Environmental Engineering and Water Resources Management

Dear Colleagues,

The most important resource in the environment is water, which affects all aspects of human life and ecosystems. Integrated water management is a very important in point of view for a region’s sustainable development.  Water management is a complex decision-making process. Increasing human activities, climate variability, and environmental issues are still influencing the quantity and quality of freshwater. The distribution of water resources is characterized by high spatial and temporal variability. For this reason, many regions of the world have severe problems with water scarcity, droughts, and floods. Water management is strongly linked with human activities and can be reflected as technical or other activities in a basin. In particular regions of the world, we are still observing limited human water management activities. Due to this, is very difficult to manage water resources in a sustainable way. On the other hand, there are many reasons for the limitations of water resources. The management of water resources requires many actions that work to shape the water regime and the safety of water availability for different human needs. Moreover, flood and drought risk reduction should be ensured while maintaining the abovementioned aims. Finally, water allocation should include protection and biodiversity of the ecosystem. Generally, there are visible strong relationships between human activities and water resource quality and quantity.

Many examples of activities that are linked with environmental engineering are commonly used in water resource management. Some examples are sewage treatment plants protecting water bodies against pollutants, hydraulics structures that play a crucial role in water resource shaping, water transport that protects against hydroclimatic hazards such as floods and drought, and irrigation and drainage systems that support water availability in agriculture. On the other hand, we also see many examples  of the negative impact of human activities on water resources.

Taking all this into account, there is still a need for investigations on the quantity and quality of water resources and the role of environmental engineering in sustainable water management. Thus, we propose the Special Issue of Sustainability titled Environmental Engineering and Water Resources Management. Therefore, the main objective of this Special Issue is to contribute to the understanding of science-based knowledge, new ideas, new approaches, and novel solutions in environmental engineering for water resource management, including the main challenges such as changes in land cover and climate variability.

Dr. Andrzej Wałęga
Dr. Dariusz Młyński
Guest Editors

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