From sustainable drinking water to tsunami hazards: modelling water science for impact

Abstract

View related articles View Crossmark data From sustainable drinking water to tsunami hazards: modelling water science for impact Humanities are facing unprecedented water-related challenges towards future sustainable development. These challenges range from droughts, to floods, tsunami, water crises, and extreme precipitation. They are not only linked to climate change, which alters the hydrological cycle, but could also be further amplified due to rapid population growth, socioeconomic development and human interventions such as infrastructure construction, land use change and land cover changes (Gleick 2018). To cope with these challenges, scientists have been developing modelling tools to study many aspects of water (e.g. quantity, quality, management) in order to gain a better understanding of its physical mechanisms, identify current existing gaps, as well as design more effective water management policies. With emerging theories, improved datasets and accelerated computational power, water modelling has propelled tremendous progress in the past few decades. But how can we leverage the advances in these modelling tools across disciplines to have impacts beyond their own field? One potential solution (but certainly not the only one) is through applying integrated frameworks given the integrative nature of the above-mentioned water-related challenges. This is what we advocate for the modelling community to consider through this Special Issue (SI) of the Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences. This SI aims to present inspiring examples of water modelling research and highlight its role in addressing pertinent environmental challenges. It includes five papers that address key themes such as tsunami hazards, sustainable drinking water, saltwater intrusion, extreme precipitation, and water logging. Although these papers span a wide range of topics, focus on different spatial and temporal scales and utilize different types of modelling tools (theory-based, data-driven, or a combination), they share commonalities in terms of how to leverage modelling advances towards more useful assessments of waterrelated sustainable development goals as well as more effective disaster risk reduction and management. They are also under the same umbrella of a broader theme of integrative knowledge and thinking (Kroeze et al. 2019), without which the impact of the selected studies may be limited compared to what they are supposed to have. The SI leads off with a paper on tsunami hazards over fringing reefs (Shao et al. 2019). This study utilized a numerical wave model, validated by newly performed laboratory experiments, to investigate the potential changing characteristics (e.g. wave inundation, momentum flux) of tsunami-like solitary wave with hypothetical scenarios of sea-level rise and reef degradation. Simulation results clearly reveal that, compared to coral bleaching, sea-level rise has a more negative effect on the protective capacity of fringing reefs against tsunami hazards, especially over low-lying areas of reef-fr...