Source-to-Sea Management

This book is the first of its kind on the emerging topic of source-to-sea management. It showcases different applications of the concept to improve the environmental health of freshwater, land and coastal and marine systems, drawing upon research performed across Europe, Africa and Asia.

Improved management of land, freshwater, coasts and oceans is a key environmental challenge of our time. It is needed to prevent the millions of tons of plastic and other pollutants that enter the ocean from land-based sources each year. It is essential to reduce highly polluted, oxygen-depleted “dead zones” in our coastal and marine waters. Extensive diversions of the flows of rivers need to be avoided to ensure that little or no water reaches the sea. Source-to-sea (S2S) is an emerging concept to improve understanding of how to effectively manage freshwater, land, coastal and marine systems. The collected works in this book explore experiences with S2S management in diverse regions across Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, addressing sedimentation, nutrient and pharmaceutical pollution in freshwater and marine aquatic environments, and marine debris on the coasts and in the seas. It provides key insights into a few areas that should be of interest to those who want to learn from the lessons from case studies of applied S2S interventions.

This book will be of great value to scholars, students and researchers interested in global freshwater, coastal zone, ocean management, sustainable development and environmental governance.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Water International.

Josh Weinberg is Programme Manager at the Water Resources department at Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI). He has 15 years of experience in the fields of water and environmental governance. He has worked with the development and implementation of the source-to-sea approach and helped initiate the formation of the Action Platform for Source-to-Sea Management.

Qinhua Fang is Professor of the College of the Environment & Ecology and Deputy Director of the Coastal and Ocean Management Institute of Xiamen University, China. His research interest is focused on the interfaces of science and management in the coastal areas, including environmental systems analysis, marine spatial planning and marine policy studies.

Sarantuyaa Zandaryaa is Programme Specialist on water quality in the Division of Water Sciences and the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP) in the UNESCO Headquarters Paris, France. She coordinates IHP’s International Initiative on Water Quality and implements UNESCO projects and activities on clean water for humans and ecosystems, water quality monitoring, water pollution, emerging pollutants and microplastics in water, and the impact of climate change on water quality.

Greg Leslie is the Director of the Global Water Institute, University of New South Wales, and a Professor in the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW Sydney. He specializes in systems analysis for water and wastewater treatment processes for municipal, industrial and agricultural applications. He has served on the Desalination Guidelines Technical Committee for the World Health Organization, the Water Issue Committee for the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Independent Advisory Panel for the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment Project.

James E. Nickum is Fellow of the International Water Resources Association (IWRA) and Editor-in-Chief of Water International.