Volume 1 Issue 10, October 2023

The concept that planting trees will help mitigate climate change by storing CO₂ is too simplistic, ignoring the large effect that plants have on the water cycle. Careful restoration of native plant ecosystems can rebalance that cycle, further mitigating climate change while also reducing flood and drought extremes.

To make an impact, scientists should engage with stakeholders and policy-makers to understand the needs and constraints of decision-making. Working at the intersection of science and policy, where knowledge and action converge, paves the way for a sustainable and thriving future.

Recognizing the importance of experiences with water insecurity in the context of food and nutrition is a powerful way to act on the Food and Agriculture Organization’s call to “take water action for food and be the change” on World Food Day.

Monitoring wastewater on a large scale in Australia confirms the increasing health concerns related to performance-enhancing drugs.

Paying private landowners to increase infiltration on their land is a cost-effective strategy to offset groundwater depletion.

Crop switching optimization within the context of the Indo-Gangetic Plain provides compelling evidence that this approach yields significant benefits in terms of increasing calorie production and profits for farmers whilst minimizing water and energy use.

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.

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.

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.

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.