Assessing the impact of socio-economic development and climate change on faecal indicator bacteria in the Betna River, Bangladesh

Developing a characterization factor framework for microbial contamination

“…The value of intake fraction also varies per region due to variability in river discharge [13] and pathogen behaviour before entering the surface water [14]. A higher discharge may decrease oocyst concentrations due to dilution [15] or increase the microorganism concentration due to resuspension from sediments and increased runoff [8]. Figure 3 below shows the effect factor value from six different dose-response models by Messner [10].…”

Cryptosporidium in rivers of the world: the GloWPa-Crypto model

“…For now, looking at the results of the modelling and the sensitivity analysis, my hypothesis is that we will find that, overall, socioeconomic development (especially sanitation and treatment) will matter more than climatic changes for average concentrations of enteric waterborne pathogens. Population growth in combination with connecting people to sewer systems (especially when the installation of adequate treatment lags behind) will likely increase concentrations much more than a few degrees of warming will affect decay and changes in river flow will affect dilution, a finding that is supported by literature (Islam, 2017;Sterk et al, 2016). Nevertheless, this will of course differ regionally and for different scenarios.…”

“…The SSPs and RCPs can be used together in a matrix structure to study future global change processes and impacts. For microbial pollution this has for the first time been done in studies at the watershed scale for Pakistan and Bangladesh (Iqbal, 2017;Islam, 2017). It will be highly interesting to perform a similar full scenario analysis with GloWPa-Crypto using a combination of RCPs and SSPs, to investigate the impacts of socioeconomic development and climatic changes together on pathogen concentrations in rivers.…”