Science funding could contribute more towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Science–practitioner partnerships illustrate how a patient and outcome-based approach could improve water security for millions of vulnerable people.

Organic photodetectors can be an alternative to silicon ones in detecting water contaminants, but their noise is too high due to disorder. Using pre-formed crystalline organic colloids to reduce the disorder in organic photodiodes helps to improve their performance to achieve detection of contaminants even at low concentrations.

In situ real-time water pollution monitoring provides a fast and convenient way to detect water pollutants, but the development of detectors with high sensitivity is still challenging. Portable organic photodetectors fabricated with a colloid processing approach achieve highly sensitive and accurate monitoring of trace pollutants in water.

US children who avoid tap water, a proxy for water insecurity, were more likely to experience household food insecurity than those who did not. Concurrent water and food insecurity doubled between 2005 and 2020 with considerable racial/ethnic disparities.

This Analysis quantifies how, and to what extent, transboundary cooperation generates economic and environmental co-benefits in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin, highlighting the importance of benefit sharing for sustaining socio-environmental systems.

Floating photovoltaics represent a promising alternative to land-based solar panels. A large-scale analysis, comprising 1 million water bodies worldwide, shows that floating photovoltaics could contribute 16%, on average, of the electricity demands of some countries.

Not accounting for coupled land–water carbon fluxes can lead to flawed understanding and incorrect assessments of climate impact and feedback on the Arctic carbon cycle. There is a need for collaborative studies, between scientific disciplines and approaches, that integrate carbon transformations and fluxes across the Arctic land–water continuum.

The use of mechanical energy in wastewater treatment has been associated with accelerating physical mixing in compartments, and its effect on microbial activities has not been explored. The implementation of the developed mechano-driven bio-denitrification approach in real wastewater treatment provides a new method for wastewater denitrification.

We publish the first article in a format aiming at discussing the process of translating research into something concretely useful for society.