Editorial: Water Resources Management in a Changing World: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Although the science of water management has experienced significant improvements over the past century, many issues still require the attention of the scientific community. Global change, growing population and increasing pressure on existing water supplies have intensified the need for further improvement of water resources management practice. The purpose of this special issue is to present some of the latest research carried out in the area of water resources management under uncertain and changing conditions. Articles in this issue highlight recent advances in this area covering all the aspects of the hydrologic cycle.The articles in this special issue were submitted to Water Resources Management in response to an invitation by the scientific committee of the 9th World Congress of the European Water Resources Association held in Istanbul on 10-13 June 2015. A total of 31 contributions were invited among those presented in the congress and 19 papers were accepted for publication following the guidelines and standard review procedures of Water Resources Management. Articles contributed to this special issue are organized in three principal categories, each represented by a group of papers. A first category of papers deals with innovative tools and techniques for the analysis of complex hydrological processes that develop in space and time. The second group of papers deals with hydrologic extremes: floods and droughts, emphasizing the need to incorporate uncertainty and risk issues. The last category covers the challenges to the implementation of water resources management to solve practical problems, highlighting the importance of new approaches to face emerging challenges.

Efficient Water Mist Collector with Both a Kirigami Structure and Chemical Modification

“…The global water scarcity issue has a long-standing history and is expected to continue as a significant challenge in the upcoming decade. − How to obtain more freshwater resources has become an urgent problem to be solved . Due to, evaporation, the most important part of the water cycle, a large amount of freshwater is stored in the atmosphere.…”

“…1−6 How to obtain more freshwater resources has become an urgent problem to be solved. 7 Due to, evaporation, the most important part of the water cycle, a large amount of freshwater is stored in the atmosphere. It has been calculated that there is 8 times as much water stored in the atmosphere as there is in all of the rivers on Earth.…”

A Fuzzified Multicriteria Outranking Method for Water Framework Directive Implementation in a Heavily Modified Urban Lake (Pamvotis, Greece)

“…Multiple stressors can be seen as external abiotic or biotic factors deriving from human intervention, moving a receptor (e.g., biological community, ecosystem state) out of its normal operating range (Feld et al 2016;Sabater et al 2019) thus threaten freshwater integrity and biodiversity, imposing new challenges to ecosystem management and restoration. Water managers should be able to provide adaptive mitigation plans before important environmental thresholds threaten human livelihoods and jeopardise ecosystem preservation (Tayfur et al 2016). However, effective management of freshwater resources remains a major global challenge in the twenty-first century (Voulvoulis et al 2017).…”