capability of capturing water from air anytime and anywhere. A facile strategy to synthesize bidirectionally aligned and hierarchically structured nanocomposite could realize scalable and efficient sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting.
Drinking water distribution systems are commonly being used to deliver new-quality water after decades of service, and monitoring the occurrence of transition effects is critical for both water utilities and customers. This 2 year longitudinal study offers an exceptional opportunity to explore transition effects when a distribution system receives new-quality water.
Increases in lake surface water temperature could threaten lacustrine ecosystems. This study explores the widespread temperature increases in 92,245 lakes across the globe, showing that less than half of the lake warming is due to surface air temperature change and that accelerated evaporation causes slower lake warming compared with surface air temperature.
Recharge net metering is an adaptable, performance-based incentive for groundwater recharge. It costs less than most methods, supports distributed recharge and imparts substantial benefits to both groundwater basins and programme participants.
Surface conductance variations in non-vegetated salt flats are similar to those in vegetated ecosystems and in an idealized boundary layer model. This suggests that soil moisture, and not vapour pressure deficit, controls surface conductance variations.
Harmful algal blooms threaten water resources across the globe. This study quantifies how temperature affects the occurrence and concentration of microcystin in lakes across the United States and finds that regions with temperatures that promote high microcystin concentrations will shift to higher latitudes in the coming decades.
Widespread switching of cereal crops in the Indo-Gangetic Plain from paddy/wheat to millet/sorghum will result in water savings with the co-benefits of improved nutrition, calorie production and increased farmers’ profits.
Wastewater-based epidemiology can be used to monitor viruses and chemical spread across diverse populations. Analysis of wastewater collected over 13 years from one treatment plant and from 51 wastewater treatment plants in 2021 shows the efficacy of the technique for studying the use of performance-enhancing substances.
Finding an efficient way to extract uranium from uranium mine wastewater is an essential environmental requirement. A spontaneous electrochemical method is now shown to enable stable and efficient uranium extraction with net electrical energy output.
This study showcases that balancing-oriented hydropower operation supporting variable renewable energy integration provides a more affordable and water-saving clean energy transition than the conventional peak-shaving-oriented operation.
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.
Lithium mining is both energy and land intensive. The use of a 3D porous natural cellulose fibre structure enables an interfacial crystallization method for the selective extraction of lithium from both brine and seawater that can be a significant alternative to mining.
Membrane desalination is a promising technology for producing freshwater from saline waters. Submicrometre-thick and nanopore-structured graphdiyne membranes on porous Cu hollow fibres accomplish nearly perfect NaCl rejections and ultrahigh water permeabilities.
Open-source sensors are becoming increasingly popular and accurate for river science, but widespread adoption is limited by the knowledge required to use them. This study presents an open-source optical backscatter sensor and water pressure sensor that can be ordered almost fully assembled, requires no coding to deploy and costs approximately 50 USD.
It is critical to understand different drivers of regional hydroclimate change and to reduce uncertainty in future projections. This study disentangles the effects of CO2 physiology and deforestation on projected precipitation, surface relative humidity and air temperature in Amazonia using multiple Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 experiments.
Solar-driven reverse distillation integrated with thermal localization has shown attractive solar-to-water conversion efficiency. Solar distillation devices based on reverse-evaporating water layers of millimetre-scale thickness successfully realize simultaneous high efficiency and salt rejection during solar desalination processes.
This article tells the story of the earliest ceramic drainage system unearthed at the Pingliangtai site on the Central Plains of China, which represents an unprecedented social and environmental manipulation as societies faced surging environmental crises in the Late Holocene East Asian Monsoon region.
China’s history of large-scale water, sanitation and clean energy investments offers promising insights into the development of new interventions to reduce linear growth faltering among children and adolescents.