Perspectives

Antimicrobial resistance has evolved over decades due to widespread antimicrobial use, with resistance genes now circulating across humans, animals and the environment, creating complex cross-sector connectivity challenges. This Perspective advocates for genomics-based studies of AMR connectivity to enable coordinated global action and investment under the One Health framework.

Wastewater-based epidemiology has already proven to be a powerful tool to monitor the spread of a number of diseases. This Perspective discusses the integration with machine learning, highlighting its potential in a number of wastewater-based epidemiology applications.

This Perspective leverages waterbirds to establish a conceptual foundation for studying wildlife interactions with floating photovoltaics (FPVs), highlighting five key considerations to guide future research on FPV–wildlife interactions.

This Perspective proposes strategies to develop and implement heterogeneous catalytic technologies for efficient PFAS mineralization.

Despite considerable attention, hygiene systems and practices remain inadequate where they are most needed. New thinking and innovative approaches are needed to develop, implement and evaluate hygienic systems to reduce pathogen exposure in high-transmission settings.

This Perspective highlights the uncertainties in assessing future drought severity, arising from conceptual misconceptions, methodological discrepancies and the limitations of Earth system models (ESMs) in accurately representing hydrological and ecological processes. A balanced approach that incorporates atmospheric drought indices can better improve the accuracy of drought assessments.

Despite their substantial contributions to watershed resilience, headwater streams are becoming increasingly imperilled. This Perspective summarizes the status of headwater streamflow information and proposes guidance for advancing the understanding of headwater hydrology to support better management of these systems.

Concern about the potential health and environmental hazards of substances known as PFAS have led to strong regulations, especially in Europe and the United States. This Perspective examines whether early warnings were followed and whether lessons can be learned from the way the chemicals were dealt with since their discovery.

This Perspective presents a wetting regime framework that is classified by dominant hydrologic mechanisms and highlights the resulting responses of stream biogeochemistry and community ecology.

This Perspective proposes a way to design membranes to separate ions of similar size and charge with a view to their use in resource recovery, water reuse and energy storage technologies.

This Perspective reviews the current understanding of groundwater recharge by meltwater, discusses the scales at which cryosphere–groundwater interactions are relevant, identifies key cryo-hydrogeological processes that need further study, and emphasizes the critical importance of these interactions for current and future water availability in mountain regions.

This study addresses the limitations and constraints of flood adaptation. These limits could result in a growing ‘adaptation gap’ (the difference between actual and desirable flood risk), leading to unbearable risks and pushing communities in flood zones into retreat.

The potential hazard of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances has led to new regulations affecting requirements for water quality. This Perspective proposes a protocol to adapt water treatment technology to meet new regulation requirements.

Access to sanitation is a fundamental right that is still missing, especially in many parts of low-income countries. This Perspective focuses on the impact of unclean school latrines on child health.

Efficiency is only one of the parameters involved in solar evaporation that should be improved to make it practical. Depending on the application, various factors of merit should be taken into consideration, as discussed in this Perspective.

In this Perspective, the authors survey potential water-system-wide benefits of AI applications from catchments to end-users and then highlight potential systemic barriers, direct risks and exposures to cascading failures, which may prove catastrophic for communities. In response, they make three recommendations for safe and responsible deployment of AI across potable water supply and sewage disposal systems.

This Perspective characterizes the major challenges to open-access water data in China. A potential data management infrastructure to improve the collection, sharing, and use of water data is outlined.

Drinking water treatment technologies are typically evaluated on the basis of narrow evaluation criteria, such as contaminant removal efficiency. This Perspective proposes additional user-centric criteria to evaluate the hidden and often gendered costs of water treatment technologies, including affordability, labour burden and user acceptance.

This Perspective reviews key water-related goals and progress achieved since the first UN Water Conference in Mar del Plata (1977) and highlights three priorities for the second UN Water Conference in New York (2023).

Decentralized water treatment technologies could help in addressing global key water issues. This Perspective reviews the literature on the psychological determinants of acceptance, support and behaviour change related to decentralized water treatment technologies and proposes a user-focused theory of change to guide the promotion of these technologies.