Erratum to: 36th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s13054-016-1208-6.]

Emerging Themes and Future Directions of Multi-Sector Nexus Research and Implementation

Water, energy, and food are all essential components of human societies. Collectively, their respective resource systems are interconnected in what is called the “nexus”. There is growing consensus that a holistic understanding of the interdependencies and trade-offs between these sectors and other related systems is critical to solving many of the global challenges they present. While nexus research has grown exponentially since 2011, there is no unified, overarching approach, and the implementation of concepts remains hampered by the lack of clear case studies. Here, we present the results of a collaborative thought exercise involving 75 scientists and summarize them into 10 key recommendations covering: the most critical nexus issues of today, emerging themes, and where future efforts should be directed. We conclude that a nexus community of practice to promote open communication among researchers, to maintain and share standardized datasets, and to develop applied case studies will facilitate transparent comparisons of models and encourage the adoption of nexus approaches in practice.Water Resource

Tidal amplification and river capture in response to land reclamation in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta

At a global scale, intertidal areas are being reclaimed for agriculture as well as urban expansion, imposing high human pressure on the coastal zone. The Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (GBD) is an exponent of this development. In this delta, land reclamation accelerated in the 1960's to 1980's, when polders were constructed in areas subject to regular marine flooding. A comprehensive analysis of tidal channel evolution in the southwest GBD reveals how land reclamation leads to tidal amplification, channel shoaling, bank erosion, and interaction between channels in which one tidal river captures the storage area of a neighbouring river. We identify-two positive feedback mechanisms that govern these morphological changes. First, reclaiming intertidal areas results in immediate loss of tidal storage, which leads to amplification and faster propagation of the tides. In systems with abundant sediment supply, the blind tidal channels progressively fill in with sediment, leading to a continued loss of tidal storage and therefore further distorting the tides. Secondly, when intertidal areas of parallel (and inter-connected) river delta distributaries are asynchronously or unevenly reclaimed, one channel distributary may expand its intertidal area at the expense of the other. This is initiated by an increasing propagation speed of the tidal wave in the partially reclaimed distributary, travelling into the non-reclaimed distributary through connecting channels. These connecting channels progressively expand while the pristine channel shoals, and potentially degenerates. Both positive feedback loops are very stable and are responsible for pluvial flooding of polders, large-scale bank erosion, and poorly navigable primary waterways, including the navigation channel accessing Bangladesh's second-largest port. Interventions aiming to solve these problems have to account for the complex positive feedback mechanisms identified in this paper and be nature-based and holistic.Environmental Fluid MechanicsCoastal Engineerin

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