Aquatic Ecosystems and Sustainable Water Resources Management
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Resources and Sustainable Utilization".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2021) | Viewed by 2317
Special Issue Editors
Interests: aquatic ecosystems; environmental flows; water resource management
Interests: ecological risk assessments; ichthyology; environmental flow assessments; ecotoxicology and water resource management
Interests: aquatic ecosystems; wetland; ecology; freshwaters; policy; development
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: conservation; freshwater biodiversity; inland fisheries; Integrated Water Resource Management; international policy; protected areas; Sustainable Development Goals
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: platinum group elements and other metals; bioaccumulation and toxicity studies with aquatic organisms; biomarker responses; trace metal analyses; (bio)monitoring of aquatic ecosystems; ecological risk assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: integrated water resources management and environmental flow implementation; practitioner capacity building; women in leadership; agriculture-wetlands interactions; implications of infrastructure development for socioecological systems; water security, science diplomacy and peacebuilding; integrated development and conservation planning; climate change and disaster risk reduction; state-of-the-environment monitoring and assessment
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Aquatic ecosystems have increasingly been recognised as central to sustainable water resource management. Already considered by many countries in national policies, they now form a key part of SDG6 in recognition of their role in water security (Indictor 6.6.1, “Change in extent of water-related ecosystems over time”). Aquatic ecosystems were also adopted by the UN Environment Assembly in 2018, where a series of guidelines were published to assist countries in incorporating them into management (Framework for Freshwater Ecosystem Management). Clearly, aquatic ecosystems are also central to the Convention on Biological Diversity, with the new post-2020 targets set to give them greater emphasis.
There are key aspects of aquatic ecosystems that need consideration during management: the influence of quantities of water and where that water comes from, the quality of water, the habitats that make up the ecosystems, and the biodiversity of the species that make use of these habitats. The management of aquatic ecosystems as part of water resource management involves specialist areas of study such as e-flow (environmental flow) assessments, target setting, pollution control, water treatment, biodiversity management and many other fields.
However, all is not well. Despite the rapid elevation of aquatic ecosystems into management realms, especially at the country level, and the prominence given to them by global programmes, they tend to be overlooked in favour of socioeconomic development. While the SDG list of indicators in support of natural resources is moderately comprehensive, it lacks holistic monitoring in relation to the evaluation of ecosystems and biodiversity to the extent that these missing-but-vital measures of sustainability threaten the entire SDG Agenda. In addition, an emerging issue is that even where there are indicators, the number of country-level data remain inadequate for evaluating sustainability, a reality that confronted the UN team trying to draft the SDG 6 synthesis report.
The key problem with the above is that there is no globally consistent understanding of the role of aquatic ecosystems in resource management, let alone methods that could be applied at a global level to collect these types of data.
This Special Issue will focus on collecting research, at whatever scale, that documents the role of aquatic ecosystems in resource management, with the emphasis being on sustainability and the means to generate the data required to monitor this.
Dr. Chris Dickens
Dr. Gordon O’Brien
Prof. Dr. Kenneth Irvine
Dr. Ian Harrison
Prof. Dr. Victor Wepener
Dr. Rebecca Elizabeth Tharme
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- aquatic ecosystem health
- water resources
- water resource management
- ecosystem management
- river health
- SDGs
- ecosystem monitoring
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