Water Quality Assessments for Urban Water Environment

This special issue entitled “Water Quality Assessments for Urban Water Environment,” strives to highlights the status quo of water environment, opportunities and challenges for their sustainable management in lieu of rapid global changes (land us eland cover changes, climate change, population growth, change in socio-economic dimension, urbanization etc.), in the urban space particularly in developing nations around the world. It also highlights the effect of COVID19 pandemic on water resources and way forward to minimize the risk of spreading health risk associated with wastewater management. Considering the complex nature of the urban water security, it highlights the importance of emerging approaches like socio-hydrology, landscape ecology, regional-circular-ecological sphere etc., which presents a perfect combination of hard (infrastructure) and soft (numerical simulations, spatial technologies, participatory approaches, indigenous knowledge) measures, as the potential solutions to manage this precious water resource in coming future. Finally, what is the way forward to enhance science-policy interface in a better way to achieve global goals e.g., SDGs at local level in a timely manner. It provides valuable information about sustainable water resource management at the urban landscape, which is very much useful for policy-makers, decision-makers, local communities, and other relevant stakeholders

Africa

Africa is one of the lowest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, yet key development sectors have already experienced widespread losses and damages attributable to human-induced climate change, including biodiversity loss, water shortages, reduced food production, loss of lives and reduced economic growth (high confidence1).// Between 1.5°C and 2°C global warming—assuming localised and incremental adaptation—negative impacts are projected to become widespread and severe with reduced food production, reduced economic growth, increased inequality and poverty, biodiversity loss, increased human morbidity and mortality (high confidence). Limiting global warming to 1.5°C is expected to substantially reduce damages to African economies, agriculture, human health, and ecosystems compared to higher levels of global warming (high confidence).// Exposure and vulnerability to climate change in Africa are multi-dimensional with socioeconomic, political and environmental factors intersecting (very high confidence). Africans are disproportionately employed in climate-exposed sectors: 55–62% of the sub-Saharan workforce is employed in agriculture and 95% of cropland is rainfed. In rural Africa, poor and female-headed households face greater livelihood risks from climate hazards. In urban areas, growing informal settlements without basic services increase the vulnerability of large populations to climate hazards, especially women, children and the elderly. // Adaptation in Africa has multiple benefits, and most assessed adaptation options have medium effectiveness at reducing risks for present-day global warming, but their efficacy at future warming levels is largely unknown (high confidence)./

Development of Deep Learning Hybrid Models for Hydrological Predictions

The Abstract is currently unavailable, due to the thesis being under Embargo