Climate–Water–Ecosystem–Interactions: Insights from Four Continent’s Case Studies

Abstract

The interaction of climate with aquatic ecosystems is a multidisciplinary field of research involving water quantity and quality issues and having strong socio-economic implications. This special issue hosts 10 studies undertaken in 7 countries of 4 continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The issue provides a wide spectrum of natural and artificial case-studies and covers a broad range of climatic conditions. Most of the studies adopted a modelling (50%) or a field (40%) approach and focused on water-quantity (60%), while the remaining were equally subdivided between water-quality and biogeochemistry. Forty percent of the papers directly face climate change. The diversity of approaches and case studies is the main aspect characterizing this special issue. Despite this high diversification, in relation to water-quantity related issues, we can identify the following messages: high attention to extreme meteorological events, drought in particular, even in regions once considered rich in water (e.g., northern Italy); fragility of agricultural and water supply systems in the face of extreme weather events, in particular in low-income countries (e.g., Madagascar); more attention to climate change compared to land cover/use change but importance of natural land cover to efficiently face the incoming climate change, in particular, in agriculture ecosystems. From a water quality biogeochemistry point of view, we can point out: sensitivity of lakes to climate change with the risk of biodiversity loss; need to reduce nutrient loads to mitigate eutrophication related problems, exacerbated by climate change; in particular, reduction of nitrogen loads from agriculture run-off, to reduce N2O emissions in large-shallow Chinese environments.