The Planet's Stressed River Basins: Too Much Pressure or Too Little Adaptive Capacity?

Abstract

Freshwater is one of the most critical elements for sustainable development of ecosystems and societies. River basins, concomitant with administrative zones, form a common unit for freshwater management. So far, no comprehensive, global analysis exists that would link the ecological challenges of the planet's river basins to the capacity of the societies to cope with them. We address this gap by performing a geospatial resilience analysis for a global set of 541 river basins. We use the social‐ecological systems approach by relating three ecological vulnerability factors (human footprint, natural hazards, and water scarcity) with three adaptive capacity factors (governance, economy, and human development), based on temporal trajectories from 1990 to 2015. Additionally, we examine resilience by subtracting ecological vulnerability from adaptive capacity. The most striking result is the fundamentally different patterns of controlling factors of the resilience in different developing regions, particularly those of Africa and Asia. Their root causes are particularly low adaptive capacity in Africa and high ecological vulnerability in Asia. Alarmingly, the difference between those continents grew within the study period. Finally, this study highlights the rapid dynamics of adaptive capacity in comparison to ecological vulnerability, the latter having more inertia. Their fragile balance is of our interest; they can either support or counteract each other depending on the geographic location.

Climate change risks to push one-third of global food production outside Safe Climatic Space

“…To conclude, the future solutions should be concentrated on actions that would both mitigate climate change as well as increase resilience in food systems [50][51][52] and societies 33 , increase the food production sustainability that respects key planetary boundaries 41 , adapt to climate change by, for example, crop migration and foster local livelihoods in the most critical areas. All this calls for global partnerships and solidarity, as well as innovative cross-sectoral thinking for finding the needed solutions.…”

“…To map the most critical areas with low capacity to cope with future changes, we used an indicator for resilience 33 . For this purpose, the resilience data 33 ( Supplementary Fig.…”

“…Societies have varying abilities to react to changes in climatic zones, depending on their resilience to cope with the potential disruptions. Thus, we further linked the gridded global dataset of resilience 33 with arc-min resolution (~10 km at equator) for year 2010 (Methods) to the hotspot analysis to identify the most vulnerable areas. The low resilience areas (bottom 25 th percentile) cover a large part of South Asia, Middle East and Africa ( Supplementary Fig.…”

Projected plastic waste loss scenarios between 2000 and 2030 into the largest freshwater-lake system in Southeast Asia

“…Unsurprisingly, plastic is not the single pressure that TSB is currently facing. Like many other large lake systems around the world, TSL is under severe threat from several compounding factors 12,13,40 . Aside from climate change and the challenges of dam building on the MR, issues such as population growth, increasing land-use intensity, and the general mismanagement of terrestrial and aquatic resources need to be addressed immediately 20,41 .…”

“…Plastic pollution is compounding the mounting contemporary issues of climate-change, eutrophication, invasive species, and existing, legacy damage, caused by nutrient loading, acidification and shoreline modification 12 . Specifically, the freshwater systems of Southeast Asia (SEA) are highly vulnerable, whilst the adaptive capacity of the population is comparatively low 13 . While studies of riverine plastic pollution in SEA have grown 14 – 17 , there are no dedicated systematic studies of plastic pollution in major SEA rivers, such as the Mekong River (MR) 10 .…”