Eutrophication in freshwater lakes is a global water quality issue. The cumulative concentration of nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), or aggregated water quality indices (e.g., trophic state index) are frequently used metrics to monitor lake water quality. Such monitoring fails to identify the key causes of eutrophication. As a result, management and policy-making are not sufficiently informed, while it is necessary to understand the effects of the changing climate and socioeconomic development. It is therefore critical to develop and promote indicators for water quality monitoring that include sources of nutrient emissions and their pathways into the lake basin. In this study, we present indicators of drivers and pressures that account for anthropogenic emissions, socio-economic variables, and land-use. To assess the indicators, we implement an integrated modeling framework that consists of GLOBIOM-CWatM-MARINA-Lakes, which combine land use, hydrology and anthropogenic nutrient emissions to lakes. The Lake Victoria basin in Africa will be used as a case study to assess the drivers and pressures and develop a better understanding of the impacts of socio-economy and sources of nutrient emissions on lake water quality. Such drivers and pressures of a lake basin can be used as proxies, particularly in data scarce regions, to fill the gap in water quality monitoring data, and to assist in design of nutrient management policies and plans
