Review Articles

A multifaceted approach integrating strategies across food production and consumption is required to advance sustainable water management in agriculture.

This Review explores key aspects and challenges to adoption of the natural source zone depletion (NSZD) of subsurface petroleum hydrocarbons.

This Review establishes a comprehensive set of permeance–selectivity relationships for thin-film composite membranes on the removal and fractionation of different solutes and provides valuable strategies for enhancing the performance of membrane systems through both material-level and system-level optimizations.

This Review discusses the potential of nanofiltration and reverse osmosis in the removal of disinfection by-products, highlighting the interactions among membranes and chemicals.

This Review synthesizes the ecological features and processes that arise when rivers are given room to move. Understanding these interactions will support more sustainable decisions that weigh river ecology against engineering in a rapidly changing world.

This Review examines methods for mapping river barriers, emphasizing the potential consequences of a lack of data on smaller barriers. It highlights the need for improved mapping approaches to support effective water management

The new SWOT satellite mission tracks global water supply–demand and land-to-ocean water movement, leading the way towards an integrated satellite observatory that can help humanity adapt to Earth’s shifting water and energy systems.

This Review summarizes the recent progress in solar-driven steam generation in diverse functionalizations and highlights its applications beyond water purification and desalination.

This Review highlights how the discovery of new nitrogen-cycling microorganisms paves the way for process iterations and technological innovations towards sustainable wastewater management.

This Review offers a comprehensive global overview of greenhouse gas emissions in the wastewater sector, highlighting key gaps in emission quantification and mitigation. It explores current decarbonization strategies, emphasizes the complexity of emissions across all scopes, and advocates for tailored monitoring, holistic analysis and strong support from different stakeholders to drive effective mitigation and achieve net-zero emissions.

A review of two decades of water science and water governance scholarship shows that how, when, where and why water is available and to whom is changing as global hydrological systems are being re-shaped across spatial and temporal scales.

Recent learnings in non-sewered sanitation remain fragmented; this Review integrates findings into one consistent terminology to identify synergies in scientific findings and explore future potential application of new technologies.

This Review highlights the strengths and limitations of deep learning approaches relative to traditional approaches, emphasizing their potential as a currently underutilized yet promising avenue for advancing our understanding of water-quality sciences.

Solar desalination has the potential to contribute to the solutions regarding global water scarcity. This Review discusses the road and challenges towards the industrialization of solar desalination plants.

Using three prototypical scenarios of water contamination from legacy pollutants at contaminated sites, agricultural use of pesticides and abatement of pharmaceuticals and disinfection by-products in water treatment systems, this Review illustrates success stories of compound-specific isotope analyses and ongoing developments for future applications.

This Review identifies factors that lead to ‘unsafely managed sanitation’ in the United States, the specific types of access, and obstacles to characterizing and addressing the problem.

This Review presents an overview and analysis of biomimetic engineering principles and strategies for developing unique surface properties to design all-weather, portable water harvesting systems. It discusses key processes involved in water harvesting and proposes a framework for designing next-generation sustainable systems to alleviate freshwater scarcity.

Advanced oxidation or reduction processes (AOPs or ARPs) are effective techniques to remove contaminants and pathogens from water. This Review compares them with a new alternative process involving UV activation of low-molecular-weight diketones and explores the shift in water treatment technologies from discrete AOPs and ARPs to combined oxidation–reduction processes.

In this Review, Li and Wang utilize a unique chemical potential-based approach and critically analyse the available literature on sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting, including sorbents, processes and applications beyond water production.

Wet getting wetter and dry getting dryer, or global aridification? This Review examines the applicability and limits of both hypotheses across different frameworks, scales and contexts, providing insights on hydrologic change and the future of water availability.