Pharmaceuticals are known to occur widely in the environment of industrialized countries. In developing countries, more monitoring results have recently become available, but a concise picture of measured environmental concentrations (MECs) is still elusive. Through a comprehensive literature review of 1016 original publications and 150 review articles, the authors collected MECs for human and veterinary pharmaceutical substances reported worldwide in surface water, groundwater, tap/drinking water, manure, soil, and other environmental matrices in a comprehensive database. Due to the heterogeneity of the data sources, a simplified data quality assessment was conducted. The database reveals that pharmaceuticals or their transformation products have been detected in the environment of 71 countries covering all continents. These countries were then grouped into the 5 regions recognized by the United Nations (UN). In total, 631 different pharmaceutical substances were found at MECs above the detection limit of the respective analytical methods employed, revealing distinct regional patterns. Sixteen substances were detected in each of the 5 UN regions. For example, the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac has been detected in environmental matrices in 50 countries, and concentrations found in several locations exceeded predicted no-effect concentrations. Urban wastewater seems to be the dominant emission pathway for pharmaceuticals globally, although emissions from industrial production, hospitals, agriculture, and aquaculture are important locally. The authors conclude that pharmaceuticals are a global challenge calling for multistakeholder approaches to prevent, reduce, and manage their entry into and presence in the environment, such as those being discussed under the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management, a UN Environment Program. Environ Toxicol Chem 2016;35:823-835. # 2015 SETAC

Abstract. Water abstractions for irrigation purposes are higher than for any other pan-European water use sector and have a large influence on river runoff regimes. This modelling experiment assesses historic and current irrigation water demands for different crops in five arc minute spatial resolution for pan-Europe. Two different modelling frameworks have been applied in this study. First, soft-coupling the dynamic vegetation model LPJmL with the land use model LandSHIFT leads to overestimations of national irrigation water demands, which are rather high in the southern Mediterranean countries. This can be explained by unlimited water supply in the model structure and illegal or not gauged water abstractions in the reported data sets. The second modelling framework is WaterGAP3, which has an integrated conceptual crop specific irrigation module. Irrigation water requirements as modelled with WaterGAP3 feature a more realistic representation of pan-European water withdrawals. However, in colder humid regions, irrigation water demands are often underestimated. Additionally, a national database on crop-specific irrigated area and water withdrawal for all 42 countries within pan-Europe has been set up and integrated in both model frameworks.

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Abstract. Sublimation of snow is an important factor of the hydrological cycle in Mongolia and is likely to increase according to future climate projections. In this study the hydrological model TRAIN was used to assess spatially distributed current and future sublimation rates based on interpolated daily data of precipitation, air temperature, air humidity, wind speed and solar radiation. An automated procedure for the interpolation of the input data is provided. Depending on the meteorological parameter and the data availability for the individual days, the most appropriate interpolation method is chosen automatically from inverse distance weighting, Ordinary Least Squares interpolation, Ordinary or Universal Kriging. Depending on elevation simulated annual sublimation in the period 1986–2006 was 23 to 35 mm, i.e. approximately 80% of total snowfall. Moreover, future climate projections for 2071–2100 of ECHAM5 and HadCM3, based on the A1B emission scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were analysed with TRAIN. In the case of ECHAM5 simulated sublimation increases by up to 17% (26...41 mm) while it remains at the same level for HadCM3 (24...34 mm). The differences are mainly due to a distinct increase in winter precipitation for ECHAM5. Simulated changes of the all-season hydrological conditions, e.g. the sublimation-to-precipitation ratio, were ambiguous due to diverse precipitation patterns derived by the global circulation models.

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Abstract. Central Asia is in large parts dominated by low precipitation and, consequentially, by low water availability. Therefore, changes of natural water resources induced by climate change are of high interest. The aim of this study is to analyse the potential impact of climate change on Central Asian water resources until the end of the 21st century and to point out the main affected regions. Thus, simulations with the large-scale hydrology model WaterGAP3 for the baseline and scenario periods were performed with outputs from three General Circulation Models (GCMs: ECHAM5, IPSL-CM4, and CNRM-CM3) and two IPCC-SRES emission scenarios (A2 and B1). The results show that mean modelled annual water availability increases for all scenarios and GCMs while CNRM-CM3 induces the wettest water situation for the 2085s and ECHAM5 the lowest water availability. Furthermore, robust trends to wetter or dryer conditions could be found for many basins. A seasonal shift of mean modelled water availability could be derived for ECHAM5 which does not show a second peak during summer. The application of daily input data showed no improvement of modelled monthly river discharges for most Central Asian basins compared to monthly input data.