Water Security and Sustainable Development of Aquatic Ecosystem in the Yangtze River Basin

Dear Colleagues,

The world’s large rivers and their basins are of great importance for providing indispensable services to support human well-being. The unprecedented growth of the human footprint in the world’s large river basins has been changing all aspects of river basin eco-systems: landscape diversity, water quality, hydrology and biodiversity. In addition, accelerating global warming and the increasing occurrence of extreme climate events drastically manipulate or even degrade the ecosystem services of the world’s large rivers, decreasing the value of these ecosystem services and their functioning in large river basins. Thus, the calls for sustainable development in the world’s large river basins—to adapt to global climate change in support of the well-being of human society—have never been so urgent as in the past few decades.

The Yangtze River is called the mother river in China. Since the economic reform was initiated in 1979, remarkable economic growth has been associated with large campaigns of exploitation in the Yangtze River Basin. Under the impacts of climate change and land use and cover change, the Yangtze River Basin faces a series of challenges. These include the degradation of aquatic ecosystems and water quality such as eutrophication, biodiversity reduction, imbalance of river-lake system and increases in the frequencies of extreme floods or drought. While the past few decades have witnessed the apparent deterioration of the Yangtze River ecosystem, the public has called for the restoration of ecosystem services and the promotion of sustainable development.

This Special Issue aims to publish high-quality studies on ecowater security and sustainable development in the Yangtze River basin under a changing environment. In fact, this issue seeks research papers from various areas including, but not limited to any of the following topics in the Yangtze River Basin: recent problems of the eco-environment, water monitoring method, trend simulation and modelling, governance in surface water and groundwater management, water environment and climate change, water governance models, decision-making tools in water management, optimizing water allocation, case study on the application of sustainable water treatment.

Prof. Dr. Qi Feng
Guest Editor

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