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Despite being a limited resource, pollution, poor management, and other drivers like climate change make available water unsuitable and insufficient for human consumption and ecosystem maintenance. Therefore, a transdisciplinary approach is needed for managing this precious resource. The overall aim of this paper is to address water inequalities...

Study region: Bosten Lake (Xinjiang, China). Study focus: This paper mainly focuses on quantifying changes in water storage of Bosten Lake using multi-mission satellite data. From Landsat images, we firstly extracted the lake area changes between 2003 and 2022 with the help of the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI); Secondly, we...

Increasing resilience to natural hazards and climate change is critical for achieving many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent decades, China has experienced rapid economic development and became the second-largest economy in the world. This rapid economic expansion has led to large-scale changes in terrestrial (e.g., land use and land...

Debris cover on glacier surfaces hampers the accurate detection of debris-covered ice using traditional techniques based on image band ratios. Therefore, this study tests a new automatic classification scheme for hierarchical mapping of glacier surfaces based on machine learning classifiers including k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector...

Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...

The Shaksgam Valley, located on the north side of the Karakoram Mountains of western China, is situated in the transition zone between the Indian monsoon system and dry arid climate zones. Previous studies have reported abnormal behaviors of the glaciers in this region compared to the global trend of glacier retreat, so the region is of special...

Today, 54% of the world’s population live in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. Major cities and municipalities in the region rely either fully or partially on groundwater. Four highly relevant Asian cities (Bangkok, Bandung, Ho Chi Minh and Lahore) were selected which bear groundwater dependency in the range of...

This publication is one of the major outputs of the Water Environment Partnership in Asia (WEPA).WEPA aims to strengthen water environmental governance in Asia through the collection and dissemination of information and capacity development of relevant stakeholders in partnership with eleven countries in the region, namely Cambodia, China...

Asian cities have faced problems caused by rapid urbanization for decades. While urbanization can bring economic development to the cities, it also produces decrease of natural resources or environmental deterioration. From the perspective of fresh water related issues, Asian cities are suffering from scarcity of water resources and water...

Many Asian cities have greatly relied on groundwater in the course of their development. Large populations and concentrations of industrial activity in urban areas intensified the stress on groundwater. Such stress has resulted in environmental problems, such as the drawdown of water tables, land subsidence and saltwater intrusion, which interfered...