Markus Andrews

Illustration: Sam Falconer

There is an old joke, made famous by the writer David Foster Wallace, in which one fish says to another, “How’s the water?” The second fish replies: “What the hell is water?”That’s more or less the question Nature faced when putting together this collection of articles on the ubiquitous substance on which all life on Earth (not just that of fish) depends. Any attempt to cover the full spectrum of scientific and social issues associated with water is surely doomed to neglect something of importance. But Nature likes a challenge. This supplement is a compendium of intersecting stories that showcase how water affects the sustainability of healthy human civilization.For millennia, the most primal concern about water has been having enough of it. Some argue that too much attention is paid to water supply, and that the real priority should be making do with what is available. Indeed, progress on conservation and efficiency has been impressive — the US economy now needs much less water per dollar of output than in previous decades.But conservation can go only so far. Rivers, wells and artificial reservoirs provide ample supplies for much of the world, but arid regions still struggle. Some researchers in these water-starved regions are turning their attention to the wet sponge that is the planet’s atmosphere. New technologies could extract clean fresh water from thin air, and sharply reduce water scarcity.No matter how abundant the supply, of course, water intended for drinking also needs to be clean and free of contaminants. Among the most pernicious are the ‘forever’ chemicals known as PFAS: chains of carbon and fluorine atoms held together by some of the strongest chemical bonds in nature, and impervious to most attempts to break them down. But engineers are devising various methods to crack them apart and purify PFAS-contaminated water.Although water sustains life, it can also be a threat. Flooding can ravage communities. In a live webcast earlier this month, specialists shared their latest thinking about flood resilience. They painted an alarming picture of the way floods disproportionately affect the world’s poorest populations, even in rich countries, such as the United States. Indeed, 1.8 billion people (22% of world’s population) live in areas at risk of severe flooding — and almost 90% of them are in low- and middle-income countries. Some researchers say that much of the infrastructure put in place to tame waterways is proving inadequate, or even counterproductive. They advocate rethinking how water is handled in the built environment, including re-establishing the abandoned practices of ancient cultures.The danger posed by water is of course increased by climate change. Minimizing its effects will require a large-scale push towards renewable power sources, but these tend to be intermittent, and therefore dependent on technologies to store and transport energy. One leading candidate for renewable power is hydrogen, which can be formed by electrolysing water. However, there is an inherent tension: an economy dependent on hydrogen energy will inevitably consume vast quantities of water. Reducing hydrogen’s water footprint is an important focus as renewable sources become a bigger part of the energy picture.Finally, because of water’s central role in life, it is also a major component of many human conflicts. Wars have been fought over water access. Armies have wielded water as a weapon. But most commonly water is a casualty of war, as has been seen with the destruction of water infrastructure in the Russia–Ukraine war. Those who follow these events closely think that there is an urgent need to identify likely areas of water conflict, and promote greater collaboration between nations on water resources. We all need water to live — not just fish.We are pleased to acknowledge the financial support of the FII Institute in producing this Outlook and the associated webcast. As always, Nature retains sole responsibility for all editorial content. More

Many people had to be evacuated following flooding caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine.Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

Oleksandra Shumilova was hundreds of kilometres away from her native Ukraine when, in early 2022, Russian troops invaded and destroyed a water pipeline near her hometown of Mykolaiv. For 24 days, the taps ran dry. When the water finally returned it was contaminated with salt and harmful chemical deposits that rendered it unsafe for drinking.The incident struck a chord with Shumilova, a freshwater ecologist at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin — on multiple levels. Not only was Mykolaiv her hometown, but she studies the floodplains of a river in Italy that still bear the scars of the First World War.Pockmarked by craters from decades-old aerial bombardments, the area around the Italian river is scattered with unexploded military ordnance. When discovered, these munitions must undergo controlled detonations, creating blasts that reverberate in Shumilova’s mind during her fieldwork.“Remnants of war can stay in nature for a long time,” Shumilova says. Now, she fears, history is repeating itself in the Russia–Ukraine war.Shumilova took it upon herself to chronicle what is happening in Ukraine. “This research is very personal,” she says. She began poring over government records and media reports, meticulously searching for instances of damage to water resources and infrastructure, resulting from military actions. She and her collaborators cross-checked their findings with information from a diverse array of Ukrainian, Russian and international sources.

Parts of Kherson, Ukraine, were flooded after the Kakhovka dam was destroyed during the Russia–Ukraine war.Credit: Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

Focusing on just the first three months of the conflict, a detailed record of 64 events emerged, each affecting crucial water facilities and often triggering a chain of events1. Missiles striking hydropower dams, for example, might result in power outages that render water-pumping stations and wastewater treatment facilities inoperable — with devastating consequences. Millions of people can be left without access to clean water, agricultural fields might have insufficient irrigation, and the unchecked flow of untreated sewage and contaminated ground water from industrial mines can pollute nearby river basins, causing significant harm to both people and the environment.These incidents highlight just one aspect of the intricate interplay between water and armed conflicts. Water resources can be casualties of violence, but disputes over water control can also act as triggers for unrest — for example, when two communities clash over access to a single water source. Furthermore, water is frequently weaponized, as has happened in Gaza, when Israel responded to the deadly attacks by Hamas on 7 October by restricting access to fresh water and cutting off fuel shipments needed to run desalination and water-treatment plants for local production of potable water.Historical records show that conflicts over water access stretch back millennia, with water systems often being targeted or manipulated as strategic assets on the battlefield. But this water–war nexus seems to be intensifying. Driven by escalating tensions and intensified hostilities in places such as the Middle East, Ukraine, southern Asia and the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, water resources have increasingly become targets or triggers of violence over the past decade, notes environmental scientist Morgan Shimabuku.“What we do see right now is a really large increase in the total number of water-related conflicts around the globe,” says Shimabuku who is at the non-profit organization the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, and helped to develop an online database of water-related clashes called the Water Conflict Chronology. There were more than 200 incidents in 2022 alone, and with the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, 2023 is projected to surpass that figure (see ‘Warring over water’).

Source: Adapted from O. Shumilova et al. Nature Sustain. 6, 578–586 (2023)

Add in the mounting stresses on water systems from population growth and climate change, and the potential for violence and instability is only expected to grow. Shimabuku thinks that there is an urgent need for comprehensive and cooperative efforts to safeguard water resources and to promote peace, but she also sees reasons to be hopeful.For example, many previously conflicting factions are embracing collaborative water-sharing treaties, which can de-escalate hostilities. “We have a lot more tools in our toolbox now for addressing these challenges,” Shimabuku points out.Troubled watersIn 1995, the then-vice-president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, made a dire warning for the years ahead: “Many of the wars in this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water.”

People queue to refill drinking water in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, after Russian forces cut off the pipeline used to supply water.Credit: AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti/Alamy Stock Photo

It’s an oft-repeated idea that persists to this day, cited frequently in discussions about water scarcity and conflict. But according to Jampel Dell’Angelo, who studies governance and disputes over freshwater resources at the Vrije University Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies in the Netherlands, “this is a myth”. At least when thinking about conflicts between nations.In a globalized economy of countries interconnected by trade, including that of agricultural commodities that can be considered a form of virtual water transfer, tensions over cross-border issues of water scarcity are often diffused by forms of interstate cooperation. This typically prevents water from serving as a trigger for major wars, but it doesn’t stop localized violence from arising in water-strapped nations.In Iraq, for example, large-scale protests over tainted water supplies have been met with strong police crackdowns. Frequent droughts in Somalia have prompted herders to abandon their pastoral lifestyles and join militant groups instead. And neighbouring states in India clash every year over their allocated river waters, with demonstrations that often turn violent.What’s more, the very conditions that promote interstate water peace can actually exacerbate water-related instability at the local level. This is particularly evident in water-scarce low-income countries, which frequently export their limited natural resources, amplifying their local water challenges and potentially fuelling smaller-scale conflicts. “There’s a shift in the burden of water scarcity on the heads of people who already suffer from the lack of water,” Dell’Angelo says.Further compounding the problem, foreign agribusiness investors have increasingly acquired vast land holdings in low- and middle-income countries, often at the expense of local communities and appropriating valuable water resources in the process. Termed land or water grabbing, this phenomenon gained momentum after the economic and food crises of 2008 — and, according to Dell’Angelo, the ongoing war in Ukraine is likely to further intensify this trend, owing to reductions in Ukrainian grain exports and heightened concerns about food security. “This will put additional pressure on land and water,” Dell’Angelo says, “with escalating consequences.”One priority of water-security researchers is to prevent similar crises in the future. “We want to put points on a map and show people where water conflict is happening so that we can better apply solutions,” says Samantha Kuzma, a data scientist at the World Resources Institute, an environmental policy and research group in Washington DC.Those efforts begin with prediction. To identify problem hotspots, Kuzma and her colleagues developed an artificial intelligence algorithm called the Global Early Warning Tool. This tool considers a wide range of environmental, economic and social factors. By comparing past trends to present data, it flags regions where water-related issues such as flooding, pollution and scarcity could spell trouble2.Kuzma hopes that the tool will help to inspire localized conflict-mitigation measures when and where they are needed. This could prove instrumental in drought-affected areas such as Ethiopia, where restricted access to potable water might escalate tensions between government forces and armed factions, or in water-scarce regions of Syria that are already marred by conflicts between rival militia groups.Although implementation can be challenging, Kuzma emphasizes that the timely identification of emerging conflicts can streamline the adoption of collective land-use strategies that will ultimately ease tensions. “If we can see water as the security risk that it is — and have more investments going into securing the resource, and managing it sustainably — we should see real impacts on the ground,” she says.Shifting baselinesThe world’s rapidly changing climate could intensify the need for those kinds of water-security intervention. As a team led by Solomon Hsiang, now chief environmental economist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Washington DC, showed in an influential 2013 analysis, extreme rainfall conditions can be causally linked to an increased risk of violence and civil war3.

Displaced people in Gaza fetch drinking water outside a school.Credit: MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images

Such was the case in Syria, where discontent over the government’s handling of a prolonged drought period contributed to uprisings in 2011. This spiralled into a devastating internal war that persists to this day.Yet, perhaps counter-intuitively, as climate extremes become less anomalous and people become accustomed to more frequent water disasters, it’s possible that the number of water-related conflicts will decline, although the severity of such clashes could intensify.That’s what Marc Müller, a water engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf, and his colleagues found when they modelled the relationship between climate variability and conflict. Because the reference point for ‘normal’ levels of water availability changes, they concluded, so will the threshold at which people are willing to fight4.Water-related conflicts could therefore become fewer and further between. But when they do arise over ever-shrinking water supplies, Müller warns, the hostilities are likely to escalate quickly. “Conflicts will be less often, but worse,” he says.Such predictions offer little consolation to the people of Gaza, who continue to endure shortages of clean water and a sanitation crisis that is facilitating the spread of waterborne diseases.Water challenges are nothing new in the region. Even before the current conflict, extreme overuse of groundwater resources, a lack of large-scale desalination plants and the discharge of mostly untreated sewage all contributed to water scarcities in Gaza. But the situation is now much worse — and with the world’s attention focused on the water crisis, some researchers are hopeful that more will be done to address the problem once the war ends.“There’s going to be a lot of rebuilding necessary after all the destruction,” says David Katz, a water-policy researcher at the University of Haifa, Israel, “and maybe investing in water infrastructure will be something that can galvanize the global community.”As Katz points out, water cooperation helped to pave the way for a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan nearly 30 years ago, and he’s hopeful that the same might be possible in any future détente between the Israeli and Palestinian governments. “Political change opens up new opportunities,” he says. “It could conceivably happen.”Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the dire impact of Russia’s assaults on the nation’s water infrastructure is consistently and relentlessly worsening. This is starkly evident in the catastrophic destruction of the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant on 6 June 2023. The massive concrete structure crumbled. Trillions of litres of water gushed out, deluging areas downstream. At least 50 people died and thousands lost their homes.In the intervening months, the extent of the damage to communities, agriculture and the environment has become apparent. The Black Sea, into which the flood waters and accompanying sediment poured, became polluted, with a potentially devastating impact on the local marine ecosystem. Vast tracts of flooded land are no longer amenable to farming, crippling the Ukrainian economy, and areas that remain arable will probably have reduced yields without the reservoir there to provide a steady stream of water for irrigation.This could spell trouble for global food supplies, given the dependence by many low-income countries on Ukrainian grain. “It will touch millions of people, not only those living in Ukraine,” says Viktor Vyshnevskyi, a hydrologist at the National Aviation University in Kyiv, who has studied the myriad water-related repercussions of the dam explosion5.This human-caused flood was not without precedent. During the Second World War, in August 1941, the retreating Soviet army destroyed a dam at the northern end of the same reservoir where the Kakhovka dam was later constructed. The goal was to slow the advance of German forces. But the obliteration of the dam resulted in massive downstream flooding that reportedly claimed the lives of thousands of people. The occupying German forces partially restored the hydrotechnical structure, before they too demolished it as the tide of the war shifted back in favour of the Soviets.With history as a sobering backdrop — in Ukraine and beyond — the persistent use of water as both a casualty and a weapon of war remains a looming threat in a world grappling with the chaos of climate change. However, by shedding light on this issue, water scientists aspire to catalyse efforts that can avert future conflicts and ensure the protection of this invaluable resource for generations to come.“We want to provide a resource for other researchers, policy makers and those who can enact solutions around how to prevent violent conflict related to water,” says Shimabuku.“Could there possibly be water-resource management approaches or governance structures that can be put in place to reduce the potential harm that these conflicts drive?” she asks. In a world in which water is both a source of life and strife, the choice between conflict and cooperation will determine our shared future. More

Floods are becoming more intense and frequent around the world.Credit: Thianchai Sitthikongsak/Getty Images

In the past six months alone, floods have hit countries including Italy, Libya and the United States. Beyond the immediate tragedy of lost lives and livelihoods, floods also have longer-term effects, such as causing damage to urban infrastructure and agriculture. In this webcast, a panel of researchers discuss how to improve resilience to floods and the need for expertise from fields such as climate modelling, urban studies and behavioural science. More

Old Delhi’s Red Fort, a nearly 400-year-old structure where India’s flag is hoisted every Independence Day, is separated from the Yamuna River by a 55-kilometre ring road that circles the capital. I drive past it on this road, built on an old floodplain, on my way to work at Ashoka University in the neighbouring state of Haryana, a further 30 kilometres or so upstream. The river is hidden from view in places but it can be seen farther along, narrow and darkened by pollution for most of the year.In July 2023, flood water from heavy monsoon rains entered the Yamuna from Haryana, flooding parts of Delhi. TV images of the river lapping at the walls of the Red Fort recalled nineteenth-century paintings of the old course of the river.
Nature Spotlight: India
The Yamuna forms from the melting glaciers of the lower Himalayas, running for more than 1,370 kilometres until it merges with the Ganga in the city of Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. Delhi lies along its banks for just 20 kilometres, less than 2% of the river’s total length. But in that short stretch, the city belches out around 80% of the pollution found in the Yamuna. In some seasons, a foamy mixture of sewage and industrial waste coats the river surface in parts of Delhi. Newspapers carry pictures of Hindu devotees offering morning prayers while standing knee-deep in this toxic foam.Much of Haryana’s ground water is used to cultivate rice. Farmers pump it up using electricity that the state government heavily subsidizes to encourage agriculture. Without economic incentives to use this electricity sustainably, groundwater levels declined precipitously from the 1990s into the early 2000s. To combat this, legislation was introduced in 2009 to restrict the sowing of rice to mid-June onwards, timed to begin after the start of the monsoon season. Previously, rice planting had started as early as May.This means that the rice-harvesting season ends even closer to the wheat planting season, which begins in November. Farmers need to get rid of their rice-crop residue as soon after harvesting as possible to clear space for the wheat.Burning the crop residue is the cheapest solution. But in the early winter months, smoke and dust released from a combination of residue burning and other sources is concentrated by frequent changes in temperature and stagnant winds, and shrouds northern India. Schools are closed, construction work is halted and flights are grounded because of the poor visibility. Hospitals fill with people complaining of breathing difficulties. Each resident of Delhi is thought to lose nearly 12 years of their life to air pollution.As the world’s climate changes, extreme events such as the rains that led to the Delhi floods in July will become more common. The southern Indian state of Kerala witnessed a devastating flood in 2018, the worst in almost a century of recorded history. More than one million people were evacuated to higher ground. A study that year showed that about 60% of the coast of Kerala was eroding, and areas where good fishing could be found were shifting, affecting the lives of one million fishers and their families.Two large Indian cities, Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal, and Kolkata, on the banks of the Hooghly River, are expected to be at significant risk from sea-level rise in the next few decades. Along with the resulting intrusion of salt water into groundwater systems, this will increase climate-change-induced migration. The Sundarbans, an ecologically sensitive wetland system on the Bay of Bengal that contains the largest mangrove forest in the world, has already seen substantial climate-change-driven migration into the nearby city of Kolkata.The Namami Gange Programme is one of many started since the mid-1980s to clean up India’s iconic holy river, the Ganga. Around US$3 billion for this has been set aside or spent since 2014, largely on new sewage-treatment plants.But pollution levels remain stubbornly high, the result of lax enforcement of control measures and unregulated river-front development. More data are needed, and more transparency on the causes, so citizens can hold civic bodies and elected representatives responsible.Science can help too. The Ministry of Earth Sciences is funding several initiatives aimed at improving India’s ability to model the monsoon. This will help provide actionable advance warnings of extreme rain events. More research on the geomorphology of coastal India, on near-shore ocean current patterns and on the impact of sea walls could aid the design of interventions to slow coastal erosion.Fresh water is a finite and vulnerable resource that should be managed in a participatory fashion. Citizen groups in the south-Indian city of Bengaluru are helping to renew urban water bodies, reconfiguring them as centres around which communities can coalesce. In arid areas, such as the deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat, old methods of rainwater harvesting are being revived, helped by traditional community knowledge.Guaranteeing a minimum amount of fresh water for each individual, free of charge, will ensure broader societal equity. Beyond that limit, water usage should be priced, creating an economic incentive for its sustainable use. Such a policy was introduced nearly a decade ago by the Delhi government, but continued groundwater extraction using illegal borewells has partly neutralized this positive step.Ensuring the sustainable use of water intersects climate change, agriculture, politics, pollution, migration and much more. Well-intentioned policy measures, such as subsidizing electricity for agriculture, can have unexpected consequences for water and its sustainable use.Placing water at the centre of our thinking about sustainability can help avoid such pitfalls. We need more conversations about water. More

Groundwater pumped on to Dennis Hutson’s farm in Allensworth, California, had dangerously high levels of arsenic. New technology tested on the farm reduced the levels to drinking-water standard.Credit: Adam Lau/UC Berkeley

In 2022, Ashok Gadgil conducted the first field trial of a water-treatment system for the 600 or so residents of Allensworth, California, who have been battling arsenic contamination for some time. The system is a more efficient iteration of technology that Gadgil and his team installed in India in 2016 to provide rural and marginalized communities with access to safe drinking water at low cost1. Like many small rural communities, Allensworth — a historically Black town with a majority Latinx population today — has no access to high-quality surface-water treatment facilities that are common in urban areas. Instead, these communities often use wells, which are at high risk of contamination with arsenic and other toxic substances.It’s an urgent issue in California: roughly 300,000 of the state’s 39 million residents drink from wells in the state’s rural areas and are therefore exposed to high levels of arsenic in the ground water. “Safe drinking water, which is a big chunk of our work, is all related to rural areas,” says Gadgil, who worked as an environmental engineer for 35 years at the state’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and in July assumed an emeritus role at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. His team plans to return to Allensworth next year to continue testing the system, which makes use of technology, developed by a team that included Gadgil’s colleague Siva Bandaru, that uses hydrogen peroxide to rapidly oxidize iron so that it binds to arsenic and removes it from water.California, like many US states, has a mounting number of rural concerns, including not just safe water supplies, but also wildfire preparedness, air quality and equitable access to health care. Researchers in the UC system have key roles in monitoring and addressing such concerns. In addition to the ten academic campuses spread across the state, the UC system has a network of Agriculture and Natural Resources extension centres that serve as bridges to rural areas. Roughly 270 researchers are employed by these centres to support all 58 state counties through collaboration with other UC teams, as well as working with other public and private organizations. And even though funds for these centres have been waning over the past two decades, they are currently allocated around US$100 million of the UC system’s US$47-billion budget for 2022–23 to rebuild their dwindling workforces.
Millions of jobs in food production are disappearing — a change in mindset would help to keep them
It’s a welcome boost for researchers who face unique challenges in rural settings, where the remoteness of the communities can be a barrier to participation and engagement and cultural differences and concerns about confidentiality can cause some residents to be wary of academics. The most successful collaborations between urban-based researchers and rural communities have been based on a commitment to building trust, bridging political divides and delivering meaningful results, say researchers with experience in these settings.A growing number of scientists are pursuing community-based research partnerships2. A common motivation, says Gadgil, is a sense of urgency in addressing environmental-justice issues, especially in historically excluded communities. Researchers at public universities, such as those in the UC system, often have a sense of responsibility to give back to the citizens that fund their mission, he says, adding that some of the most satisfying projects use innovative technologies to find solutions to these communities’ problems. “Scientists are always looking for new frontiers,” says Gadgil.The regional contribution of the UC system is also apparent from Nature Index data on science cities (see ‘Deep connections’ and ‘Slipping back’).Centring community voicesAnn Cheney, a medical anthropologist at UC Riverside, conducts health research in partnership with communities living near the Salton Sea, California’s largest saline lake, roughly 50 kilometres north of the Mexican border. Over the past few decades, the lake has been shrinking owing to drought and reduced run-off from agriculture, which has increasingly exposed the lake bed. This has become a growing source of dust in a region that already has higher than average rates of childhood asthma compared with the rest of the state3.In 2017, Cheney and her colleagues worked with researchers at the US Border Health Commission to identify the health needs of Mexican immigrants in rural southern California. Childhood health was at the top of the list. Since then, she has partnered with local groups to further analyse health impacts, particularly in undocumented immigrants. A major challenge, she says, is that many of these communities have grown resentful of urban academics who — backed by hefty grants — swoop in to collect their data but then fail to return with solutions. “My fear, and what I’ve already seen happen, is the continued exploitation of these incredibly vulnerable communities,” Cheney says.

The largest minority population in California’s rural areas is Latinx people. Cheney, who has become fluent in Spanish so that she can engage with community members more effectively, says that the small number of Latinx staff at academic institutions in California, relative to the general population, makes it difficult to involve local voices in research. It can be time-consuming to partner with community members in identifying research needs, incorporating local knowledge and implementing research findings, and it comes at a cost, says Cheney, given that academic career advancement is typically based on publications.William Porter, who works with Cheney at UC Riverside, says that the Salton Sea’s growing dust problem was too much for him to ignore. An atmospheric scientist, Porter had originally arrived at UC Riverside in 2017 to focus, in part, on wildfire and coastal air quality. But he soon felt an urgent pull. “It’s right here in my backyard,” he says.Over the past few years, Porter has tailored research programmes to track dust storms and their acute health effects. He’s also launched a project to help the region’s residents to build their own indoor air purifiers using box fans and air filters. Scientists are uniquely positioned to address the consequences of policy indecision when it comes to complex environmental crises, he says, and he sees the Salton Sea’s environmental decline as a pressing opportunity to build research capacity around climate-related problems that are becoming increasingly common worldwide. What’s clear, says Porter, is that the days of the ‘ivory tower’ model of research dissemination are over; academics can no longer just publish a paper and assume the results will be delivered to communities. “That is a broken model,” he says. “The way you conduct community research nowadays is as part of a team with communities.”As California’s rural areas experience wildfires, flash floods, heatwaves and drought, researchers are asking what they can do to help, says Diana Moanga, who manages the Spatial Analysis Center at Stanford University in California. Throughout her career in California, Moanga has interviewed ranchers affected by dwindling water supplies, helped to create a risk index of mobile homes that are vulnerable to wildfires and assessed the potential for solar projects on tribal lands. Notably, she says, funders want to ensure that research results reach communities. Federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US National Science Foundation will not fund projects that do not set out clear community impacts — as well as a clear plan to disseminate the results back to community members.
Water crisis: how local technologies can help solve a global problem
Gadgil agrees that rural-community projects must avoid top-down approaches to be successful. In fact, his team always asks community members how else they would like to use scientists’ skills. Most often, the researchers provide teaching modules on making drinking water safe. They have even helped rural students with their science-fair projects. In his experience, if locals aren’t engaged, “as soon as you leave, the intervention will die”. It’s important to set appropriate expectations when embarking on a project, he says, by explaining how the science works, and emphasizing that a few failures might occur before the problem is solved.Better yet, says Susana Matias, a researcher who sits at the nexus between UC Berkeley, the Agriculture and Natural Resources network and community members, is sharing the leadership and decision-making. When analysing data from the state’s largest farmworker population health surveys4, for instance, Matias found increased risk of chronic health conditions, notably obesity, compared with elsewhere in the country.For example, in one project, Matias and her team partnered with a berry grower, who allowed them to run a health-promotion programme focusing on diet and exercise with farmworkers in their fields in California5. Although the programme did not measurably improve health outcomes, the researchers think it was highly valuable in engaging the farmworker community. “Roughly half of these populations are potentially undocumented immigrants, so it is key to have community-based partners to help build trust and access,” says Matias, who emphasizes that placing value on community members’ time and expertise is an important way to build mutual respect and workforce capacity.The value of rural dataInvolvement by rural residents is particularly important in medical research. People living in rural areas are more likely to die from heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease and stroke than are urban dwellers, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but securing their participation in trials and surveys can be major challenge. Participants typically have to contribute their time during business hours, which might not be feasible for those in full-time employment, especially when they live far from urban centres. “Rural participants are often excluded from clinical research,” says epidemiologist Jennifer Radin.

By encouraging participants to engage with studies remotely, Radin and her colleagues at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, have been able to gather high-quality rural-health data. From 2017 to 2019, for example, they ran POWERMOM, a nationwide pregnancy health study in which participants could share data on blood pressure, weight-gain and other factors throughout their pregnancies, through a smartphone app6. Of the 3,612 participants who were initially recruited, 16% had rural addresses — a high percentage compared with previous studies, says Radin. “Doing a completely remote clinical trial allowed us to include everyone,” she says.In 2020, Radin launched another study, called DETECT, which used wearable devices to predict outbreaks of COVID-19 in the United States. The team also conducted outreach in far-flung locations, such as rural Alaska and Guam, to ensure that diverse populations were represented. The initial results, published last year, showed that symptom and sensor data collected by smartwatches and activity trackers could improve surveillance of COVID-197. “These digital tools can be rolled out anywhere, at any time — not necessarily only when it’s convenient for the researchers, but when it’s convenient for the participant to share their data and experience,” says Radin.Perhaps the greatest health impact, however, comes from the UC Programs in Medical Education (PRIME), which aim to address California’s looming physician shortage, especially in rural areas, where only 9% of the state’s doctors practise. The programme has resulted in more than 750 medical-school graduates since 2004, and roughly 43% of those graduated from programmes based in or serving rural areas.It’s projects such as this, which centre societal needs and priorities, that Gadgil hopes will attract greater funding and resources in future, alongside curiosity-driven science. “Research that benefits the communities around us is receiving much more focused attention,” he says. More

A sample of lanthanum (iii) nitrate under the microscope.Credit: Christian Wei/Zoonar/Alamy

The fermented drink kombucha seems about as far away as possible from the mining of heavy metals. But Alexa Schmitz, chief executive at the biomining company REEgen in Ithaca, New York, sees parallels between her firm’s bacteria-based product and the tangy beverage.REEgen’s bacterial ‘soup’ dissolves ground-up rocks, waste electronic components and other solids that contain rare-earth elements — metals that have valuable conductive, magnetic and fluorescent properties and that are used in everything from mobile phones to wind turbines. The metals impart strength and hardness to alloys, for example, and are found in superconductors and catalytic converters. But Schmitz notes that the company’s product is much less hazardous, both to people and to the environment, than are the chemicals typically used to separate metals from ore. “We’re producing a solution that is proving to be about as good as concentrated nitric acid at dissolving solids,” says Schmitz. “But it’s a little bit like kombucha. You can stick your hand in a vat of it and come out unscathed.”Rare-earth elements include those in the lanthanide series — those with atomic numbers from 58 to 71, usually shown as a pop-out beneath the main periodic table — as well as the group 3 transition metals scandium and yttrium. They are used in products such as magnets, light bulbs and electric cars, and end up in various waste streams, including mining tailings and ash from coal plants.Despite their name, rare- earth elements (REEs) aren’t all that uncommon, but they don’t tend to be found in concentrated deposits (unlike, say, a vein of gold). Miners might have to excavate one tonne of rock just to obtain a gram of REEs, says Buz Barstow, a synthetic biologist and Schmitz’s former adviser at Cornell University in Ithaca.
How a protein differentiates between rare-earth elements
They’re also difficult to purify. REEs tend to co-occur in natural deposits and are chemically similar. The conventional purification process involves repeatedly separating the metals, in dozens or even hundreds of cycles, using aqueous acids and organic solvents such as kerosene. It’s inefficient, costly and damaging to health and the environment. Much of the globe’s REE separation currently takes place in China.Now, Schmitz and a small but growing cadre of researchers are investigating a possible alternative: biomining. Many microorganisms naturally concentrate metals, and some are already used to mine copper and gold. The discovery about a decade ago of microbes that use lanthanides for their metabolism1,2 allowed researchers to explore the feasibility of adapting the microorganisms or their components to isolate REEs. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia, has invested around US$43 million in research–industry partnerships to develop biomining for REEs.There’s room for microbes at every step of the biomining process, says Dan Park, an environmental microbiologist and DARPA grant team member at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. For starters, many microbes secrete acids that can solubilize metals from rocks, discarded appliances and other electronic waste. Some make proteins that specifically interact with REEs, giving scientists the opportunity to isolate the elements from other metals, and perhaps even from each other.But scaling up microbe-based mining and remediation from the bench to an industrial process, in a way that would be practical and economical, involves substantial challenges.Each DARPA project on REEs, for example, has a goal that is puny by industrial standards: by 2026, the teams must to be able to purify 700 grams of material in a week. “It is really a baby step,” says Linda Chrisey, a programme manager for biological technologies at DARPA. “The most important thing is, can we do it?”Microbe minersWhatever the starting material, the first step in biomining is to grind it up and isolate the metals from everything else. Acid is often used to solubilize metals, and the acids produced by microbes are environmentally friendly, economical options. Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, for instance, zeroed in on Gluconobacter oxydans, an acid-producing bacterium found in garden soil, fruits and flowers, as a potential microbe miner. The organism has no designs on the REEs themselves, says Barstow, who also works with G. oxydans. Rather, the acid it produces dissolves phosphates that it then uses in DNA; the liberation of REEs is a collateral benefit that humans can exploit.In experiments at Idaho National Laboratory, G. oxydans secreted a gluconic acid mixture that was better at leaching rare metals from industrial waste than was a comparable concentration of commercial, pure gluconic acid3. “We think there are other things being produced besides the gluconic acid,” says Vicki Thompson, a chemical engineer at the lab.Gluconobacter oxydans has a long history in biotechnology applications and a sequenced genome that is accessible to genetic tools. Schmitz, Barstow and their colleagues tapped these tools to optimize leaching of REEs by G. oxydans. The researchers began with a gene knockout screen, disrupting 2,733 of the microbe’s non-essential genes to identify more than 100 that influence gluconic acid output4.Disruption of G. oxydans genes involved in the uptake of phosphate resulted in the microbes producing a solution that was more acidic and more effective at leaching REEs5. “We convince them they’re starving for phosphate,” explains Schmitz. Work at REEgen to combine genetically engineered G. oxydans with optimization of the firm’s processes has boosted leaching by up to five times compared with wild-type microbes, Schmitz says.Separation anxietyAfter leaching, the next step is to isolate REEs from other metals that come out in acid, such as calcium and iron. Here, some surprising biology comes to the rescue. REEs were once thought to have no direct relevance to living organisms. Then, in 2012 and 2013, researchers reported that REEs are used by certain microbes to metabolize methanol1, and are even vital to the survival of microorganisms living in volcanic mud pots in Italy2.Lanthanides, it turned out, provide essential cofactors for microbial enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, some of which convert methanol to formaldehyde as part of metabolism. In fact, use of lanthanides as enzyme cofactors is widespread among microbes, even those that don’t eat methanol, says Cecilia Martinez-Gomez, a microbial physiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Researchers are now adapting these microbes, or just their REE-binding molecules, to concentrate the desired elements.

A worker walks past a stack of waste computers at a recycling yard in Accra, Ghana.Credit: Christian Thompson/Anadolu Agency/Getty

Martinez-Gomez’s group, for instance, works with another lanthanide-using organism called Methylobacterium extorquens, which is found in a variety of locations, such as plants and the oceans. She and her team identified a set of ten M. extorquens genes6 that produces a small metal-binding molecule that the team named methylolanthanin. The microbes secrete methylolanthanin into their surroundings, where it sticks to nearby lanthanides, which are otherwise insoluble. The complex is then taken up by a microbial transporter and brought into the cell to serve as a cofactor for alcohol dehydrogenase.M. extorquens also has a system to store lanthanides for later use, saving the metals either in granules or in structures that the researchers called lanthasomes7. This, presumably, allows the bacterium to prepare for a lanthanide drought; it can stockpile enough of the metals to last for several microbial generations, says Martinez-Gomez.To improve lanthanide uptake for biomining purposes, she and her team engineered a strain of M. extorquens that allowed them to control and scale up methylolanthanin production. This more than tripled the microbes’ ability to collect neodymium and other REEs from pulverized magnets, Martinez-Gomez says. Then it’s a relatively simple matter of breaking open the cell and precipitating the lanthanides. The process results in REEs that are more than 98.8% pure, says Martinez-Gomez, who co-founded a company, RareTerra in Berkeley, to commercialize accumulation and separation of lanthanides by M. extorquens.The bacterium has also yielded a tool that has become key to the burgeoning field of rare-earth biomining. Discovered in 2018, lanmodulin is a lanthanide-binding molecule8 that sits between the two outer membranes of the bacterium, alongside the alcohol dehydrogenases that use lanthanides as a cofactor. Co-discoverer Joseph Cotruvo Jr, a biochemist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, still isn’t sure what lanmodulin does there. “We kind of got sidetracked by the interesting properties and technological applications,” he says. For example, his group, Martinez-Gomez and others are adapting parts of the protein to create luminescent and fluorescent biosensors. These could highlight where REEs are present or accumulating9,10, and might even be used to remediate REE contamination of water sources11.Lanmodulin has provided researchers with a mechanism for isolating REEs, at least at the benchtop scale. Park, a collaborator of Cotruvo’s, immobilized lanmodulin on agarose microbeads to create a column that could capture lanthanides. Starting with coal-mine ash from the northwestern United States, which contained less than 1% lanthanides overall, the team obtained a solution of 88.2% pure lanthanide12. “It was so selective that we could take really dilute, poor sources of rare earths, and selectively capture using lanmodulin,” says Park.Getting specificLanmodulin and M. extorquens are part of a small group of emerging tools for purifying REEs. Researchers have also designed lanthanide-binding peptide tags that can be encoded in a gene of interest. Originally intended to enhance X-ray crystallography and protein assays13, these are also finding applications in biomining.Researchers are studying the REE-collecting abilities of the model microbe Pseudomonas putida14 and of Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum — the species discovered in volcanic Italian mud pots15. And scientists in Germany have discovered that photosynthetic single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria can suck up REEs16 — although, as with G. oxydans, this doesn’t seem to be essential for their survival. The cyanobacteria can even absorb heavy metals into their cell walls if they’re dead, meaning that it might not be necessary to keep them alive to use them in metal purification, says biotechnologist Thomas Brück at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
Metal-oxide cages open up strategy for processing nuclear waste
Whatever their source, once REEs are obtained, the most challenging step is to separate them from each other. There are 17 rare-earth metals, which are not necessarily interchangeable for commercial applications. Yet the smallest and largest lanthanide atoms differ in size by less than half an ångström. Their similarities in size and chemistry explain why the current chemical separation process is so laborious. Isolating individual REEs is “the problem that industry wants to solve the most”, says Cotruvo.Here, again, lanmodulin offers possibilities. Cotruvo and his colleagues scanned genome sequences for the most unusual lanmodulins they could find, homing in on a protein from a bacterium called Hansschlegelia quercus. It’s found on oak buds, where it can live on methanol released by the plant. Lanmodulin from H. quercus showed a preference for light lanthanides — those with atomic numbers of 62 or less — rather than for heavy ones with atomic numbers of 63 and up.Cotruvo’s group discovered that H. quercus lanmodulin distinguishes between the metals through a selective process. When the molecule encounters a light lanthanide such as neodymium or lanthanum, two lanmodulin monomers stick together to form a dimer, and do so more than 100 times more tightly than they do in the presence of a heavier lanthanide such as dysprosium. The lanmodulin protein probably doesn’t dimerize on Park’s columns, Cotruvo says, but nonetheless, that preference meant that a column of H. quercus lanmodulin could separate a mixture of neodymium and dysprosium into fractions that were more than 98% pure for each element17.“That’s really a significant breakthrough,” says Daniel Nocera, an inorganic chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It’s going down the road to selectivity.”And there are likely to be other tools out there, notes Martinez-Gomez, because microbes seem to have a wide variety of mechanisms for collecting, transporting and using lanthanides. “There are really interesting differences, so this is really a broad and emergent area of study,” she says.
NatureTech
To apply these tools to mining and recycling, researchers envision a series of steps. First, they’ll remove metals from the ore or waste material, then they’ll extract lanthanides from the other metals. At that point, they might enlist H. quercus lanmodulin or other tools to separate groups of lanthanides from each other, such as lights from heavies, until they have pure elements.But biology doesn’t have to solve all the separation problems, says Park, because the chemical process remains an option. If microbiologists could go from a low-grade leachate to a solution that is, say, 80–90% REE, they could pass it on to the chemists to finish the job. Even with partial biomining, the whole process might still use less energy and produce less toxic waste than an entirely chemical purification.Emphasis on ‘might’: the commercial viability of this biomining approach remains to be seen. “The system needs to be incredibly robust, otherwise it won’t be economically feasible,” says Marina Kalyuzhnaya, a microbiologist on a DARPA REE project at San Diego State University in California.The Idaho team has calculated how much it would cost to use G. oxydans to recover REEs from hazardous waste originating in petroleum production, and estimated that the process could be economical18. The biggest costs in terms of both money and environmental hazards were electricity to power the plant and glucose to feed the microbes, with the sugar alone accounting for 44% of the investment. But microbe miners don’t necessarily need pure glucose. Alternatives include maize (corn) stover — the stalks, leaves and cobs left over after harvests — or the starchy water that runs off potatoes after they’re washed. Switching to either of these inputs, the team calculated, cut costs by 17% or more19.Another key question is how long purification columns will last before they have to be replaced. So far in the lab, scientists have run their columns only dozens of times at most, but mining companies could require tens of thousands of runs. “Any time we talk to somebody in industry, that’s the first question they’ll ask,” says Park. “It’s still a pretty open question.”Park advises scientists interested in studying this kind of process to talk to people in the mining industry to understand their needs. He’s also found “a wealth of expertise” in advice from peers at the Critical Materials Innovation Hub, a collaboration between labs in academia, industry and the US Department of Energy, led by Ames National Laboratory in Iowa. Its goal is to accelerate work on rare-earth and other materials that are key to clean energy. Conferences and journals from the American Chemical Society are also great resources for those interested in REE purification, Park says.And should lanthanide biomining prove successful, it could be only the beginning. There are other elements found in relatively low-grade ores that manufacturers would love to concentrate, Barstow says. “Rare earths are just a test bed for all the other minerals,” he says. “We want to make microbes that are tailored for all the other metals.” More

Last month, a portion of the Negro River in the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, Brazil, shrank to a depth of just 12.70 metres — its lowest level in 120 years, when measurements began. In Lake Tefé, about 500 kilometres west, more than 150 river dolphins were found dead, not because of low water levels, but probably because the lake had reached temperatures close to 40 °C.
‘We are killing this ecosystem’: the scientists tracking the Amazon’s fading health
These are symptoms of the unprecedented drought gripping the Amazon rainforest this year. Climate change is involved. But researchers who study the rainforest say other factors have come together to exacerbate this crisis, which has cut river communities off from supplies including food, and has forced Indigenous residents to use dirty, contaminated water, resulting in gastrointestinal and other illnesses.The drought is the sum of three things, says Luciana Gatti, a climate-change researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) in São José dos Campos. The first is deforestation, “which is killing the rainforest’s resilience and turning it into a drier, hotter place”, she says.Fire seasonDeforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped between January and July this year — by 42.5% compared with the same period in 2022, according to data from Inpe — but this follows a number of years of record destruction. The main culprit, say researchers who spoke to Nature, is agribusiness. Ranchers and farmers have cleared trees to expand Brazil’s agricultural area by about 50% over the past four decades, mostly in the Amazon, according to a report from MapBiomas, a consortium of academic, business and non-governmental organizations that monitor land use in the country.About 20% of the Amazon rainforest is deforested, and 40% is degraded — which means trees are still standing, but their health has faded and they are prone to fire and drought, Gatti says. “That was all done by humans.”

Researchers study a freshwater dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) found dead in Lake Tefé amid a record drought in the Amazon rainforest.Credit: Gustavo Basso/NurPhoto via Getty

Making matters worse is the second factor contributing to the drought: an El Niño climate pattern has begun this year.El Niño is a phase of a phenomenon called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and occurs every two to seven years. During El Niño, winds that usually blow east to west along the Equator weaken or reverse, and warm water pushes into the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Precipitation patterns change in South America, causing dry air in the north, where the rainforest lies, and damp air in the south. As a result, Uruguay is currently being slammed by heavy rains. In the past few months, Paraguay, Argentina and southern Brazil have experienced floods that have killed dozens of people and left thousands of others without shelter.But in northern and northeast Brazil, eight states have had the lowest July to September precipitation levels in 40 years, according to the Brazilian National Center for Early Warning and Monitoring for Natural Disasters (Cemaden) in São José dos Campos. These months are the peak of the ‘fire season’ in most of the Amazon.
Oil from the Amazon? Proposal to drill at river’s mouth worries researchers
Dry spells in the Amazon have consequences in addition to low water levels. Ranchers and others clearing the rainforest don’t burn trees when it’s rainy or when the air is humid, says Erika Berenguer, an ecosystems researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. But because El Niño has made the rainforest’s air dry, those who are clearing trees have been burning them, Berenguer says. This has added to the harsh conditions and has sparked some uncontrolled fires — something she experienced at first hand when she visited the town of Belterra in the northern state Pará in September.“We would sleep and wake up surrounded by smoke,” Berenguer says. Ironically, she was there with a team to study how vulnerable the rainforest is to fire. Things got so bad that she had to evacuate for 10 days. “I was shorter of breath than when I got COVID — and I am among those who can leave and get medicine. What about those who can’t?” she asks. “This is collective poisoning.”A visible patternThe third factor responsible for the Amazon’s severe drought is an unusual warming of the water in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Climate change is contributing to this anomaly, says Maria Assunção Dias, a climatologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. The warming of these waters has affected the intertropical convergence zone. This region, which circles Earth close to the Equator, “is one of the main meteorological systems acting in the tropics and is a region of intense cloud and rain formation”, says Karina Lima, a geographer at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. The zone has shifted north, taking the storms with it, away from northern Brazil.
When will the Amazon hit a tipping point?
All of this adds up to a record-setting year for the Amazon. The rainforest has experienced dry spells in the past, but severe droughts “are becoming more frequent”, Dias says. There is a visible pattern, she adds, citing extreme droughts in 1912, 1925, 1983, 1987, 1998, 2010, 2016 and now 2023.One big problem is that the current El Niño is just getting started. So “things are not going to get any better”, Gatti says.It might even turn into a ‘super’ El Niño, Dias says. This could occur if the sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific reaches 2.5 °C higher than average — a possibility, given that 2023 looks set to be the hottest year ever recorded on Earth. Last week, the World Meteorological Organization issued a statement that there is a 90% likelihood that El Niño will persist at least until the end of April.Although it is hard to predict when the next drought might grip the Amazon, studies have shown that climate change is messing with the timing of El Niño. “The tendency is that we have stronger and more frequent episodes,” Lima says. This could be catastrophic for the Amazon rainforest, already battered by deforestation and a warming and drying climate. “The forest’s tipping point is coming closer — and it’s coming quick.” More

As an experienced advocate of water diplomacy, I urge de-escalation of the water crisis in Gaza. In response to the Hamas attacks on southern Israel of 7 October, blockades by Israel have curtailed access to water for the Gaza Strip’s two million — predominantly civilian — inhabitants.
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More