About this Research Topic

Background

The problems related to global water security have magnified, and today and in the future, have the capacity to significantly disrupt and stall economic, social, and environmental development of most countries of the world. Water has indeed become a global security issue. The risks born of the interactions between natural processes, such as hydrological, biogeochemical, ecological, and anthropogenic processes (governance, law, institutional practices, and human behaviours) at different scales remain difficult to understand, analyse, integrate, and predict. These complex interactions result in many unknowns that are constantly varying and rapidly evolving. As a consequence, the global community will continue to struggle to meet the requirements of water security, human potential and environmental sustainability, propelling us towards new norms that cannot be reversed.

Digital science and technology have been inseparably connected along their paths of development. Their innovative combination may provide entirely new capabilities in water science application to understand the effect of multiple rate of changes from global to local levels, the tipping points of the water crisis, and to pinpoint opportunities (such as investment and allocation) with respect to time and space as well as to shape a truly sustainable water future. Digital technologies will allow researchers to address many of the major water security challenges, and add value to water as a scarce resource through increasing the distribution and operational efficiency of water and energy, reducing wastage, extending the life of existing assets, and increasing access to better information for better governance, with the aim of working toward improving human well-being and environmental outcomes.

This Research Topic will address the global and regional perspectives of worldwide experiences on the responses of digital water management to the challenges of water security. It will address issues such as variability in supply, predicting water quality, groundwater conditions, environmental flows, coupling digital models at different scales, meeting increasing demands for water, water trading, and coping with land use change. In the Research Topic, papers will cover issues linked to water governance, including institutional and technological innovations, and identify in which ways innovative combinations of digital science and technology can assist policy and practice in the field of sustainable freshwater management.

The Research Topic aims to address the following key questions:

1. What are the new knowledge frontiers and perspectives in the field of digital water management developed over the past decade with respect to water security and governance? What are the key new ideas and insights and how are these different than over the previous decade?
2. How did the global water community engage and contribute to this new thinking?
3. How will water assessments and predictive tools supported by innovative combinations of digital science and technology, help to reduce costs in infrastructure building, and planning in the public and private sector?
4. What are the social and environmental outcomes and benefits of existing digitalization now and in the future?

Keywords: Sustainable Development, Digital Innovation, Smart Watering System, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Big Data algorithms, Fuzzy Logic, Machine Learning

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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