Recent Trends in Water and Health Studies on the Focus of Global Changes

Excerpt

Water is a dynamic resource varying in quantity and quality across temporal and spatial scales. Global change drivers such as population growth, land-use change, environmental pollution, and climate change affect the availability of water resources. Alterations to the hydrologic cycle put pressure on water resources, causing fluctuations in water levels and quality. Climate change also threatens the health of hundreds of millions of people in the world. It is estimated that 2.2 billion people currently do not have access to safely managed drinking water, and 4.2 billion are without safely managed sanitation. Along with that, there is a strong and consistent association between climate change and water scarcity. Modeling studies adopting the “ what-if-then” approach can reveal opportunities to address the effects of potential stressors to water resources and enable the development of efficient management strategies. In addition to climate change, human activities also have direct effects on water resources, threatening ecosystem and human health. Thus, water quality models are common tools to predict and simulate the fate and transportation of certain pollutants and recent literature is growing to reveal the current and predicted effects of human activities on water resources. …