Volume 2 Issue 1, January 2024

Transformation narratives in water and sanitation emphasize public health and gender equality, yet miss a critical foundational perspective: planetary sustainability.

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.

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.

Using three prototypical scenarios of water contamination from legacy pollutants at contaminated sites, agricultural use of pesticides and abatement of pharmaceuticals and disinfection by-products in water treatment systems, this Review illustrates success stories of compound-specific isotope analyses and ongoing developments for future applications.

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.

Production losses due to drought escalate progressively with the depletion of aquifers, underscoring the need for proactive measures in aquifer conservation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.