Session Description

The Anthropocene is characterized by unprecedented human pressures on aquatic environments, with rapid urbanization, industrialization, intensive agriculture, mining, and climate change increasingly affecting the quality and availability of water resources. Emerging and persistent contaminants—including pharmaceuticals, pesticides, heavy metals, nutrients, microplastics, pathogens, and other chemical pollutants—pose complex challenges to freshwater and coastal ecosystems and may create significant risks to human and environmental health. Understanding the sources, transport, transformation, fate, and impacts of these contaminants is therefore essential for safeguarding water security and ecosystem integrity.

This session, “Safeguarding Water Quality in the Anthropocene: Contaminants, Health and Sustainable Management,” will bring together interdisciplinary research addressing contemporary and emerging challenges in water quality. Contributions are invited on contaminant monitoring and assessment, advanced analytical and sensing technologies, pollutant fate and transport, exposure pathways, ecological and human health impacts, risk assessment, and innovative approaches for water and wastewater treatment. The session will also explore nature-based solutions, circular approaches, remediation strategies, and data-driven and integrated frameworks for sustainable water-quality management.

By connecting environmental science, hydrology, engineering, public health, ecology, and policy, the session aims to foster knowledge exchange and identify science-based pathways for protecting water resources and supporting resilient, healthy, and sustainable aquatic systems in the Anthropocene.